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This was the view from our back door at 9.00 this morning.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And this is a bird's eye view of the bird table!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Then this afternoon we had this!

 Ride on, ride on, in majesty!
Hark! all the tribes hosanna cry.
0 Savior meek, pursue Thy road,
With palms and scattered garments strowed.

2. Ride on, ride on, in majesty!
In lowly pomp ride on to die.
0 Christ, Thy triumphs now begin
O'er captive death and conquered sin.

3. Ride on, ride on, in majesty!
The angel armies of the sky
Look down with sad and wondering eyes
To see the approaching Sacrifice.

4. Ride on, ride on, in majesty!
Thy last and fiercest strife is nigh;
The Father on His sapphire throne
Expects His own anointed Son.

5. Ride on, ride on, in majesty!
In lowly pomp ride on to die.
Bow Thy meek head to mortal pain.
Then take, 0 Christ, Thy power and reign.

Saviour meek, lowly pomp, wondering eyes, the last and fiercest strife – this Palm Sunday hymn is far removed from the triumphalism of much modern praise sing discourse. The power to reign is not power, it is sacrifice; and the majesty evokes wonder not by the authority of might but by the relinquishment of power in suffering. Palm Sunday sets the agenda for the coming week. The Passion Story isn't about God winning by compulsion and forced compliance, but about the vulnerability of God in Christ loving enemies with a gentle defiant refusal to confirm that might is right. The heart of God is revealed in peacemaking, the surrender of a love that seeks to reconcile by healing hatred, subverting violence, embracing the treacherous and forgiving those who crucify.

God commends his love towards us in that while we were his enemies, Christ died for us. I guess that the witness of Christians in the 21st Century could take a new turning of risk and costly adventure if the politics of Palm Sunday shaped the politics of our daily lives, our personal relationships and the way we express our citizenship of the world, and God's Kingdom.

…. Ride on, King Jesus, through conflict and debate

ride on through sweaty prayer and the betrayal of friends

Lord this Palm Sunday forgive me my evasions of truth,

my carelessness of your honour;

my weakness which leaves me sleeping

even when in others you suffer and are anguished;

my cowardice that does not risk the consequences

of publicly acknowledging you as Lord.

 

The other day I got a lovely letter from a friend, expressing appreciation for something I'd written. What makes the letter more special is that it was typed, not word-processed. It's perhaps entirely a matter of perspective, or maybe there is an aesthetic of the technologically obsolete, but a typed letter feels more personal, takes more effort and care when there's no delete button, conveys a generous intentionality as trouble is taken.

My friend Stewart, whose funeral I shared on Friday, gave me a gift two days before the stroke from which he eventually died. The Naked Now. Learning to See as the Mystics See, by Richard Rohr, is now one of those books twice treasured – for what it is, and from whom it came. Inside it Stewart wrote in a characteristic hand, with his fountain pen, his own greeting and appreciation of friendship – neat, firm, legible and instantly recognisable as Stewart.

Typewriter and fountain pen – it's not that I undervalue all the other ways we keep in touch with each other these days – email, text, facebook and all other forms of maintaining and repairing relationship. But the typed letter, and the handwritten flyleaf re-present the faces and the voices of two dear friends. Emails and texts are transient, often enough informal chits of chat. But a typed letter and written flyleaf are artefacts of friendship and lasting fingerprints of touches on our lives.

 

And That Will Be Heaven

and that will be heaven

and that will be heaven

at last   the first unclouded

seeing

         to stand like the sunflower

turned full face to the sun    drenched

with light     in the still centre

held     while the circling planets

hum with an utter joy

                        seeing and knowing

at last     in every particle

seen and known     and not turning

away

     never turning away

again

(Evangeline Paterson)

I shared in the funeral of my friend Stewart today, and was given the privilege of trying to explain the mystery that is the human life, precious, unique, surprising, the gift of presence, and communion, and inward companionship. The poem expresses the breathless wonder of our earthbound eyes seeing through the eyes of God to the face of God, and how in the end God will be all in all.

Amongst the words borrowed and used in the service were these from Julian of Norwich, Stewart's favourite theologian, and fro m Paul, who understood the limits of human thought and experience to comprehend the infinite mystery of eternal love, stooping to redeem and renew:

Thus I was taught that love was our Lord's meaning.

And I saw quite clearly in this and in all,

that before God made us, he loved us,

which love was never slaked nor ever shall be.

And in this love he has done all his work,

and in this love he has made all things profitable to us.

And in this love our life is everlasting.

In our creation we had a beginning.

But the love wherein he made us was in him with no beginning.

And all this shall be seen in God without end.

In the end the beatific vision is to gaze with joyous wonder on the brilliant dazzling darkness that is the mystery of Love Divine:

When I was a child,

I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child.

But when I grew up, I put away childish things.

Now we see things imperfectly,

like puzzling reflections in a mirror,

but then we will see everything with perfect clarity.

All that I know now is partial and incomplete,

but then I will know everything completely,

just as God now knows me completely….

and all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.

Yesterday one of my dearest friends died. We first met 28 years ago, and from our first meeting we sensed an affinity that is hard to explain and requires no explanation because friendship is gift, grace, goodness and gratitude all bundled together in a congruence of mind and heart.

In due course I'll say more. I mention my friend here because this is Buechner week, and I've been re-reading and re-thinking Buechner's wisdom. There is a spiritual family resemblance between my friend's and Buechner's take on God and the graced life. In 28 years we had countless conversations about the meaning of God, and love, and what it means to be human, and how to reach out to the other, and who Jesus is for us and our broken world today, and why blessing is the default setting of any heart openly receptive to the love of God that is always there before us, and behind us. When I read Buechner, I think he has been reading my friend's diary, overhearing many of those conversations, wishing he could interrupt and agree or disagree by saying, 'But have you looked at it this way?'

Here is Buechner on love, words that coincide exactly with my friend's theology, and mine.

Of all powers,

love is the most powerful and the most powerless.

It is the most powerful because it alone can conquer

that final and most impregnable stronghold

which is the human heart.

It is the most powerless

because it can do nothing except by consent.

To say that love is God is the most romantic idealism.

To say that God is love is either the last straw,

or the ultimate truth.

Wishful Thinking, 50-54

The photo was taken a stone's throw from my friend's house. An exuberant garden was one of his delights, probably because such profusion of colour, variety and vitality answered to much in his own inner world.  

Forgiveness is one of the hardest won and easiest forgotten hallmarks of Christian discipleship. You'd think in an era obsessed with branding, marketing, celebrity, fame, the product, that the church might have taken time to ask what it is that the world most needs, and how to offer it at an affordable price. If the 21st Century church is serious about mission, has a rudimentary let alone a strategic grasp of the Gospel, is 'missionally engaged' with the surrounding culture of debt and recession, entertainment escapism, technological idolatry, social fragmentation and relational maliase, then you'd think that the connection between a debt ridden world and a Gospel of debts forgiven might be an idea worth considering, demonstrating, practising, and embodying.

Grace has to be one of the most ridiculously straightforward bargains a market idolising culture could ever be offfered, you'd think. Instead of buy one get one free, the invitation to come buy bread without money would be a game losing own goal for Supermarkets, but the ridiculously obvious life disposition of those who follow Jesus.

After all at the heart of the prayer shared throughout the entire Christian tradition we pray 'forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors', and do so in a civilisation where bank bail-outs are a self interested emergency to prevent indebtedness engulfing the world economy. More outrageously still, in moments of the greatest agony and personal grief inflicted by others, Jesus prays 'Father forgive them for they know not what they do'. It isn't as if the ideas of grace and forgiveness are radically new. They are in fact radically old, they lie at the originating centre of Christian faith in the heart of God in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.

Forgiveness is a fundamental responsibility of the Christian heart, a life-changing gift to be to be given and received freely. The coalescence in our hearts of responsibility and gift, and the life shaping power of forgiveness, should be eye-openingly obvious. The argument goes from the greater to the lesser – if God in Christ forgives me, I am a forgiven sinner, now a willing conspirator of the Kingdom, a grace inspired subversive, a forgiven forgiver.

Buechner puts it more prosaically, but sometimes that's exactly what is needed for us to grasp what the Grace of God both demands and gives, as we try to faithfully follow after Jesus, whose harshest words were sometimes reserved for those who harden their hearts and refuse to be reconciled.

When somebody you've wronged forgives you, you're spared the dull and self-diminishing throb of a guilty conscience.

When you forgive somebody who has wronged you, you're spared the dismal corrosion of bitterness and wounded pride.

For both parties, forgiveness means the freedom again to be at peace inside their own skins, and to be glad in each other's presence.

Forgiveness is the word we live by, says Elizabeth Jennings in her poem, 'Forgiveness'. There would be more life and less death, more peace and less violence, more love and less hate, more joy and less anger, more gift and less payback, and therefore more grace and less retribution if in the world there were more live demonstrations of forgiveness. Now there's a missional imperative for a faith community called to be reconciled reconcilers, or in Paul's words, words far too often given their soteriological weight at the cost of their transformative ethical urgency, Jesus has given us the ministry of reconciliation.  

Yesterday I bought two things with a combined price of £10 The first was the book in the picture, Paddison's monograph in the Society of New Testament Studies Monograph series, on Theological Hermeneutics and First Thessalonians. The copy was hardback in mint condition, was probably a review copy, and is currently priced at £65 – so when I saw the price was £4.50, I felt like a certain farmer ploughing in a field when his arms are jarred by the blade of the plough hitting treasure. I didn't buy the field but I grabbed the book and handed over my £5 note and fled rejoicing.

As a lifelong bibliophile I am still like a child in a toyshop, or a chocolate factory, when I'm in a bookshop. And a Cambridge or Oxford hardback monograph is still a delight to hold, read and be able to afford to buy! I bought it in my favourite second hand bookshop, having stopped by on impulse, and the whole compexion of the day changed as my faith in providence was shored up by yet another coincidence of circumstance more theologically defined as a blessing!

Later on the drive back I was an hungered. I lapse into King james language when still glowing with recent blessing, and I stopped at the Little Chef beyond Dunblane. I ususally sniff disdainfully as I pass and keep going to Baxters. But by now they were closed. Another good decision. I ordered scrambled egg on brown bread and a pot of tea well, to be exact toasted wholemeal bread and butter, and organic free range eggs, and a three cup pot of tea. For nourishment of mind and body it's hard to beat a good book and crusty brown bread!! .

One of my favourite brief poems, which should be read occasionally at the Lord's Supper, is a reminder of the sanctity of the ordinary. Through the Incarnation of our Lord all matter is made sacred; at the centre of the Lord's Prayer is that petition that shakes us out of our spiritual reveries by addressing our most basic hunger, 'Give us this day our daily bread'; and on the night when Jesus was betrayed, he took bread, and broke it……. and we call that, Eucharist.

Be careful when you touch bread.

Let it not lie uncared for – unwanted.

So often bread is taken for granted.

There is so much beauty in bread;

Beauty of sun and soil,

Beauty of patient toil.

Winds and rain have caressed it,

Christ often blessed it.

Be gentle when you touch bread.

~Anonymous

You can find the picture and the recipe for cider bread over here.

 

Now here's something that doesn't happen every day. Monday was the best day this week, and I'd promised a friend we'd go out on the bikes for the first time after the winter. But the tyres of the bikes were soft and the pump connector unhelpfully burst – and it was well after 5pm.

So in the car and out to look for a bike shop. Thought we'd found one at 5.30 but could only park across the road in a side street in the last space. The rush hour in full swing, the cars kept coming and the pedestrian crossing was a ways down the street. Finally got to the shop but the lights had gone out and the door locked. Looked in the window and the owner came and opened the door and asked if he could help. "No", he apologised – it was mainly a fish tackle shop – but we should try the new bike shop down the road.

Ran down, hoping it was open, and it was. Asked about the connector, yes he had one. Went to pay for it. Had changed into different clothes and had no money – a suit and tie being less than helpful on a bike!

"That's ok", he said, "hand it in next time you're passing".

So in 10 minutes I'd been at a closed shop which opened, been kindly directed to an open shop but had no money, and still came away with a pump connector because the owner took a risk and trusted.

There are days when it's all worth it – the hassle, the conveyor belt of stuff we all try to handle, the couldn't care-less-ness of much that passes for service in our recession ridden times. But the sun was shining, a closed shop was opened, a £3 connector was given away on trust.

As we walked up the street we waved to the owners of the fish tackle shop, and got the thumbs up. And eventually got half an hour on the bikes before the sun set. The sun which shines on the righteous…..I know the rest of the verse about also on the unrighteous, but on Monday according to the Torah, these folk had been kind to strangers, and multiplied happiness, which is pretty righteous!

The bike shop in question is Thomson's – its website is over here. If you live near Paisley I can recommend it for customer service and downright helpfulness – it also has loadsa bikes!

"At Assisi once, when a theologian attacked Fra Egidio by the usual formal arrangement of syllogisms, the brother waited till the conclusions were laid down, and then, taking out a flute from the folds of his robe, he played his answer in rustic melodies."

Quoted in Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder. The Revelation of John and the Praying Imagination (San Francisco: Harper Collins), 1991.   Peterson has never written a better book.

…….

 

 

 

 

 

"Do you want to know what goes on at the heart of the Trinity?

I'll tell you.

At the heart of the Trinity,

the Father laughs and gives borth to the Son.

The Son then laughs back at the Father,

and gives birth to the Spirit.

Then the whole Trinity laughs,

and gives birth to us."

Meister Eckhart (1260-1327)  

I know. Eckhart jumps right into the filoque controversy despite the playful language. Still like the idea of laughter as creative and life-giving though!

…..

"A shallow mind is a sin against God", Chaim Potok, In the Beginning.

Potok was one of the finest interpreters of Hasidic Judaism, and his novels remain a source of delight and instruction for me. But don't read them if you have a shallow mind – they move in a world of spiritual intensity and serious reflection on the collision between faith convictions and the pressures towards cultural accommodation. His novel, My Name is Asher Lev, is I think a masterpiece as an account of a young man growing up under the dilemma of being faithful to his artistic calling and remaining within the community that confers identity.