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For a long time now I have collected images of the cross as and when I see them. It is one of the perplexing but crucial realities about being a Christian that the cross is central to Christian discipleship and devotion, and an essential focus of Christian theology.

After all Jesus defined discipleship as taking up the cross and following him, and Paul, Jesus' greatest interpreter, declared the paradox, "I am crucified with Christ, I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me…"

During this Holy Week I would like to offer a brief reflection on one or other of the images of the cross that sheds some light and insight into the dark recesses of the greatest mystery of our faith. 

This is an olive wood, hand-held cross that sits on my desk. It was given to me by a friend at a time when life was hard and prayer was even harder. We all have times, episodes, events in our lives when we suffer, when our inner resources are dangerously depleted, the heart is sad and the mind struggles to think clearly. More than that. Without ever trivialising the passion of Christ, or suggesting our suffering compares with that of the Crucified Christ, nevertheless, there are times when it feels as if we are sharing the sufferings of Christ. 

This small piece of wood is shaped and smoothed to be held on to. It is something tangible, the hand and therefore the body responding to the cruciform shape of wood so that it becomes a wordless prayer; or at least wordless until the words eventually come. In that sense holding and clutching a few ounces of olive wood becomes an act of sacramental grace, when a created object reminds us of God, the Creative Subject of our lives and life of the world.

On this Monday of Holy Week, I hold this cross as I read the updated news on the war in Ukraine. Sometimes I have words, but they never seem adequate, though I pray they are at least honest. The suffering of God in Christ is played out through the anguish and cruelties of human conflict, so perhaps my prayers are a way of aligning my heart with that of the God who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. Perhaps that is the true meaning of intercession, to love the world in all its brokenness.

Perhaps too, Christian theology has to recover a deeper, more searching, and more honest doctrine of sin and evil. I am not aware of a recent major theological work that compares to Emil Brunner's Man in Revolt, or Reinhold Niebuhr's Nature and Destiny of Man, both written in contexts of gathering conflict, ideological confrontations, and major threats to human peace and justice.

So I pray, I hold my cross and I imagine the cries of those who are suffering and bereaved, made homeless and brutalised by acts of human aggression, cruelty and, yes let's name it, sin. And this Monday of Holy Week, holding this cross, I ponder the meaning of the coming Good Friday. Like the angels in the Palm Sunday hymn, it may be that our sadness speaks our prayers more truly than words that for all our trying, fail to grasp the depths of human suffering and Love Divine: 

Ride on, ride on in majesty!
The angel armies of the sky
look down with sad and wond'ring eyes
to see th'approaching sacrifice. 

 

I have a letter, now 47 years old, written by an elderly widow, in which the first words are, "Dear Pastor, while I’m waiting for the tatties to boil”. She was writing to me on Sunday after the morning service to encourage her minister. At the end of it she mentions a couple of folk in the church with equal appreciation and gratitude to God.

I mention this because I want to recommend that you read part of a letter that was written to a church made up of all kinds of folk, some of them I guess not unlike Mrs Todd, the elderly saint who made it her mission to encourage the minister.

Romans chapter 16.1-17 is a long list of greetings from Paul to various friends, colleagues and other Christians whose presence in his life had been blessing, for him and in the life of the Church in Rome.

Here’s some of Paul’s reasons for thanking God for some of his fellow Christians. “They risked their lives for me.” “My dear friend Epenetus who was the first convert to Christ in Asia.” “My relatives who have been in prison with me.” “Greet Ampliatus, whom I love in the Lord.” “Greet those women who work hard in the Lord.” Then he greets Rufus, “chosen in the Lord, and his mother, who has been a mother to me too.” And so on.

Read it for yourself. Seventeen times Paul says Greet… the church…my dear friend…our fellow workers…all the saints. You know how at a vote of thanks there’s always the worry that someone will be missed out and be offended? No such problems with Paul. He’s on a thanksgiving roll. The word he uses, “Greet”, means to warmly welcome, to say hello and wish someone well. It also means in this letter pass on my good wishes, remind them of me and my affection for them. In fact he finishes the list with “Greet one another with a holy kiss.”

What is very clear from this catalogue of friendships and affection is that Christian fellowship runs deep, and the love of God is a powerful current that runs through the Body of Christ. There’s a lot of heart searching going on about how local churches, churches like ourselves, rebuild and recover their impetus, energy and vision after all the disruptions during the pandemic. And there’s no doubt a lot of thinking, praying, talking, praying, deciding and praying will have to be done!

But there’s something that hasn’t changed, and shouldn’t change. Two things actually. Paul mentions them in this letter to the Romans. “God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit whom he has given us.” (Romans 5.5) We love because God first loved us – not only so, but the Holy Spirit is God’s gift to us, to live in our hearts and to inhabit and guide the church opf Jesus, wherever it is locally expressed.

So yes, let’s think and plan and pray and seek to discern the mind of Christ as in all our churches  we look to our future together. But we do so as those transformed by the outpouring of God’s love and the gift of God’s Spirit. Two things – (1) God’s love poured into our hearts, and (2) the Holy Spirit, the Gift that keeps on giving, the Giving Gift of God, the Giver of Gifts to the people of God.

God’s love for us, God’s love in us and flowing through us is the great presupposition of Christian fellowship in any and every church seeking to be faithful to Jesus. In the Body of Christ, our love for each other presupposes God’s love poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit and overflowing in love, joy and hopefulness for our life together. That’s one great presupposition – and it changes everything. Charles Wesley gave us the exact words for our prayer:

O Thou who camest from above, the pure celestial fire to impart.

Kindle a flame of sacred love on the mean altar of my heart.

Jesus confirm my heart’s desire to work, and speak, and think for Thee;

Still let me guard the holy fire and still stir up thy gift in me.

 

Over the past two months or so I've been working away on the new tapestry. The idea came from a reading from the Book of Revelation, chapter 21.9-27. I knew roughly what I wanted to do, but like a number of previous projects, I tried to listen to the text and find ways of giving image, form and colour to what is a remarkably precise description of the Holy City.

The angel with a measuring rod lays out the geometric contours of a celestial cube, a city of inconceivable dimensions. But this is Heaven, so mathematics comes into conversation with eschatology, geometry is informed by theology, and the architect is drawing up a blueprint for a city where there will be inhabitants "from every tribe and language and people and nation."

Throughout John's Revelation the figure of the Lamb is central, enthroned, the focus of worship and the guarantor of the victory of God. So John sees, and says in a pivotal passage,

"I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb is its temple. The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is its lamp. The nations will walk by its light and the kings of the earth will bring their treasures into it" (19.22.3-5 

So I started at the centre and worked out. I decided to use three basic geometric shapes; the square, the triangle and the circle. The full central panel is done in tent stitch allowing the mixing and detail of colours. The centre of the City is represented by the small and intermediate squares. Beyond them are the 12 large triangles, which represent the 12 foundation stones of the city walls. Each is the colour of one of the precious stones described in 19.19-20.

The large square is superimposed on a circle, representing a universe filled with the glory of God, emanating from the centre of the Holy City. Once the basic outline was worked came the tricky part of embroidering with metal threads, – copper, silver and gold. These are notoriously difficult to work without them breaking, snagging or getting into a fankle on the underside of the canvas.

I chose to use them because the entire descriptive passage is about a city the glitters and glistens and that is an integrated layout with streets of gold, and everything converging on the centre. Like a gold and silver maze, these threads can be followed from the edges, through the circle, triangles and squares to the small central panel. 

Based on the descriptions of the Lamb in Revelation 5.6 and 12, and the reference here in ch.19.22 and 23 I opted for a small cross, from which everything begins and towards which everything returns. The metal threads emanate in all four directions from the centre of the cross, with the effect of making the entire tapestry crucicentric, the cross emphasised not by its size, but by the outward movement of increasingly complex geometric connections.

While doing all of this, every day I read the passage, and often when working it I listened to certain pieces of music including the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir, "Worthy is the Lamb", various versions of "The Holy City," Jessye Norman "Sanctus" by Gounod, Handel's Hallelujah Chorus, Andrea Bocelli "The Lord's Prayer", Bonhoeffer's "Von guten Mächten" and a variety of other music from Mozart's Laudate Dominum to a big sing version of Crown Him with Many Crowns!

I read commentaries on the passage, did my own exegesis of the text, and was glad that some of them were as puzzled as me about what colour those blessed precious foundation stones would have been! I doubt if any one visual representation can do justice to such a multi-layered text, but it seemed important to make some attempt to visualise, however one dimensionally, the impossibly beautiful vision of God's reconciliation of all things in Christ. Worthy is the Lamb! 

This is now the seventh tapestry I have completed based on a biblical text, and intentionally using the practice of contemplative tapestry work. It's a form of visual exegesis, each one an engagement with the text at a serious level of scholarly study, but also with imaginative freedom nurtured by music, prayer and seeking to inhabit the text. For myself, it is a form of sacrament, a textured and tactile expression of something much deeper than the pattern, the colours and the action itself. By such a process of inhabiting the text, eventually and perhaps, there is a sense that the text is inhabiting me.   

 

God is love. An entire creed condensed into a phrase. In the age before sound-bytes one of Jesus' closest followers was writing letters littered with sound bytes. God is love. God is light. God is spirit. The First Letter of John has been a deep well of water to which I return regularly for inner refreshment, restored faith, re-energised devotion, and no nonsense reminders of what it is I'm saying when I use the words God is love.

Autobiography first. Not long after my conversion I was thirsty for knowledge, not knowing what I needed to know. I was pointed to the then premier Christian Bookshop in Scotland, Pickering and Inglis in Glasgow. For reasons now forgotten, I picked up the Tyndale Commentary on The Epistles of John, by John Stott, and bought it, my first purchased commentary, and the start of a lifetime's immersion in exegesis as devotion.

Ten years later in my first pastorate I was preaching through John's Letter. My companions were John Stott, Robert Law's quite outstanding The Tests of Life (1909), and the just published Epistles of John in the prestigious NICNT series by Howard Marshall. My memory is the congregation appreciated, sometimes perhaps affectionately tolerated, my attempts at communicating the passionate confession and defensive polemic of an apostle whose entire core was energised by the eternal coincidence of Divine love and human response – "we love because He first loved us", and in an older translation, "Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us."

1982 saw the publication of Raymond Brown's ridiculously massive commentary in the Anchor Series, 800+ pages on a letter of 2000 words. It's brilliant, exhaustive and exhausting to use, but crammed with information and deep scholarship. Names like Schnackenburg, Brown, Smalley, Lieu, Youngblood and many other mid level commentaries, demonstrate a diversity of theories and interpretive options.

I've kept up with much of that scholarship, learned new ways of reading and understanding John, and had to think and rethink again. But what remains constant is that urgent voice arguing and commending, expounding and defending, explaining and contradicting, reassuring the faithful and condemning those who mess with the heads of "his little children."

The relevance of my own journey with John, for me at least, is the attractiveness of his mixture of passion and precision – passionate love for Christ because in Him we see the passion of God. In words like these:

"God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another." (4.9-11)

The love of God is both centre and circumference in my spirituality and theology, and therefore in my preaching and understanding of the motives and energies of pastoral care. The letter of John runs like a continuous thread through the story of my life and how I've tried to live it as a Christian, a minister and a human being called to live responsibly and responsively before God. This text is a vocal, persistent and penetrating critic of my failures in the Tests of Life. But it keeps me honest, it keeps me wanting to be more faithful, and it keeps me hopeful.

For John there are unbreakable links between being loved by God, loving God in response, and proving that love by loving others. You can't say you love God if you hate your brother – not shouldn't, can't! The commentary by Robert Law I mentioned earlier says it in the title: John's letter provides the Tests of Life, the criteria by which we can claim to be Christian. John doesn't do compromise or exception clauses. John delivers an ultimatum like Jack Reacher, perhaps without the physical intimidation! Love! You're loved by God who is love. So love in the same way, to the same extent, to the same people. That's how it works. God loves you, you love others. Give what you get. Freely you received, freely give.  

Oh yes, John has a lot to say about sin, confession, cleansing and being made righteous. But the test of righteousness is love. And yes, John insists that a Christian is someone who confesses that in Jesus the fullness of God's love is revealed, but the test of such confession is love in practice, that is, the same love of God revealed in Jesus is to be evident in those who confess they have experienced and live by the love of God. 

At this stage of my life, half a century on from my first reading of Stott on I John, I'm ready to try to preach the message of 1 John again. Maybe five sermons, core samples of a text that really ought to upset us as much as uplift us; that is, if we can be honest before God and confess the sin of not loving. And if we can seek again the inner renewal of the heart that comes from opening ourselves to the love that opens us up in vulnerable, humble and determined love of others.

Meantime here's John the pastor, who manages to be both compassionate and uncompromising: 

This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. If anyone has material possessions and sees a brother or sister in need but has no pity on them, how can the love of God be in that person? Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth.

    

This was for the Aberdeen Press and Journal for last Saturday 12 March. Nothing in the current world news requires it to be edited or changed.

Saturday Sermon 

With saturation news coverage from all directions it’s impossible to avoid the hard thoughts and distressing images that war brings. Why the wicked prosper, or how it comes about that one man can command an army and threaten world peace. Far less can I understand the broken hearts of mothers shielding their children from missiles, with no one able to stop the bombardment; or figure out how it’s possible to bring about a peace which is more than the surrender and oppression of an entire people, culture and nation.

What I do see, clearly and unwaveringly, is God’s call to us to care for the broken, and to share the burdens of suffering, to give generously to purchase and procure food, medicine, clothes and shelter. And yes, to pray without ceasing for peace, and the justice and righteousness that alone makes peace possible.

In the face of suffering on a scale beyond our experience and imagining, it seems trivial to talk about what we are giving up for Lent. So instead, let Isaiah the Prophet readjust our ideas of what matters, and what matters most.

“Is not this the fast I have chosen, to loosen the chains of injustice, and untie the cords of the yoke….is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the wanderer with shelter.” (Isaiah 58. 6-7) These are the values of the Kingdom of God, the moral landmarks of the Christian church. These are the key objectives of our praying, giving, protesting and active discipleship as followers of Jesus. This isn’t about what we give up, it’s about what we give – to others.

That is what we pray for in those words that now need to be hoped and lived, “Your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven…” I know. It’s hard to even imagine something we can actually DO that will end the brutality and danger of war. But don’t underestimate the power of the prayers of millions, the moral force of courageous acts of protest, and the strategic value of financial kindness.

Someone defined charity as “reading statistics with compassion.” Refugees, millions of people, are being processed. The statistics make grim reading. Isaiah tells us the humane ways and human values that are evidence that we read statistics with compassion, and answering actions.

 

Some Afterthoughts.

 

Today a good friend told me he and his daughter Charlotte designed a cookie cutter in the shape of a map of Ukraine. Charlotte who came up with the idea is happy for me to tell the story, and sent a couple of pictures. Cookies were baked and iced with blue and yellow icing for the flag of Ukraine. Sometimes it's the young who have the sharpest eyes and the imagination to dream of making the kind of difference Isaiah dreamed about too. 

The cookies are being sold by the church and in the community. The cutters can be downloaded for 3D printing at this link for as little as 50pence! the link is here, just click

All proceeds going to the European Baptist Federation Appeal which delivers aid direct to refugees on the Polish-Ukrainian border and other immediately responsive locations.

Charlotte's dad (who is also quite clever) told me "our cookie cutter was downloaded by someone in Lviv yesterday." In case you don't know, Lviv is one of the cities currently under missile and artillery attack. And someone is baking cookies in the shape of their country. Just think about that. 

“Is not this the fast I have chosen, to loosen the chains of injustice, and untie the cords of the yoke….is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the wanderer with shelter.” (Isaiah 58. 6-7)

Isaiah didn't say anything about cookie cutters. He left that to the imagination of those who look for ways of living his words!

 

Recently I wrote this Lectionary Reflection for the online website Good Faith Media over here

The tapestry is an original design of my own based on Isaianic texts about streams in the desert and the desert blossoming. 

“I sing in the Shadow of Your Wings…” Psalm 63:1-8

This Psalm is not for the nonchalant. It vibrates with emotional intensity and assumed intimacy. Body and soul, the whole person is defined at least for this moment, by longing for the felt nearness and accompanying assurance of God. Thirst for God and prolonged longing for God is experienced as the persisting presence of an absence. As parched land languishes for want of water, so body and soul suffer the want of the presence of God. There are parched episodes in every life, miles of the journey when we thirst for rain, times of emotional exhaustion and bone weariness that make prayer seem a waste of time.

These verses, and the images of this Psalm inspired a hymn that anticipates how to survive the desert, and emerge from the wilderness.

Beneath the cross of Jesus I fain would take my stand;

The shadow of a mighty rock within a weary land.

A home within the wilderness, a rest upon the way

From the burning of the noontide heat and the burdens of the day.

That beautiful fable, The Little Prince, is a story of a pilot whose plane crashed in the desert. One of the many wise sentences in this slim masterpiece has found its way into many an anthology: “What makes the desert beautiful is that somewhere it hides a well.” The Psalmist knows this.

Actually so did the apostle Paul, making one of his boldest rhetorical moves. This from another of our lectionary passages about God’s provision for the children of Israel in the wilderness: “They drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.” (I Cor.10.3-4) 

Whether a subterranean well, or a mobile rock doubling as a fountain, the promise of refreshment and recovery are woven throughout these 8 verses. The spiritual psychology is sound. First remember, think back, and recall God’s goodness and mercy that has followed you all the days of your life. (v2) Second, take hold of that covenant word love, and speak that steadfast, faithful love that can be trusted whatever. That love of God is better than life because it makes life possible and alone guarantees life’s meaning, purpose and fulfilment. (v3) Third, praise God every day into the future, because that future is safe and enfolded in purposive love and sustaining mercy. Praise is an act of faith, anticipating blessing going forward because born of past blessing (v4)

The result of remembering God, speaking God’s faithful love, and praising God for the future is summarised in v5. Lips that were parched will sing God’s praise, and a soul hungry for God will be “satisfied with the richest of foods”. (5)

Faith is much more than a grim hanging on when life seems barren, and God far away. This Psalm is defiant of despair. It resonates with the trustful optimism of one who knows, just knows, that somewhere, beneath the desert, is a well. And if that sounds like a miracle, you’re on the right track. Because wherever we are in the wilderness, and however weary, a spiritual rock accompanies us, and that Rock is Christ.

Then the Psalm moves from the desert to the safety and comfort of bed! This time the Psalmist isn’t tossing and turning, anxious and restless. When I’m awake “I remember you, I think of you through the watches of the night.” We’re back to the importance of memory, the recalling of our story, the restorative power of trustful optimism; trustful because God has proved faithful and God keeps his promises.

For years that remarkable Christian and United Nations diplomat, Dag Hammarskjold, kept a notebook by his bed, in which he noted thoughts of deep spiritual honesty and wise counsel. My guess is he knew the wisdom of Psalm 63 when he wrote this brief prayer: “For all that has been, thank you. For all that is to be, Yes!”

Such words presuppose levels of confidence that must find their energy somewhere. “You are My help. I sing in the shadow of your wings.” Is that mothering image of the eagle’s wings, or the gathering close of a mother hen, or perhaps the wings of the cherubim on the altar in the sanctuary? No need to choose. It is an image of protective care and dependable safety.

The Psalmist settles down, and as we read and pray his words, so do we. Our soul clings to God, we are held in the strong right hand of God. There are desert journeys, wilderness wanderings, times of weariness and thirst, experiences that bring us to our wits end. But note where this Psalm starts – verse 1 naturally enough! “O God, you are my God.” This Psalm can be distilled to the lines of another hymn:

“O Love, that wilt not let me go, I rest my weary soul in Thee.” That’s for the desert, and those times of thirst and seeking that have to be lived through.

“I give Thee back the life I owe, that in Thine ocean depths its flow, may richer, fuller be. That’s for the bed, the place of rest and peace, when the soul is satisfied with good things, and we intentionally remember the goodness and mercy that has followed us all the days of our life, think of God who is our help, and sing praise in the shadow of God’s wings.

Wandering in someone else's garden (centre),

three degrees under a dazzling sun set in a sky blue sky,

inwardly sorrowful at the ugliness, cruelty and culpable intransigence

of those bent on stealing someone else's country, culture and identity,

I stopped, or rather was arrested,

by the miracle that is the possibility of such astonishing beauty,

and its power to argue back against the ugly nihilism of human hubris,

simply by announcing its loveliness,

without rancour, violence or noise,

as a vision of grace, a moment of gift,

a coaxing tug towards hope for a heart tempted,

however briefly, to despair.