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Thought for the Day October 24-30

Monday

Proverbs 12.25 “An anxious heart weighs a person down, but a kind word cheers them up.”

“Don’t worry, it might never happen” is one of the least helpful things to say to someone sick with anxiety. Worry and anxiety are part of our mind and body’s response to threat, or fear of what might happen. Amongst the most effective reliefs for those sick with worry is kindness, in words and in actions. Paul wrote, “Be kind and compassionate to one another”. So, today – be the love of God to others.

Tuesday

Matthew 6.25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 

Inflation, energy bills, cost of living crisis – these are real, not just scary words on the news. It’s worth remembering that God’s provision for others comes through the ordinary acts of generous giving and compassion. A Christian response to all that we are now facing must include; taking thought for the poor, supporting the vulnerable and struggling, and befriending the lonely. Our local food banks can be places of graced giving, and quite literally, gift aid.

Wednesday

1 Peter 5.7 “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God, that he may lift you up in due time. Cast all your anxiety on him, for he cares for you.”

I sometimes wonder if my worrying is a strange form of pride, the belief that it’s up to me to solve the problems that make me anxious in the first place! But if it is pride, the answer is to humble myself, and hand over my anxieties to the God whose concern for me is beyond doubt. “Burdens are lifted at Calvary, Jesus is very near…”

Thursday

Luke 12.25 “Which of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life, or an inch to his height.”

Sometimes Jesus states the obvious. Worrying changes nothing, except our own energy levels and emotional resilience to face whatever comes. The doctrine of providence comes from two words, pro + video, “to see before”. God sees what we need before we even know it ourselves, because God is always ahead of, behind and around us. If worrying made us taller, I’d be able to play basketball! As it is, for all the anxieties I’ve lived through, my height hasn’t changed. But neither has the sufficient grace of the God who is always ahead of me. Whatever comes, He is there. 

Friday

2 Corinthians 11.27-8 “I have laboured and toiled and have often gone without sleep; I have known hunger and thirst and have often gone without food; I have been cold and naked. Besides everything else, I face daily the pressure of my anxieties for all the churches“.

So there it is. Paul isn’t a super saint. He worries and feels anxious just like the rest of us. The long list of hardships from verse 23-28 are enough to break the most resilient spirit. Paul is anxious about the future of the churches he helped to establish. What’s important is that Paul knew the counterbalance – the grace that is sufficient, the peace that passes understanding, the power of the Holy Spirit within.

Saturday

Mark 4.19 “Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth, and the desires for other things come in and choke the word.”

It can happen to any of us. We get caught up into a life so busy, God has to join the queue, often quite far back. When life is driven, often the fuel is anxiety. And often we suppress or cope with the anxiety by filling our lives till there’s no time, space or energy to hear the word, to pray, to be with God and God’s people. Decluttering isn’t just for houses stuffed with stuff; it can also be God’s call to clear space in the diary and in our minds to attend to our souls.

Sunday

Philippians 4.5-7 “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident to all. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

We’ve spent the week thinking about anxiety, and what makes us anxious. The Bible says quite a lot about what it feels like to worry, to be anxious and afraid. These words of Paul were written from a prison, signed with a hand chained to one of the Praetorian guards. They ring with that gentle defiance we call hope and trust in the God who, Paul says, far more than any elite soldier of Caesar, stands guard over the hearts and minds of those who belong to Christ.

Preaching on this text this morning. In the turmoil and unpredictability of our times, we have to find what T S Eliot called "the still point of the turning world…"

For me that's my faith – "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever…" (Hebrews 13. 8)

With such faith comes the call to follow in the way of Christ, which must often mean a call to contradict the assumed life-goals, even idols, of our culture.

The drive to possess money and stuff, the lust for power without responsibility, the assumption that my self-interest has priority over the common good, the pride of thinking of others as less deserving, less entitled, and therefore of less value than me, I myself.

And yes, most of these are in blatant and naked view in the moral morass of current politics.

Just to be clear. When Christians say "Jesus is Lord", we are not celebrating love of power, but the power of love to redeem, transform and renew that which is lost, broken and hopeless.

“Let me invoke the ecological analogy. If we purchase food and other products whose processing or manufacture involves unethical use of resources or human labour, our participation in those systems is not ethically neutral.

If we boycott or protest unjust practices, we may not stop the practices, but we add to what may become a critical mass of resistance and, in however modest a way, support the change we hope for. This seems like fairly obvious reasoning.

What is less obvious is the extension of this reasoning to language practices. The analogy may carry more weight if we consider specifically what we all stand to lose if lies are tolerated. Lies that make their way into policy decisions, campaigns and marketing strategies erode the social contract that enables us all to count on what we’ve called professional ethics, business ethics, and the commitments that public servant make when they take oaths of office.”

Marilyn McEntyre, Caring for Words in a World of Lies, page 57

Let me start with a good story about customer service. I started to read Jurgen Moltmann seriously in the late 1970's. I used the SCM Study editions, those sturdy not quite paperback books were intended to survive heavy use and repeated reading. My volume of The Crucified God split in several places before I finished the first reading. No, I didn't bend it back, or try to flatten it on the desk. The glue had dried – it was a first edition paperback. These were the days long before Amazon and no quibble returns. 

I phoned the publisher (only landlines in those days!) in London and spoke with a helpful Services Manager. He apologised and promised to send a fresh copy there and then. It arrived later that week, by which time my original volume was reduced to a series of several chapter sized pamphlets. But what a book! It was during Lent and I was working through The Crucified God while preparing for a series of 5 Holy Week Services.

I had never encountered such powerful writing. Reading Moltmann was a form of extreme theological diving into waters of unknown depth, at times dark, and utterly exhilarating. Not an easy read, how could it be with such a title: The Crucified God.

The problem intrinsic to every christology is not merely the reference to the person called by the name of Jesus, but also the reference to his history, and within his history, to his death on the cross. All christological titles presumably express what faith receives, what love gives, and what one may hope. But the critical point for them comes when, faced with the 'double conclusion of the life of Jesus, they have to state what it means for the Christ, the Son of God, the Logos, the true man or the representative to have been crucified. (86)

For more than 40 years I've continued to read Moltmann, have used his books in teaching, and have gone back often to re-read, especially passages I have marked, and to which for me at least, intellect assents, and heart affirms. As a Christian and theologian, thinking the faith can never be an exercise of intellect unharnessed to personal experience of Jesus Christ – Moltmann exemplifies faith seeking understanding, that is, a way to love the crucified God with heart, mind, strength and all that makes us who we are.

The underlined words above, are underlined in my copy, still that SCM Study Edition which has indeed proved durable, as has the impact of that first reading. It has survived recurring reference and reading all that time, several house removals, multiple spells on the desk, and still hasn't split into pamphlets. A true study edition.

“Truth is elusive

Truth avoids institutional control.

Truth tugs at conventional syntax.

Truth hovers at the edge of the visual field.

Truth is relational.

Truth lives in the library, and also on the subway.

Truth is not two sided;; it is many sided.

Truth burrows in the body.

Truth flickers.

Truth comes on little cat’s feet, and down back alleys.

Truth doesn’t always test well.

Truth invites you back for another look.”

Marilyn McEntyre, Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, page 43

I learned many things I thought I might never need to know from Jack Duncan. Perhaps that isn't surprising, considering he was (by my maths) in his 40's and I was just started school. He was the farmer my dad worked for, as a dairyman.  From as early as aged 4 until I was about 7 or 8 I remember him as a kindly, slow talking and slow walking man.

He first sat me on a tractor seat when my feet couldn't reach the pedals – I learned amazing words like throttle, clutch, gear-stick. I was his golf ball retriever when he took a couple of golf clubs into a field and practised. He said it was OK to eat the peas that were growing with the barley in the field next to our cottage. He encouraged me to take some of the rich molehill soil just over the dyke at our cottage, for my dad to make potting compost (mixed with river gravel and leaf mould.

He and his wife Nancy took us to Ayr a couple of times each summer, to the beach, for ice cream, and the amazing experience of travelling in an early Austin Cambridge A55. We inherited every couple of weeks the comics that came into the house for their two children, my first discovery of that particular literary genre.

They were generous, kindly people who made life a bit easier for us. These reminiscences are sparked by a photo I took of a Cheviot sheep, one of a few hundred grazed for a few weeks locally. Jack Duncan taught me the names of several sheep; Blackface, Leicester, Scottish Dunface, and Cheviot – the one in the picture. 

Jack Duncan was a good shepherd. His dog was unimaginatively called Shep. and sometimes competed at the sheep dog trials down Ayrshire way. I remember in the evening he took me down to the meadow, and across the main rail line to Dumfries, to look over the sheep.

He was looking for any sheep that was limping, and Shep easily separated it and cornered it. Jack the good shepherd had a sharp pen knife, a wee box of powder and a stick of keel (now called marking fluid). Once treated, he would mark it, and go looking for the same sheep some days later, and if still limping it would be taken to the farm for the vet to treat.

So when I read the Johannine Jesus saying, "I am the good shepherd…the good shepherd looks after the sheep," I already have a stock image in my head of a slow talking, slow walking, kindly man with a bunnet on backwards, a couple of golf clubs, a clever sheepdog, and the wherewithal to deal with foot rot.

I know. It isn't a bible land Ladybird book picture – but it works for me.   

"Lord, have mercy. The sea is so vast, and my boat is so small."

When life seems too much – too complex, too scary, too unpredictable, and yes, too exhausting, I come back to this prayer. It's traditionally called the prayer of the Breton fishermen. 

It's a prayer for those who feel out of their depth. A cry of the heart when the waves keep coming and every one of them gets bigger. 

It may have come as a prayer of desperation, hope clinging to an old story of disciples in a storm, the sea of Galilee a frenzy of destructive forces. And Jesus asleep.

The photo was taken the other day, the sea calm, and a small fishing boat overtaking a platform service vessel, both heading for harbour and home.

Like the sea, long periods of life can be calm, navigable, predictable, and relatively safe. Then weather patterns change and the sea transforms into threat, and we rediscover our finitude, our limits, our humanity; we are reminded of what we can't do, what we don't know, and what we cannot control.

This brief one line prayer asks for mercy, but does not tell God what to do. At most it points out the obvious, the vast realities we face, and the limited resources at our disposal.

God already knows all that. But it is deeply human to cry out for help, for mercy, for something that pushes the balance of fear towards faith, despair towards hope, and transforms that sinking feeling into a sense of being held.

The Psalms are full of such one line prayers. Cries for mercy, recognition of risk and danger, words of complaint at how hard it is – and thanksgiving for a rescue still to come but already promised by the God of mercy.

Does life always turn out like that? Does what we dread never happen? The sea is indeed vast, and our boat exceedingly small. And I guess that's where faith becomes more than, not less than, certainty.

Trust grows out of, and into, our relationship with God, forming bonds of love, trust, hopefulness and purpose. God's mercy is not a guarantee against storms at sea, but of God's presence in the boat. 

"Lord, have mercy. The sea is so vast, and my boat is so small." Whatever we face each day, "the Love that moves the sun and other stars" is on our side.

"Here is love, vast as the ocean, loving-kindness as a flood…" The instincts of the translator are precise; mercy and loving-kindness are English translations of the Hebrew word for mercy, Hesed.

"Lord have mercy…" 

Now and again a moment and a place coincide. A photograph is a way of capturing the intersection of what we are thinking, and what we are seeing. 

Walking through campus on my way to a public lecture, I was still thinking of what I'd spent the last hour reading. Slow reading. The kind of reading that is a conversation with occasional interruptions, and the occasional significant silence.

I was reading an essay by my friend, and Doktorvater, Professor David Fergusson, "Kenosis and the Humility of God." Reading theology has become both lifelong discipline, and a way of loving the God of whom we think, to whom we pray, and whom we seek to serve. So reading theology is a form of prayer, the mind kneeling, the heart attuned to hear what James Denney called "the plunge of lead into fathomless depths."

Here's the two or three sentences I was mulling over as I walked:

"Can divine love be stripped of divine power without weakening its capacity? Paul's insight is that divine power is manifested in the foolishness of the cross, not that it is abandoned or lost in this event. If the fullness of God is here to be revealed, then kenosis, whatever else it is, cannot be construed as a divestment of divine identity in the incarnation. If Christ reigns from the tree, then he reigns." (Kenosis. The Self-Emptying of Christ in Scripture & Theology, eds. Paul T Nimmo, Keith L Johnson, Eerdmans, 2022, page 195)

"If Christ reigns from the tree, then he reigns." That was my thought as I walked down the brae and looked at the King's College Crown and Cross through the trees. Thinking and seeing coincided in a moment, not so much of intellectual clarity, as of spiritual acknowledgement.

Oh the thinking must go on, as must the praying. And the reminders, first, that worship is expressed in the form and content of our thought, and second, our best thinking is done on our knees if not always physically, then certainly intellectually. 

I've said it often now, my camera often becomes and enables reflection on the "sacrament of the present moment."