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Today is the fourth consecutive day of meetings. I don't mean days in which there was a meeting. I mean days which were entirely made up of meetings. it's not that I don't like meetings. It's just that meetings involve, well meeting; they are held indoors; meetings function by people talking, something that comes too easily for me; the food is usually bought in to allow us to have maximum time for meeting rather than eating.

And if I ask what's been achieved by all this meeting – quite a lot actually. It isn't that this week of meetings has not been worthwhile – more that they are all on the one week. But even with the most creative diary juggling, such a meeting of meetings in the one week has simply proved impossible to avoid. Today there will be four meetings. Well, now – I could become super-spiritual and pedantic and say that tonight isn't a meeting. Since it is our annual College Thanksgiving Service it is worship – and if that's a meeting it's planned, an intentional time for us to meet with each other and with the God whose presence is promised not only tonight but in the academic year that's just gone.

But I don't want to be super-spiritual. Whether committee or worship service – offered to God our time, gifts and service is in the most important sense, worship. For me, every meeting this week has been about trying to serve God in our lives by doing well what we are all called to do. So Monday was Subject Panel and Programme Panel when student performance was reviewed and confirmed. And that performance ranged from good to stunningly good – which is reason enough for thanksgiving, by students and staff. Tuesday and Wednesday were Board of Ministry days when we walked alongside four people seeking God's will for their future as they tested their call to Baptist ministry – in prayer, conversation and discussion – that too is reason for thanksgiving. Today one meeting will be about ongoing financial challenges and encouragements, the next will explore issues around learning and teaching and how to do both better, then College Committee which is the group responsible for College Governance and Development and for exploring more widely the next stages of our life together. I see all of these meetings as integral to what we will do tonight in our worship, thanksgiving and celebration of the ministry of God.

So. A day of meetings, at the end of a week of meetings, but all of it ending with thanksgiving – and our glad meeting together to say so, to God, and each other. If you read this on time, and tonight have the time, come and share the evening with us.

Scottish Baptist College Annual Thanksgiving Service

When – Thursday June 18, 7.30

Where – in Central Baptist Church in Lady Lane (Just across from Thomas Coats Memorial Church).

The preacher is the Rev Brian More, Senior Pastor for Congregational Leadership at Newton Mearns.

As always the folk from Central Baptist congregation will provide refreshements at the end. Come if you can.

Just received the first of two big books being delivered this week. This one I so wanted to buy for my sabbatical last year – but £85 in hardback and no paperback edition till May 2009. So with patience born of frustration, I waited. Now it's here, in a stout and well upholstered paperback version, at the more affordable (and justifiable) price of around £25.

The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology is one of those books that's about four volumes in one. The first part is an introduction to the relationship between literature and theology. Next comes a chronolgical section with nine chapters on the formation of the tradition, spanning the earliest origins of the English tradition, through reformation, enlightenment and on through romanticism and modernism to postmodernism. This is a 150 page book in its own right.

Part three explores literary ways of reading the Bible and 200 pages are devoted to such literary explorations as the Pentateuch, Judges, Psalms, Song of Songs, Wisdom books, prophetic literature, Gospels, John and apocalyptic. All of them major tributaries of the biblical river. I note, and probably want to reflect on the editorial choices that lay behind the exclusion of a chapter on Pauline literature and OT historical books, each in their own right theology and literary genre. Paul in particular is inextricably woven into the moral categories of Western thought and story, and is inexplicably omitted – Bunyan for example is deeply Pauline in his portrayal of the soul's drama, and Puritan theology was called a Pauline renaissance.

Part four examines theological ways of reading literature and contains chapters on major figures in the English literary tradition. Eleven chapters, 300 pages, and a near comprehensive coverage of major figures and movements. Part five looks at theology as literature, 230 pages on a selection of major theological influential figures – Cranmer, Bunyan, Butler, Keble, Newman, Arnold, C S Lewis – again editorial choices, but a broad selection – Ian Ker on Newman is a 15 page account of a man on whom he wrote a book which at 788 pages is almost as thick as this one!

The last section looks at great theological themes and how they have been treated in literature. Evil and the God of love, death and afterlife, pastoral trditions, the passion story in literature (Paul Fiddes), redemption, heaven and hell and several others. These essays offer important alternative perspectives on Christian doctrine and how foundational doctrines may be better expressed in novel, drama, poem, which aim less at precision and more at cumulative persuasion.

Anyway – not going to read it through. But several of the chapters are on the 'when I have a spare hour' list. Incidentally, not to name drop, but one of the editors, Andrew Hass who lectures in religious studies at University of Stirling, was in the church I attended on Sunday. It occurs to me that when I preach there, I sometimes use literature to help explore theology. Hope he wasn't marking my sermon………

Speaking with a good friend yesterday about one of those situations common in the life of any community, organisation, or church. The new minister does things differently. My friend's dad is a long-standing member, previous officebearer, but doesn't like the changes. And as well, in the first year of ministry the minister has only spoken to him once, and hasn't visited. You can see both sides – probably nothing deliberate, or intentionally hurtful on the part of the minister, but on the part of the elderly member an understandbale sense of rejection, a lost sense of significance and belonging.

My friend who is as fair minded and courteous and responsible a person as I know, with a good sense of humour and a high ethic of loyalty, feels torn both ways – the minister is doing a good job in a hard place all things considered, but dad isn't happy, and has started going elsewhere most Sundays. With some justification he feels he's now like many of his age, unnoticed and surplus to requirements nowadays. How to sort this before dad leaves. How to alert the minister to something they really should have noticed and recognised for themselves – it isn't that big a congregation.

So my friend says she wants it sorted – "but it isn't my place to tell the minister there's a problem." She's not being deliberately difficult or unhelpful – she genuinely feels interference would be wrong.

Which raised for me the following questions we went on to discuss

• If not her place to intervene, then whose place?
• When is it "our place" to become involved in a relationship breaking down and try to sort it?
• Is peacemaking ever possible without some third party being willing to risk the initiative, and isn't that each Christian's "place"?
• And if efforts at peace-making, seeking to be a bridge of reconciliation, is seen as unwelcome interference, isn't that the risk worth taking?
• Scaled up to the level of community and nation, isn't such a breakdown in communication and the resulting looming breach of relationship, something that calls out for third party risk taking?

So two further questions

• Is peacemaking creative intervention or unwelcome interference?
• Are there times when even if it is seen as unwelcome interference, conciliation is a Christian imperative that can't always be risk managed?

John Sargeant is one of those lucky people whose career has taken off since his retirement. Not that he had a bad career. He was one of the best BBC political correspondents, lucky enough to be right there in Paris when Margaret Thatcher suffered her own personal coup d'etat. And then more recently as guest and host on Have I Got News for You, his roving reporter role on The One Show, the comedy debunking of Strictly Come Dancing and a number of other enjoyable ways he grins his way on to our TV's.

So I enjoyed his review of the papers on the Andrew Marr show last Sunday for the following reasons:
Like the big human being he is, he took on all the detractors and self-righteous head shakers whose current target is Jade Goody. In her struggle with what is now a terminal condition she is telling and selling her story to make money to try to ensure she can make provision for her children. Those who prefer grudges and sniping, and diminishing further a vulnerable person created by the celebrity scandal culture and just as cruelly to be disposed of, were themselves shown to be diminished and hypocritical, preferring to take cheap shots rather than compassionate notice of a young woman making a hard, hard journey.

Both on the Andrew Marr show and on Any Questions on Saturday, Sargeant was quite unequivocal about the sacking of Carol Thatcher for her racist comment. Without rancour, but also without sympathy, he pointed out the importance of genuine apology, that acknowledgement, mea culpa, that says to others "Forgive me I got it wrong". Of course (and Sargeant didn't go here), there's also the insincere apology which Jeremy Clarkson mouthed immediately to avoid losing his job. His later comments show how utterly contrived and self-serving such emotionally redundant verbiage is. But it kept his job. An outcome I personally regret – unfortunately I don't know of a reliable test to confirm the integrity of Clarkson's apology, or that exposes the underlying arrogance that assumes others share his appetite for such nastiness. On any reliable integrity test, Clarkson would be gone.

Back to Sargeant, and one of the best examples of post-modern perplexity I've heard on TV. Sargeant has just done a minor bit part for the TV series Casualty. Regretting that he wasn't given a part in which he could die on Casualty (clearly an ambition equal in longing to his dancing aspirations), instead he is playing a reporter admitted to hospital with chest pains; indeed he is playing himself. His observation, on which we could do with an entire seminar on the liquid nature of identity in the capricious fluidity of our entertainment and celebrity culture, was the following: "I was paid more for pretending to be the real me, than I ever was for being me".
Go consider.

Or,

"Discuss with reference to our current confusion about reality, value and who we, or others, think we might be.

Today I
will be conducting the funeral service for my aunt, the last member of my
mothers family of four sisters and three brothers. Included in the service will
be a prayer written into a book of prayers that she used, well thumbed
and occasionally marked. It is a precis of a life well
lived.

The prayer is by
Yehudi Menuhin, one of the greatest musicians, and I think one of the great
human beings of the 20th Century. I remember reading his autobiography Unfinished Journey, years ago, while lying in a caravan, near St
Abb's Head, in a week of gales with horizontal rain, a fractious toddler (not
telling you what one), and a cupboard full of "spoil me I'm on
holiday" food. Yehudi Menuhin's story of how he grew from child prodigy to
one of the most accomplished and respected musicians of at least two generations,
is told in a way that was neither self-promoting nor self-centred. Instead he
wrote movingly of the musician's demeanour of humility before the music, the
importance of those teachers and companions who encouraged and drew out the
best, a sense not so much of his own greatness as a talent, but of his
obligation to fulfil his gifts in the service of human compassion and joy. And
through it all a deep and growing sense of gratitude, of indebtedness to life for its
opportunities, its blessings and late in life its still unexhausted possibilities.

 
So the prayer we will
say today, as the last will and testament of my aunt, is as much a blessing
offered at the end of life, from one human being to the wider human family, as
a religious devotion offered to God. But the truth is, gratitude is its own
prayer, its own form of address to Whoever is believed to be the author of such
blessing. In fact my aunt was the author of considerable blessing herself. From
as early as I can remember, until the year I was married, at birthday and
Christmas I received a card with money that was to be used for whatever I
wanted. So in the late fifties it was a ten bob note (10/-) that was inserted. Just to explain
relative values; the purchasing power of 10 shillings in 1958 was equivalent to
£22.50 today; put another way, it would have taken my dad 3 hours work to earn
10 shillings. Such long term and uninterrupted generosity comes from
the kind of person for whom this prayer was significant as her final word on
her own life, a word of contentment tinged with regret, but suffused with a
luminous gratitude. 

May those who survive me not mourn but continue to be as
helpful, kind and wise to others as they were to me. Although I would love to
enjoy for many years the fruits of my lucky and rich life, with my family and
friends, my many projects, and this whole world of diverse cultures and peoples
– I have already received such blessings as would satisfy a thousand lives.

Amen, and Amen

In the absence of Exit Interviews, an important source of insight for organisations and movements haemorraging recruits and support, David Hempton has done what's the next best thing. Evangelical Disenchantment is a phenomenon that goes back to the early generations of the movement and has remained a significant outcome for many who put their hands to the plough and looked back – or looked elsewhere. What makes this book so interesting and challenging for contemporary evangelical self-understanding is the account it gives of faith found and lost, of the weaknesses and strengths of Evangelicalism viewed through the lenses of human personality in cultural context.

George Eliot combined intellectual power, moral imagination, philosophical rigour and psychological insight, making her a formidable opponent with previous insider knowledge.  Francis W Newman was the brother of John Henry Newman. His experience as a missionary in Baghdad, his encounter with the Muslim world, his disillusion with millenial theology that looked to the Christianisation of the globe, the anti-intellectualism of fellow evangelicals, pushed him towards a position much more open to modern advances in knowledge. He came to see Evangelicalism as pathologically scared of the mind, holding to an infallible Bible often at the cost of authentic spirituality, trusting in Christian evidences, naively unquestioning of core dogma, and unchristianly hostile to those like himself who could no longer sign up to a faith demanding detailed doctrinal rectitude.

Theodore Dwight Weld was one of the great anti-slavery patriarchs of the 1830's and a convert of Finney's revival activities. He broke with Finney over whether priority should be given to revivalist conversionism or reformist zeal in transforming the social and moral life of the nation.

Three women activists, Sarah Grimke, Elizabeth Cody Stanton and Frances Willard are treated in one chapter.

Why?

Hempton acknowledges that such women are an essential though largely missing part of a more truthful, alternative, and as yet unwritten history, a required corrective to the distortions of male-focused narrative. But from the writings and accounts these three women Hempton builds a composite picture of the crucial connection and eventual conflict between their feminist principles and the biblically underwritten constraints imposed on them by church sponsored theology and politically legitimated male empowerment in society. My next post will review this chapter along with the last chapter on James Baldwin, sub-titled Evangelicalism and race. 

The chapter on Van Gogh on secularisation (the focus of the previous post on January 31) is followed by a careful and balanced exploration of Father and Son, one of English Literature's classic accounts of Victorian childhood. By the time Edmund Gosse wrote Father and Son, he was established as a literary critic and writer of independent mind. Brought up in a narrow Plymouth Brethren home, Gosse and his later autobiography provide a fascinating, at times embarrassing account of Evangelicalism and childhood. I remember the first time I read Father and Son. And coming to the end of it where the last line says so much about the impact of powerful religious convictions, conveyed through parental approval or disapproval, and reinforced within a small religiously intense community where conversion and baptism as a believer by immersion were paradigmatic and required experience. The book ends by insisting on "a human being's privilege to fashion his inner life for himself." And in that culminating observation lies an entire critique of what Gosse himself saw as a well meaning but personally damaging process of indoctrination.

Hempton is even-handed in these studies. Disenchanted critics are listened to, their grievances heard, and the validity of much of their complaints acknowledged. Their own oddities of temperament, gift for shooting themselves in the foot, attempts to have their evangelical cake and eat it, these are also noted and fitted to what is an overall balanced exploration of a movement and its dissidents. The concluding chapter helpfully gathers the main causes of intellectual and spiritual disenchantment and personal disaffiliation. Some reflection on these will be the final post on this fascinating education of a book.

At times R S Thomas reads as much like a Zen master, as a Welsh Anglican priest. His resistance to certainty, and reluctance to make dogmatic faith claims, betray a mind restlessly, at times angrily, interrogative. He came to a faith intuitively hesitant in his recognition of a Reality detected if at all, by hints, half-heard intimations and those unattended moments when truth invites attention. Distilled into this brief poem, are serious playfulness, unsentimental wistfulness, resilient hopefulness, and a capacity to make the uncertainty of 'maybe' sound like a promise, but not to be taken for granted. Julian of Norwich's "All shall be well", transposed to the minor less confident key of "Maybe…, after all…, all shall be well".

One of the longest Benedictions I've ever heard. A complex text of human experience, personal story, national history, biblical faith and political hope. A day when the world was watching and listening, Rev Joseph Lowery a veteran civil rights campaigner, offered prayer on the high balcony of Capitol Hill, America's public architecture of power, partially reconstructed in the 1850's using slave labour. It was a day when inner attitudes went through tectonic shifts. And as I listened to this long Benediction, part confession, part eulogy, part prophetic oracle, and all transparently and unembarrassedly prayed, as a citizen of the world and a human being, I sensed again the importance of hope as a moral stance. And I cried and laughed for sheer pleasure that a prayer could say so much – not only the words, but the human life of the one who spoke it, and the multi-millions of lives on whose behalf he prayed.

There's already been criticism of the comment about "white will embrace what is right". And I think I understand the sensitivities of those hurt by this singling out of one human colour for moral censure – especially the thousands of white civil rights campaigners who walked alongside Rev Lowery and others down through the decades. That's why I think it has to be read and heard as a complex text; the long and bitter experience of the man who prayed, the history of a nation, and the miracle of hoped for and long in coming change, is reflected in a prayer personal, political, prophetic, and reflecting the very tensions that made the day fraught with possibility.  

The text has been released by the Federal News Service, and I was glad to read it again – but it's nothing without the quiet defiant hopefulness of the Rev Lowery's gruff, at times breaking, but affirmative voice. So you can also see and hear it over at You Tube.

……………………..

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who has
brought us thus far along the way, thou who has by thy might led us
into the light, keep us forever in the path, we pray, lest our feet
stray from the places, our God, where we met thee, lest our hearts,
drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee. Shadowed beneath thy
hand may we forever stand — true to thee, O God, and true to our
native land.

We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we've shared this
day. We pray now, O Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant, Barack
Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his
administration. He has come to this high office at a low moment in the
national and, indeed, the global fiscal climate. But because we know
you got the whole world in your hand, we pray for not only our nation,
but for the community of nations. Our faith does not shrink, though
pressed by the flood of mortal ills.

For we know that, Lord, you're able and you're willing to work
through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness,
heal our wounds and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor or the
least of these and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.

We thank you for the empowering of thy servant, our 44th president,
to inspire our nation to believe that, yes, we can work together to
achieve a more perfect union. And while we have sown the seeds of greed
— the wind of greed and corruption, and even as we reap the whirlwind
of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a
spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president
by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to
turn to each other and not on each other.

And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to
make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion,
not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.

And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit
of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power
back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our
mosques, or wherever we seek your will.

Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little, angelic Sasha and Malia.

We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won't get
weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone,
with your hands of power and your heart of love.

Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not
lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors,
when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and
fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like
waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest,
and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that
day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick
around — (laughter) — when yellow will be mellow — (laughter) —
when the red man can get ahead, man — (laughter) — and when white
will embrace what is right.

Let all those who do justice and love mercy say amen.

AUDIENCE: Amen!

REV. LOWERY: Say amen —

AUDIENCE: Amen!

REV. LOWERY: — and amen.

AUDIENCE: Amen! (Cheers, applause.)

My thanks to Andy and Derek (see comments on previous post), for looking at Google books and for their efforts to find that which was lost and redeem my literary lapses.

My pal Bob from New Hampshire tells me the Von Balthasar reference I'm looking for is in Grain of Wheat. Now this collection of Von Balthasar's aphorisms isn't on Google books as a preview volume, and I don't have a copy. So does anyone have access to a copy and is my elusive reference to be found there? I'm beginning to feel like the woman with the lost coin, unable to settle to those other responsibilities of life till I find the one that was lost. So I'm sweeping the house – figuratively speaking.

Here it is again – you can see why I want to place it – this is Von Balthasar at his most quotable. I don't know a better definition of that ecumenism of the heart that grows out of the love of God in Christ.

"Only in Christ are all
things in communion. He is the point of convergence of all hearts and beings
and therefore the bridge and the shortest way from each to each."