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A number of years ago I decided I wanted to read through the Gospels regularly; likewise the Psalms. After some trial and error I created a daily reading chart that would take me through the four Gospels and the Book of Psalms every 3 months – four times a year. One chapter of the Gospel and one or two Psalms gets it done. Yes I try to do it daily; and yes sometimes I miss. But over a year I still get through a lot of Gospel and Psalms with odds on I've read them at least three times! This isn't a guilt trip – it needs discipline but with a small d. And the benefits are not surprising:

The Gospels are read as narrative, not piecemeal. Granted a chapter can be a big chunk (John 6 isn't rec reational browsing) but over time there is a sense of coherence and unfolding story.

The four Gospels take on their own characteristics and you become aware of Jesus as a multi-dimensional figure rather than a vague confluence of Gospel fragments arranging themselves in our minds as if the Gospel writers didn't mind us playing Scrabble with the text. Matthew's Jesus is didactic, a re-presentation of Moses and Exodus and new covenant on the Mount; Mark's Jesus is God in a hurry; Luke more than the others reaches to the margins in a story of inclusion, scandal and healing with Jesus as the protagonist of the Kingdom of God and the prophetic critique of power; John is all about glory, but a strange and beautiful glory of kenosis, the Word made flesh and dwelling amongst us, the presence in our history of I AM, and the defining confrontation of light and the darkness which can neither comprehend it or overcome it. 

The voice of Jesus becomes familiar, and the different accents noticeable from Gospel to Gospel. There is the voice that speaks the words; and their is the message of how Jesus acts, what he does, how he behavesm who he is. By the way I want to do another post on What Would Jesus Do? I'm not at all sure we can be as confirdent of answering that question as is sometimes claimed.

Then there's the Psalms. A book of prayers that disturbs as much as comforts; in which complaint and praise can pour from the same heart; in which silence can be companionable or threatening, contemplative or crushed; and in which the conversation with God moves from intimacy and joy to alienation and fear.

Regular reading of the Psalms has been a spiritual habit of the church from the beginning. And no wonder. The whole range of emotion and human experience, the peaks and troughs of the faith journey, the endless perspectives of the soul arguing with, wrestling with, resting in, trusting in, fearful of, mindful of, angry at, wondering at, God.

My new RSV New Testament and Psalms was bought to continue a daily exposure of heart and mind, conscience and will, to those four Gospels and the Prayer Book of Israel. Below is a file showing the first half of 2013. Soon I'll produce the one for July to December.

Download Gospels and Psalms Daily

Below is a prayer of Intercession written recently for a worship service I was invited to lead. It's probably a bit long and tries to do too much, but then again  if a prayer is written around the theme and reality of the Triune Love of God then it is likely to suffer from an embarrassment of riches and an overload of possibility! Yet to take the eternal inexhaustible communion of self-giving love of Father, Son and Spirit, as the pattern and paradigm of prayer, is to be called to prayer that is outwardly generous and forwardly hopeful and patiently creative. Anyway – this is one attempt to combine prayer for ourselves and for the world in a way that acknowledges the reproductive power of the Triune God in whose Love we live and move and have our being.

The photo is from the cliffs at St Cyrus. The gorgeous golden gorse, the old fishing cottage and smoke houses, and miles of sand and waves – what's not to love about a world like that, eh?

 Eternal
God and Father, whose
infinite yet intimate love,

shared
from all eternity between Father and Son,

is
the love you have now poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

 

Drawn into that life of loving communion,

we
pray for those in our lives, touched and transformed by love,

faithful,
unselfish, generous, joyful, love.

Lifelong
friends and good neighbours,

wives
and husbands, parents and children,

sisters
and brothers, best friends and new friends:

love overcoming
differences in language, race, gender, religion,

so that in the rich life of love between Father, Son and Spirit,

we
glimpse and discover love’s inexhaustible possibilities

 

We pray for those whose lives are broken for lack of love:

children
whose safety and health come second to adult demands;

friendships
ended by exploitation and backstabbing;

marriages
shredded by unfaithfulness and shattered by broken promises;

families
fractured by social pressures, whether poverty or affluence;

neighbourhoods
where to survive love is weakness and compassion despised;

businesses
whose bottom line matters more than the welfare of their people.

 

We
pray for Churches, and for our church which
you have called to be the Body of Christ.

Give grace and imagination to
embody and to model the love of God in Christ,

which
is gift of the Spirit and the sign of your Presence.

Make us living conduits of your eternal love,

generously given, lovingly available, patiently
faithful,

willingly sacrificial,persistently
hopeful, and self-evidently joyful.

 

Like
Jesus gives us eyes to see Zacchaeus hiding in shame;

voice to ask the name of violent terrified Legion;

courage to
stand between the vulnerable victim and those holding the stones;

compassion to
touch with tender risk those who like the leper are feared and excluded;

generosity to
see the best in the Samaritan, and go do likewise;

reckless kindness to
open our arms in welcome like the prodigal father;

faith to
take our loaves and fishes and bless them to the use of others;

 

…and
so to be perfect, as our Heavenly Father is perfect,

whose
sunlight love gives life to all within your radiance

whose
rain of mercy falls on each with life giving refreshment,

who
radiates and rains love that warms and waters,

whose embrace holds and heals broken worlds and broken hearts alike,

and
all this in Jesus name and in the power of the Spirit,

Amen

 

Lord
how much juice you can squeeze from a single grape.

How
much water you can draw from a single well.

How
great a flame you can kindle from a tiny spark.

How
great a tree you can grow from a tiny seed

My
soul is so dry that by itself it cannot pray;

Yet
you can squeeze from it the juice of a thousand prayers.

My
soul is so parched that by itself it cannot love;

Yet
you can draw from it boundless love for you and for my neighbour.

My
soul is so cold that by itself it has no joy;

Yet
you can light the fire of heavenly joy within me.

My
soul is so feeble that by itself it has no faith;

Yet
by your power my faith grows to a great height.

Thank
you for prayer, for love, for joy, for faith;

Let
me always be prayerful, loving, joyful, faithful.

(Guigo the Carthusian, died 1188.)

I took this photo on an evening drive down to Glasgow. I was looking across the Mearns to the west and stopped at a layby for ten minutes to gaze. Then continued to drive, this time with more care and attentiveness to a world both fragile and durable, and to a rhythm whose regularity recurs in the Psalms as a metaphor of God's faithfulness and the dailiness of blessing. "From sunrise to sunset the Lord's name is to be praised."

In the Fiddler on the Roof, the image of sunrise and sunset describes growth and maturity, as the love of parents for children begins to relinquish and set free while still acknowledging that the investment of our deepest feelings in those we love, and enlarging the circle of those we love, is life's high calling. And in the lyrics, the recognition that life is movement and change, happiness and tears, and what we hang on to, what hangs on to us, is that same rhythm of faithfulness and the recurring cycle of light and life, sunrise, sunset. 

Sunrise, sunset

Sunrise, sunset

Swiftly flow the days

Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers

Blossoming even as we gaze

Sunrise, sunset

Sunrise, sunset

Swiftly fly the years

One season following another

Laden with happiness and tears

"Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father, there is no shadow of turning with thee…" Well, yes, that's true – though there are shadows, and sometimes it feels like they are cast by the back of God! And then you see a sunset, and our faith holds on for dear life to mystery, and we are smitten by a beauty redolent of love, gently revealing the goodness and mercy that surely follows us all the days of our lives, sunrise, sunset. 

But their idols are…,
    made by human hands.

They have mouths, but cannot speak,
    eyes, but cannot see.
 They have ears, but cannot hear,
    noses, but cannot smell.
 They have hands, but cannot feel,
    feet, but cannot walk,
    nor can they utter a sound with their throats…

    But I Praise you

    for I am fearfully and wonderfully made,

    your works are wonderful,I know that full well.

My Ordination Bible is a beautifully bound King James Version which remains always to hand, and is read for the soft draping comfort of holding such a lovely volume, and for the glory of the language and as a reminder of what my life, finally and gladly is about. There's something all but sacramental in the recurring act of holding that one Bible, handed to you at the time you make promises which will thereafter guide, undergird and sustain your life of faith.

I went back to my Bible today after reading the last pages of F W Dillisone's old fashioned volume, The Christian Understanding of the Atonement. Old fashioned in this case is a positive term, an affirming and approving response to a book that is relaxedly learned, displaying elegant architectonics, broad in sympathy, precise in analysis and eschewing controversy and partisan posturing. Published 45 years ago it remains one of the finest treatments of the atonement for theologians; polemicists and partisan apologists for this or that theory of the atonement will be definition be impatient with it – and be the poorer for their quick all too narrow judgements. This is a book in which scholarship is in the service of faith, and the exposition of the living core of Christian faith is reverent, searching and sufficiently open to allow for mystery and intellectual humility that feels no discomfort in not knowing, and opting for wonder rather than cognitive closure.

On the last page Dillistone quotes Luke 1.78-79, as follows:

Through the tender mercy of our God; whereby the dayspring from on high hath visited us,

To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.

The last words of the book are from Auden's Christmas Oratorio, the words of Simeon:

"Because of his visitation we may no longer desire God as if He were lacking: our redemption is no longer a question of pursuit but of surrender to Him who is always and everywhere present. Therefore at every moment  we pray that following Him, we may depart from our anxiety into His peace."    page 422.

The Giotto Deposition shows Jesus gazed upon from different perspectives and vantage points. And what each saw was cause for wonder, prayer, tears and thanksgiving. Worship always out-thinks and out-wonders controversy.

A bright sunlit path,

blue door in summer shadow,

walk through, see what’s next.

I sit down and when I rise up you discern my thoughts from afar.

(Psalm 139 v 3)

Last week I wrote about Bernard McGinn's series of encyclopedic works on Christian m ysticism, under the general title The Presence of God. So far five volumes are published with two more scheduled over the next few years. I was aware as I wrote it that the descriptors Mystic and Baptist don't seem to fit easily into each other's company. But that's to misunderstand both terms.

Baptists are certainly resistant to esoteric spirituality, and dismissive of gnostic claims to special extra-biblical revelation. We are deeply committed to a biblically shaped faith and experience. We draw our understanding of Christian life from a faithful following after Jesus the risen Lord as revealed in Scripture, acknowledging the One who is the "sole and absolute authority in our faith and practice". But it is precisely that intetentionally Christocentric faith, rooted in the realities of the Triune God, that provides a source of deep and tranformative encounter with the God who draws us into the love and life of that eternal Triune relationship of creative, outflowing Love that is the source and fountain of Divine Grace.

Christian Mysticism and Baptist identity don't trip of the tongue as two descriptors you would expect to use naturally. In fact chalk and cheese, apples and pears seem more logical pairings than Baptist mystic – you would think. And you'd be wrong. C H Spurgeon, whose bust sits on my bookshelf ( a Victorian one, not a 20th century repro!) was a Baptist Mystic, and his mysticism, was profoundly, exuberantly, Christological. He might have scowled at the comparison, but his best writing of the experience of rapture and vivid encounter with Jesus Christ compares with Bernard of Clairvaux's Christocentric rhapsodising, Teresa of Avila's joy in the Crucified and Charles Wesley's praise band approach to celebrating the Saviour and the Gospel of captivating overwhelming love, with words used as creatively and startlingly as Van Gogh's most life transcending juxtapositions of colour, image and human experience.

The last hymn Spurgeon wrote (which can be sung to the tune Nottignham) is a remarkable text of Baptist Mysticism. It deserves a place in any anthology of mystical writings.

     1. All my soul was dry and dead

         Till I learned that Jesus bled;

         Bled and suffered in my place,

         Bearing sin in matchless grace.

     2. Then a drop of Heavenly love

         Fell upon me from above,

         And by secret, mystic art

         Reached the center of my heart.

     3. Glad the story I recount,

         How that drop became a fount,

         Bubbled up a living well,

         Made my heart begin to swell.

     4. All within my soul was praise,

         Praise increasing all my days;

         Praise which could not silent be:

         Floods were struggling to be free.

     5. More and more the waters grew,

         Open wide the flood-gates flew,

         Leaping forth in streams of song

         Flowed my happy life along.

     6. Lo! A river clear and sweet

         Laved my glad, obedient feet!

         Soon it rose up to my knees,

         And I praised and prayed with ease.

     7. Now my soul in praises swims,

         Bathes in songs, and psalms and hymns;

         Plunges down into the deeps,

         All her powers in worship steeps.

     8. Hallelujah! O my Lord!

         Torrents from my soul are poured!

         I am carried clean away,

         Praising, praising all the day.

     9. In an ocean of delight,

         Praising God with all my might,

         Self is drowned; so let it be:

         Only Christ remains to me.

            —C.H. Spurgeon, 1890

 

 

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When I am afraid I put my trust in you (Psalm 56.3)