Once a week I play five a side football for an hour.

We play for fun, fitness and nobody needs to get hurt

There was a time when I was quite good at football, so also an exercise in nostalgia.

I watch Match of the Day, pre-recorded so I can fast forward the post mortem pundits.

But recently football has gotten too big for its boots.

Beautiful has become ugly, fun turns to fury, cheating is the new professional skill, money talks but mostly it spouts spite, and celebrity egos grow like giant hogweed, which is poisonous.

1. Global coverage of accusations and counter accusations of racism,
2. controversies about diving and simulating and cheating,
3. the crowd psychology of abuse rising at times to levels measured in units of hatred, 
4. levels of club indebtedness or billionaire subsidy that work on the economics of another planet,
5. expectations that match officials are omniscient, omnipresent and emotionless robots,
6. player celebrity status that achieves the rare combination of self-parodying silliness and ludicrous self importance.

These are only a few of the malignant prodigy growing inside a game ironically called the beautiful game.

A Christian critique of this cultural unwellness would provide considerable even formidable evidence of how far such a cultural phenomenon is from the Kingdom of God and the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount.

No. Don't laugh. 

There's a research paper waiting to be written on values such as

1. meekness, peacemaking, and thirsting for the rightness of things
2. walking second miles,
3. not murdering others in our heart,
4. learning the meaning of standard of living from birds and flowers,
5. giving thanks for bread enough for today,
6. the lifegiving possibilities of forgiveness,
7. prayer as the daily recognition we are not the centre of the universe, even  our own inner universe.

Maybe I'll get to it. If football mirrors realities in our culture, such an analysis might show us some missiological open goals

For now – read the sensible, sane, humane and clear-eyed blogpost on the link below. It comes from a Eurosport reporter and it says of Premier League football – 'The Unhappiest Place in the World."

It combines social analysis, cultural critique, basic ethics of community life, informed reflection, and the honest way of seeing that notices the Emperor id naked.

http://uk.eurosport.yahoo.com/blogs/armchair-pundit/unhappiest-place-earth-161812042.html

I park my car in my designated space in the University Car Park.

It is 7.30 am and a cold drizzly day.

Crisp autumn leaves now a layer of mashed soggy brown.

The car park is on a steep slope.

For breakfast I have an intentionally healthy combination.

It includes a banana and a large red apple.

As I get out the car I fumble with the keys and drop the apple.

It rolls under the car and determinedly down the hill, gathering pace.

By the time I get round the car it is bouncing its way towards the rhodedendron bushes.

Dilemma One – do I pursue an apple downhill handicapped by manbag and half put on jacket?

If I do I will be on security CCTV, – and the apple has now disappeared under a bush.

Dilemma Two  – should I now ferret around in the bushes while also on CCTV?

So I reluctantly relinquish half my breakfast.

Existential Question – why couldn't it have been the banana I dropped??

Theological Reflection – what is it about apples, human frailty and a fallen world that frustrates our good intentions?

Thought for the Day – Was I meant to have a bacon roll instead?

Just because something is overstated doesn't make it wrong. I'm readinjg a book which sometimes overstates, generalises and makes claims that need some qualifying. But it is a good book, written by a genuinely interesting and thoughtful pastor. David Hansen's The Art of Pastoring is being read by our Pastoral Care class, and it is all the things a good text book should be – accessible, written out of experience, and sufficiently self deprecating for readers to feel they are learning from a fellow traveller rather than deferring to an expert.

The sub title is Ministry Without All the Answers, and throughout the book there is a refreshing acceptance that much of ministry is ad hoc, instinctive, gift and opportunity, serendipity subverting strategy, a way of being that leads to certain actions and activities – but all such activity governed by who it is done for, Jesus Christ.

So, here is an overstatement – "…time management is the new eschatology. Theology's venerable "already and not yet" has become "what needs to be done today and what can be left till tomorrow". Earlier Hansen had a go at "How to" books on pastoral tasks, and warned, "pastoral ministry is a life, not a technology." By which he means a way of being rather than a set of practical and relational skills. What he is after is a view of ministry that is not trend driven, task driven, or identity conferring. Then he says something not so much overstated as often overlooked – "The pastor as a parable of Jesus Christ" (p.11). 

Balance in ministry is both doing and being, who we are influencing and motivating what we do. It is not mere technique, but neither is it mere trial and error, accidental or incidental. It is a rich and unpredictable mixture of many things, including careful planning, alert adaptability, contemplative reflection, imaginative compassion, spiritual instinct for the significant, attuned listening to others, discipline and organisation balanced with intuitive and subversive openness to change.

Time management need not be the division of the day into quarter hours and each one accounted for – though John Wesley in his own neurotic self-censorship did indeed keep account of such micro-managed life. Nor should ministry be measured bytasks completed, boxes ticked, or skills demonstrated. Like all good books on pastoral theololgy, Hansen's book is a refreshing corrective, and a very good guilt reducing tonic. His key insight, that the pastor is a parable of Jesus Christ informs the whole book. Hansen is obviously not afdraid of the tough theology either – he quotes Eberhard Jungel, "This christological statement is to be regarded as the fundamental proposition  of a hermeneutic of the speakability of God." Ehh…Quite!

Hansen explains, "If Jesus is the parable of God and preaching the story of Jesus brings God to people, if we live our lives following Jesus, maybe our lives canb bring Jesus to people. Maybe we can be parables of Jesus." (p.24) Jesus is the Word of God, God articulated in human life and personality, the Word become flesh. Hansen is arguing for an incarnational ministry in which Jesus is glimpsed, explicated, demonstrated, not in the fullness of the glory beheld in the Word full of grace and truth, but in the much more limited, but no less graced life of following Jesus in the service of the Kingdom of God. As Jesus is the exegete of God, the pastor is called to be exegete of Jesus, His Way, His Truith and His Life.

We await the class discussion.

These two photos were taken within a couple of days of each other. The view from our front window. I could become all annoyingly moralistic and do a wee homily on the passing seasons, autumnal maturity and the coming of winter as a metaphor of life passing. But why waste two perfectly good photos – they show what they show – life goes on!

He is a path, if any be misled;

He is a robe, if any naked be;

If any chance to hunger, He is bread;

If any be a bondman He is free;

If any be but weak, how strong is He!

To dead men life He is, to sick men health;

To blind men sight, and to the needy, wealth;

A pleasure without loss,

a treasure without stealth.

– Giles Fletcher

Today at quite a low point I turned as often, to several of the writers who act as my spiritual directors and as sources of spiritual refreshment. This was what I found by browsing for ten minutes in their company.

A Church, as soon as it is a believing church, must above all else be a confessing Church, i.e. it must be more concerned to show forth the Lordship of Christ and his Gospel in its every special action, enterprise, than to hum with energy…

…………………..

God approaches our minds by receding from them. We can never fully know Him if we think of Him as an object of capture, to be fenced in by the enclosure of our won ideas. We know Him better after our minds have let Him go. The Lord travels in all directions at once. The Lord Arrives from all directions at once.

Wherever we are, we find that He has just departed. Wherever we go, we discover that he has just arrived before us.

………………………

The first by P T Forsyth reminds me what is central, foundational, crucial, and therefore the primary source of sustainable energy for the church.

The second by Thomas Merton reminds me, and often this reminder comes as a jolt, that God is bigger than my ideas, vaster than my wish list, the frustrator of my instinct to control and comprehend.

And both help me understand and nod knowingly in assent, to the older translation of John's words, "The Light shineth in the darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not…."

Behold the Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world…..

The other night I went looking for a sunset. Around six o’clock, looking down on Loch Skene through the trees, I sat for 10
minutes watching the colour change, but it never went red. One of those
evenings when nature does its own thing just to put sightseers in their place!

And
an astonishing reminder that, for all our manufactured virtual realities, clever
illusions and obsession with appearance and image, we still can't do a nature
makeover, or airbrush a sunset. So I took a photo of an ordinary sunset, and
left it untouched, unedited and unimproved. How do you improve a sunset anyway?
At the centre of the photo there’s a little jewel of reflected gold, stretching
across the loch a mile away, leaving much to the imagination. But imagination helped towards
joy by the noise of hundreds of migrating geese, echoing up the hill, honking
their calls of home and home-going. Another reminder of nature's rhythms, which
are of course natural, and so far, mercifully, beyond our control!

“From
the rising of the sun and to the going down of the same, the Lord’s name is to
be praised.” And the greatest praise is gratitude, recognition of the gift that
is beauty, and life, and the blessings of a world threatened by a combination
of our cleverness and our foolishness. I took a photo of an ordinary sunset!
What an extraordinary thing to write – as if a sunset was ever other than a
familiar taken for granted miracle of Benediction!

Can someone explain to me the purpose, value or social usefulness of sending a man to jail for six months because he swam in front of two competing boats in a race? There's no disputing it was stupid, illegal, ruined a national and internationally important event – at least in the eyes of the BBC and two Universities. So that it was a court case is not in dispute – that it was a public order offence is equally both obvious and conceded.

But in a country where we have the highest percentage in Europe of prisoners handed custodial sentences, there are surely more creative, socially responsible and hopeful ways of dealing with a lone protester who interrupted a race.

What is the judicial system for, and what does the criminal justice process seek to achieve. Punishment, and even that word needs some qualifying – but punishment is not an end in  itself. What was the six month sentence intended to achieve for society, for the offender, and for both as they look to the future beyond the crime and the sentence?

Is the sentence intended to act as a deterrent? But where are the hordes queuing up to swim in front of boats on the Thames, or steal the flag at the last green of the Open Golf, or bring a vuvuzela horn to the last night of the Proms and blow it annoyingly during Land of Hope and Glory?

To be sensible. Punishment, let's use the word. Is its purpose deterrence in which case will this deter him from doing the same thin g next year? Probably, but there are more efficient ways of doing that even if he wanted to do the swim again?

Or is the intention to exact retribution for an act of selfish stupidity that ruined the enjoyment of thousands? But are we saying the only way we can think of to express social punishment is to take away liberty and further criminalise the offender in an institution at ridiculous expense to the very people he has offended against?

If the intention is to correct, rehabilitate, re-orientate a person's sense of social responsibility and moral thinking, then the last place suited for that is a prison where it is accepted there are far too few resources, and a deeply counter-productive environment for such mental, emotional and social self-reinvention.

Now if the intention is restitution, seeking to put right what was done wrongly, making recompense for loss or hurt to others, then I fail to see how he can do that while locked away from the very public to whom he owes a debt, and again, at their considerable expense.

Would several hundred community hours of work have been better? Oh, I think so. Would a fine have been more appropriate – fines depend on how much money a person has anyway. If he is a millionaire then a few thousand pounds is more inconvenience than restitution or any other alleged good consequence of punishment. If he is on benefits, then a fine merely goes unpaid and we are back to jail with no get out of jail free card.

So I'm still asking – how does sending him to prison provide a satisfying resolution to a disrupted boat race? We are not talking about a football fan inciting violence, or behaving in a way likely to endanger life and limb around them. There was no crowd who would become a threat to public order lining the Thames that day. But to require the offender to repay the public money this whole incident incurred, and make restitution for ruining the hard work and enjoyment of many others, that could surely be better achieved by community service, a re-education in what makes a society good and just, and a reminder that human community cannot flourish unless there is a mutual recognition of rights, and obligations, and these balanced in socially responsible actions.

Haiku on a Favourite Picture

Beauty in repose,

eyes gazing wonderingly

at futures unknown.

This is one of my favourite images of the Virgin Mary. An early European sketch by Rogier Van der Weyden. Alongside much more developed images this near neutral sketch exudes mystery, beauty, and an all but tangible intimation of the sacred.

I don't mean in any soft, unreflective devotional reverie, those responses that are best summed up as "nice". Art like this communicates the inner meanings of faith through those hints and clues of tone and technique, the power of form and capacity to set off those inner resonances which are prompts to recognition; that what we are looking at is more than we see, and signifies deeper than we can often feel, or think. 

Mary's "Yes" at the Annunciation is one of the pivotal points in salvation history. Maybe so. But what makes it so, is it is also one of those moments when a human heart transcended the limits of human possibility and said "Yes" to an unknown future, not out of mere resignation, but from a willed act of costly obedience.

The art that surrounds the Annunciation is an embarrassment of masterpieces; but this small sketch has its place amongst the most theologically focused, because the face, understood in human encounter, is the mirror of the embodied self, the reflection of our inner being, the outward expression to the world of our most personal self.

The beauty of repose is therefore a profoundly reassuring image of God's modus operandum in the loving of the world.

Next June this book is being published. I don't usually pre-order 9 months in advance. Few books that interest me sell out within the first few weeks, or years.

But here's an interesting thing. In 1977 I bought Howard Marshall's commentary on Luke, the first volume in the series New International Commentary on the Greek New Testament (NICGNT). One of the ones I most want to get my hands on is still not written: Richard Bauckham on the Gospel of John being one of them. That book has been scheduled for 35 years, and I would really, really, like to read it before I die!

There are, for the commentary lover, desiderata that we dream about. I still remember going into the tiny St Paul's Bookshop when it was at the top of Buchanan Street in the early 1970's. It was staffed by several warmly welcoming and knowledgeable Catholic nuns, who knew a thing or two about reading the Bible seriously. 

Now I worked for a couple of years in a brickwork in Carluke, Lanarkshire, while earning the money to get to University. I was a brick setter – which means I placed the bricks in the kilns, stacked neatly in rows of five with a finger breadth between them and built in pillars 10 high, before building a wall across them to the ceiling. You lifted 28 a minute, and each weighed around 4 kilos (actually just over 7lbs). Forget any idea of doing weights – this was a gym you got paid for working in, and it was warm too – so you only worked 30 minutes on, and 20 m inutes off.

Back to the bookshop. I took a book off the bookshelf that was just about exactly the palm spread of an uncooked brick! Remember I know this – Every half hour in the kiln I lifted and stacked hundreds of them. It was of course a fraction of the weight of a clay brick, but its dimensions were uncannily similar. And so, for £6, I bought volume one of Raymond Brown's commentary on John's Gospel. In 1972, £6 would buy you 19 gallons of petrol – I'll leave you to do the maths of 86 litres times the current cost of petrol.

I came back a month or two later for volume 2. And those two volumes, published by Geoffrey Chapman before Doubleday, and now Yale took over the series, remain lifetime companions in the study of John. I later bought Brown's volume on the Johannine Epistles. It's just as thick, magisterial and impressive, but by then I had lived with Brown on John's Gospel long enough to appreciate the spiritual investment of buying the right commentary, at the right time.

So this post is by way of a plea, a prayer even. Richard Bauckham on John, Tom Wright on Philippians, Walter Brueggemann on Psalms – These three things Dear Lord I pray!

The Mayfield Brockworks closed at the end of 2011. Look here and  you can see a slide show of the whole process and the remains of the Works, including the interior of the kilns. I worked there from 1970 to 72, night shift, from 7.00 pm to 7.30 am Monday to Thursday, and Friday 1.00pm to 5.00pm, and Saturday 7am – 12 noon!