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I am posting today at hopeful imagination – about the importance of staying awake – politically, ethically, spiritually, theologicallly ….awake!

Finished the paper for the first meeting of the Centre for the Study of Scottish Christian Spirituality, this Saturday at the College (Block K University of Paisely – need to enter from Storie St past security). From 10 a.m. -1.00 p.m. we will explore the early days of the Iona Community when Anne Muir, the oral historian of the Community, will be our guest speaker. My own contribution is an exploration of George Macleod’s prayers – the title is taken from one of his recurring phrases;

‘When the whole thing becomes the whole blessed thing’.

Stuart will do something on Macleod’s radio broadcasts from Govan, dating the 1930’s. If you are free come along. If you want any other details email me from the email address on the sidebar of this blog.

My main post for today is at hopeful imagination. Took the chance to mention my current Lent Book, Raging With Compassion and connect it with a couple of really big questions? Couldn’t resist another wee post on the astringent wisdom of James Denney though! See earlier post here today!

Today’s main contribution to blogdom is at hopeful imagination 

  But last night’s reading included this Barthian broadside against any marginalising of preaching by the church.

"… the sermon as the exposition of Scripture, becomes fraught with meaning, when it is a preaching of the Word of God. It is simply a truism that there is nothing more important , more urgent, more helpful, more redemptive, and more salutary, there is nothing, from the viewpoint of heaven or earth, more relevant to the real situation than the speaking and the hearing of the Word of God in the originative and regulative power of its truth, in its all-eradicating and all-reconciling earnestness, in the light that it casts not only upon time and time’s confusions but also beyond, toward the brightness of eternity, revealing time and eternity through each other and in each other – the Word, the Logos, of the Living God. Let us ask ourselves – and as we do so think of Jesus Christ – whether the will of God does not drive us, and the plight of man….does not call us, toward this event?

Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man (London: H&S, 1928), 123-4.

On Wednesday, 21 Feb, my birthday, I spent the day doing several things I enjoy. Early morning I was on my way to Glasgow University Library chasing material on George Macleod of Iona for the paper I am doing on him in March. Needed a quality coffee to start the day and went into the Hunterian Museum which has a small, light, corner cafe where I enjoyed a latte with Almond syrup, and a chapter of my new book.

When I asked for the Almond syrup the woman serving me asked if I’d seen Masterchef Goes Large, the night before.

‘Aye’, I said.

‘Whit aboot that eejit that put ground almonds instead of parmesan in the pesto?’, she asked me, obviously still astonished at such ignorance of elementary cuisine know-how.

‘And the pillock served it, tae’, she added.

I know what she meant – meatballs served with a sweet almond sauce?????  If you make a mistake, you acknowledge it and start again; if you are in a hole stop digging; two wrongs don’t make a right. Did leave me wondering though….marzipan flavoured meatballs!

Then, still sipping and reading, I overheard fragments of a conversation – but before I recount a couple of snippets, you need to know I was reading The Cross Shattered Christ by Hauerwas, a gift for Lent. As usual, Hauerwas was on about peace, the cost of peacemaking, and the dangers of pious sentimentality leaching the tragic mystery from that pivotal moment in the life of God – the death of the Son. And in the light of such tragic mysterious triumph, the determined opposition of Christian hearts to all that makes for unjust death and dehumanising cruelty, morally reinforced by an abiding suspicion of politically motivated violence.

Now the fugitive pieces of conversation rendered into phonetic Scots – the meaning still more or less transparent………

‘Ah didnae want tae hiv a row wi’ her. A didnae mean tae fa’ oot wi’ her. She juist went ballistic.’

‘Ah’m that busy ah’m gonnae be aff the planet next week – ah cannae look efter her.’

‘See whit ah huv tae pit up wi’? God love her – ah love her tae bits so ah dae.’

A mother, complaining to her friend, about her teenage daughter’s perplexingly challenging behaviour, in the language of the heart.

What’s the connection between me reading about the cross and peacemaking, thinking about George Macleod, sipping an almond latte, and hearing these snippets of genuine humanity and the costly tensions and tanglements of human love.

It’s the word ballistic – used to describe a family row, a euphemism for other euphemisms like ‘losing it’, ‘chucking a wobbler’, ‘doing your nut’. Ballistic – it means a projectile travelling by its own momentum when the engine is switched off. So when I hear the word I think of other semantic connections – Intercontinental ballistic missiles – silent unwinged harbingers of mass death, the terror of our enemies, our peace founded on the ultimate blackmail play of the ‘other’s’ threatened destruction.

Connections?

The cross and its intercontinental embrace.

Peace as the goal of God.

Lord George Macleod, passionate Christian pacifist, kirk minister, and CND’s most eloquent orator.

The love of a mother and the love of God.

And that scary euphemism; when did the word ballistic enter the popular vocabulary of the West of Scotland as a description of self-propelled anger? I ask the question as a West of Scotland man, sitting at a keyboard, 20 miles from Faslane, hoping none of the people with power ever feel compelled to go ballistic on an international scale.

And I sit here affirming still, ‘Beneath the cross of Jesus, I fain would take my stand’;

and praying still, ‘O cross that liftest up my head, I dare not ask to fly from thee, I lay in dust life’s glory dead, and from the ground there blossoms red, life that shall endless be’.

And, more whimsically, but just as seriously, I wonder if God looks down on this planet and says something like……..

‘See whit ah huv tae pit up wi’? God love her – ah love her tae bits so ah dae.’

Cross shattered Christ!

God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself…………………..

Today, Ash Wednesday, I have blogged at hopeful imagination. The site is set up by Andy Goodliff, and you should visit it during Lent if you want daily reflection and comment that encourages a different way of looking at the world, ourselves and what God is about around us. The title will be familiar to Brueggemann fans – the theological importance of both hope and imagination is that they are perspectives that refuse to take the way things are as the way things have to be. To pray is to lift up holy hands against the status quo – the thought is Karl Barth’s, and recalls us to prayer as an act of political significance.

Lent can easily reduce to a "pious grovelling around in our own souls" (R E O White, former Principal of the Scottish Baptist College in an unforgettably astringent lecture on pastoral prayer). There are few more selfish acts than prayers which are fixated on our own feelings, our own devotional aspirations, our sins, our desires, our view of what we want God to do here, there, then, now. Yes prayer is personal relationship – but the personal becomes selfish, and private, and exclusive – "oh that will be, glory for me" – if that relationship, like all Christ-like relationships, is not outward looking in self-giving love, generous compassion, hunger for justice for others. The picture above is of a child working on a construction site in Honduras. See the story and statistics on the UNICEF site here. Lifting up holy hands against the status quo….Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven……children….of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.

Self-concern is not one of the fruits of the spirit, and it might be an interesting experiment this Lent to monitor the frequent recurrence of the first person singulars in our prayers – I, me, we, us, mine, our. And to consider whether public prayers by those of us who lead worship reflect the wideness of God’s mercy, express hunger and thirst for righteousness, understood not primarily as personal justification, but as God’s call to the Church to embody a Kingdom that is justice, peace and joy. And it just might result in one of the most radical changes in our own spirituality when our understanding of the ‘ingrasping’ love of God,(the word is Charles Wesley’s!) opens our arms to embrace this broken beautiful world of ours, with a passion derived from Christ’s Passion, and with a self-forgetful commitment to the ways of Christ as the ways of life. That would be to pray with hopeful imagination!

Have a good Lent!