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I remember learning to swim in first year at secondary school. I don’t like chlorine, and I didn’t like taking my feet off the bottom. You never know, you might float towards the deep end, and I’ve never had long legs!

The PE teacher, who had previously played top flight football, was entirely unsympathetic, and he thought the most effective tone of encouragement was sarcasm and mockery. Even now, I rehearse what I might have said to him as an adult if I had met him in later life.

One thing he said though, which was true if only I could have believed it then, is that if you relax into the water, and breathe in, the natural buoyancy will keep you afloat. Eventually I discovered that rhythm of breathing and moving and away I went. I still don’t like chlorine, and swimming I can take or leave. But when I do go to the pool I enjoy lying on my back, floating. So you will see why it is I like ‘The Avowal’, a poem by Denise Levertov. Late in life she became a Christian, so she understands what we mean when we pray for the enabling grace of God:

As swimmers dare
to lie face to the sky
and water bears them;
as hawks rest upon air
and air sustains them,
so would I learn to attain
freefall, and float
into Creator Spirit’s deep embrace,
knowing no effort earns
that all-surrounding grace.  

What Levertov is teaching us, is what Paul wrote over and over again to the small, young Christian communities learning to swim in the deep water of a culture and society that was pagan and hostile to them. As the community of Christ we are borne by the buoyancy of the Spirit of God, held in the embrace of our Creator, and our lives are hid with Christ in God.

Trust and surrender are some of the most difficult, risky and rewarding experiences of our lives. By grace we are saved, through faith which is the gift of God. Faith is when we allow ourselves to be upheld by the God who will not let us fall. Faith is the risk of trusting God with all that matters most to us in our daily, sometimes messy human lives. Trusting faith isn’t some kind of special spiritual positive thinking. You can’t just work yourself up to believe and have faith. Levertov had read her Bible: “By grace you are saved through faith, that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.”

Faith is when we stop trying to prove we have it all under control, and receive the gift of God’s grace, the surrounding, buoyant presence and power of the living Christ. You don’t have to exhaust yourself proving what you’re worth to others; your value is index linked to the cross of Christ and to the Eternal Love which comes to us in the grace of Christ.

We don’t have to find the resources within ourselves to believe more, or have more or stronger faith, as if faith itself was a work that could save us. God’s grace is sufficient for your weakness, and is richer than all your debts. The grace of God in Christ is generous enough to outbid the claims of our neediness, and patient enough to outlast our most persistent fears.

When Levertov writes about all-surrounding grace, in the background are some of the most powerful words Paul ever wrote to struggling Christians. They are worth reading carefully, prayerfully and gratefully. They describe the grace that surrounds us, upholds us, guides us, and guarantees our ultimate safety in Christ:

But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. (Ephesians 2.4-10)

Years ago I had booked to go to a pastor’s conference at the St Ninian’s Conference centre in Crieff.  Sheila and I met there in 1970 so it’s a kind of special place. I led several annual Summer Missions in Crieff in the early 70’s with daily children’s meetings, sports days and open air singing. Crowds of children and parents as helpers spent two weeks of the school holidays doing all this in Macrosty Park.

In 1997 I had booked to spend several days at a conference with one of the finest men I’ve ever met. Not that I had met Eugene Peterson at that point. I had read most of what he had written about the work of being a pastor. His books have been and remain deeply formative of how I think and seek to live, work and preach as a Christian minister.

The week before the Conference Sheila’s mum died, and our family funeral arrangements coincided with the Conference. I couldn’t go, so I cancelled. I was travelling home to Aberdeen the day after the conference finished, so I telephoned St Ninians on the off chance I could speak for a minute or two to Eugene and say thank you for all I had learned from him. He came to the phone and said if I could drop by St Ninians he would be happy to meet, sit on a bench and talk for a while. This man was simply being the kind of person he wrote about; considerate, caring, being gladly inconvenienced, making a gift of time, listening, and happily enjoying the company of those who came his way in the Lord’s good time.

When he met we sat on the bench looking down across the tow towards the hills. He asked me to tell my story, told a little of his own, prayed with me and for our family, took me into the bookstall, bought one of his own books and wrote a lovely greeting inside. That’s the only time I met a man whose love for God and devotion to Jesus were a natural part of who he is and how he relates to people. We emailed a few times after that, and I still have and often use that book, Praying with the Psalms. Eugene died three years ago.

I tell you all this because what happened on that morning diversion to Crieff to meet Eugene Peterson, was nothing all that significant as human affairs and the big moments of history go. But make no mistake. what happened had its own special meaning in the economy of God, showing how God works through the quiet ministry of friendship. I met someone who walked as he talked, and in our sitting and talking together he embodied the welcome he wrote so much about, the welcome of God.

Every time I remember Eugene Peterson taking a phone call from someone he had never met, I remember a particular Bible verse: “Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.” (Rom 15.7) This man had just finished a three day conference with over a hundred pastors, and must have been tired and needing some peace. He could have passed a minute or two being polite on the phone, graciously accepting my words of thanks, and then get on with the day. But welcome was for him, a habit of the heart, his default disposition towards others, part of his calling to treat others as Christ had treated him throughout a long life of faith.

Which finally brings me to the point of this week’s pastoral letter, apart from the telling of a story that still vibrates with good memories of a Godly man who would be surprised, even embarrassed, to have this story told. Welcome of others is the pulse of pastoral ministry, and the heart of an authentic mission in Jesus’ name. Paul’s words at the end of Romans were not to the church leaders, but to the whole church. Us.

We are still some way away from life opening up into the freedoms and opportunities we knew before the pandemic. But as we begin to think about our future as a church community, that word “welcome” is a fundamental and essential descriptor of our Christian presence in our town. The glory of God is made known in the welcome we give; in the friendships we build, the words we share into others’ lives, the prayers we say for the help and health of our town, the ways we use our money, our premises and our gifts and skills in service of others, our willingness to shape our worship to the world we live in as ambassadors of Christ. All of this, and much more, is to welcome others as God in Christ has welcomed us.

As God leads us forward, we know the world has changed, and church cannot stay the same in a changing world. We could do worse than make Paul’s instruction our own habit of the heart towards all who come into our lives and our church: “Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.”

(This week's pastoral letter to our church folk in Montrose.) 

Reading the text of the prophet Nahum is an exercise in theology in the service of imagination and imagination in the service of theology. Yes it is a text of terror, a tour de force description of the defeat, fall and ultimate humiliation of Nineveh, the greatest imperial power of Nahum's times. Nahum reads like a series of taunt songs, strung together with poetic narrative and sparkling with metaphors and images of military manoeuvres, besieging strategies and punishing campaigns that overthrow and overwhelm the power base of the Assyrian Empire. All that is clear from even a first reading of Nahum.

Re-reading, and lingering over the text, the reader is drawn into the emotional payload delivered by Nahum's words. The dialectic between theology and imagination electrifies the text which at times is shocking in its explicit celebration and gloating at the humiliation and destruction of the rhetorical target – Nineveh. That city was the seat of Assyrian power, and the symbol of a power-base unimaginably strong, durable and indestructible. Except that Nahum imagines the unimaginable, and portrays the supposedly impregnable imperial city being easily invaded, violated, humiliated and utterly dismantled as a political entity.

The devastating truth that shatters the walls and foundations of this Empire and each Empire is stated by God: "I am against you, declares the Lord Almighty." (Nahum 3.5) There follows one of the most controversial and coarse passages in the entire Hebrew Bible. Many commentators feel the need to become apologists for the crudity, misogyny and dangerously abusive imagery of 3.1-7. I have every sympathy with them. Nahum's choice of imagery and words are shocking in the intensity of the mockery, cruelty and humiliation that is heaped on a city that specialised in the mockery, cruelty and humiliation of other peoples they had conquered, plundered and slaughtered. Now the boot is on the other foot, and it is Nineveh's neck it stands on.  

But how else to confront the hopelessness of those whose horizons of hope have long been shut down? How else but by a re-educated imagination can a prophet create a new and vocal defiance of the very hopelessness that would guarantee permanent subjugation? How else conquer the powerlessness of those facing intolerable abuse?

Much of Nahum brings comfort to Judah by portraying a different reality in which Assyria is on the receiving end of what it had handed out to others for centuries – irresistible power, remorseless cruelty, and the destructive energy of an enemy who could punish with impunity. What we have here is a strategy for defiance of that hopelessness that Empires always strive to instil. "Resistance is futile" has been the strap line of the earth's empires long before the Borg cast its shadow across the crew of the USS Enterprise!

The flashing images in chapter 2.1-4, of military power invading the invader, are there to help people witness the devastation of the powers that enslaved them and whom they had thought invincible. As I have read through Nahum, worked through this terrible and terrifying text, playing at the back of my mind has been the theological tension which is first clearly stated, and then woven throughout the entire book. "The Lord is slow to anger but will not leave the guilty unpunished. The Lord is a jealous and avenging God but the Lord is good, a refuge in times of trouble. He cares for those who trust in him, but with an overwhelming flood he will make an end of Nineveh."

Chapter 1.2-7 weaves these statements into the one fabric. This is the God who is against Nineveh, and yet promises to restore the splendour of Jacob. The prophet Nahum would laugh to scorn as sentimental, self-indulgent, anthropocentric and theologically one-sided, an emphasis on God's steadfast love that ignores the realities of human suffering, the evils of the powerful, and the blatant signals of defiance to all that God purposes for created and human life. No. God is not mocked, And yes. The Lord will not leave the guilty unpunished.  

In the end this is a book about divine judgement. The three chapters are almost entirely devoted to an Empire getting its comeuppance. Nothing about repentance, mercy or forgiveness for Nineveh. They have met their nemesis, the mirror image of their own ways of being. Kingdoms may rise and fall but the word of the Lord endures forevermore – and that word to the complacently powerful, and to those who flourish on the suffering they inflict on others, is unequivocal, uncompromising and swiftly approaching judgement.   

Myanmar. Uyghur. Yemen. Name your oppressed people of choice. Human history is replete with atrocity, oppressive policies, military suppression, and violent discrimination. Ask how the text of Nahum would read to such peoples faced with endless trauma, long drained of hope, many never having lived free of fear. Words that imagine the defeat of your worst enemy are hard to find and formulate. But words that take the imagination in hand and compel us to think the unthinkable, conceive inconceivable possibilities, teach us to say again after ages of silence, but what if – such words must have some substance, some hold on reality, but also a capacity to reframe how we think of that reality. 

I think that is one way of taking Nahum seriously as a text for today. For Nahum, God is not mocked – and every time people and peoples made in God's image are brutalised by the powers that happen to be in those moments of history, those powers mock God. And Nahum will have none of it. He brings a theology of God's judgement into the service of imaginations long trained to operate in the interests of the Empire. But the Empire, whatever imperial power it is, Assyrian or Babylonian, Persian or Greek, Roman or British, and whether in our own times the militarised nations inflicting untold suffering on other, such powers that be are not unaccountable.

That is Nahum's message. To those who inflict suffering on the innocent and powerless – "I am against you says the Lord Almighty." To those whose trust is in militarism, materialist consumerism, and / or economic leverage against others, and whose political shenanigans make life Hell for other people – "I am against you says the Lord Almighty." To those who create and sustain institutions of discrimination, who form and inhabit systems of oppression of others, whose ruthless pursuit of profit, gain, power and influence ignore the cost to others who are simply ground under the wheels of the global machine – "I am against you says the Lord Almighty." This is not so much a text of terror, but a text for building resilience in the hopeless, and hope in the despairing.

No, Nahum is not a comfortable guest to have in your head. Reading him is like – well, I remember on an early holiday in Austria, the hotel manageress, a former Olympic downhill skier, took us up the hill for early breakfast. She came round with a glass of Schnapps for everyone, and insisted, (and I guessed it might be futile to resist) she insisted we drink it down in one large gulp. I did – and my head felt as if fireworks had been set off inside, and tears ran down my face. Reading Nahum is like that! 

I'll come back to Nahum one more time when I've thought some more. It still sits uncomfortably alongside what we have come to know of God in Christ, reconciling the world to himself. Which doesn't make Nahum wrong or his message contradicted. But it is a reminder that the Bible is a complex and complicated collection of texts in which diversity and argument are part of the challenge as we try to makes sense of unfamiliar ancient words and how they might apply to the more familiar world in which we try to live wisely and obediently in the light of Christ, the Light of the World.       

Whether it's the first or one hundredth reading of Nahum, it's hard to make a constructive alignment between that prophet of vengeance and violence, and the Sermon on the Mount. And they both sit between the covers of the Bible. I've never liked Nahum. To be honest, I've never studied this angry prophet with anything like the care and humility that I bring to Isaiah, Amos and Micah; even Ezekiel and Jeremiah seem to have more to offer than rage and poetic genius dedicated to gloating.

So, recently I have read Nahum again, and again…This time I'm trying to listen to what he says and pay attention to what he writes. Listening to the text gets harder as you get older, I find! Because familiarity breeds assumptions, often unexamined assumptions. For example, having read it those first times, I concluded it was about vengeance, and vengefulness as a settled disposition is a sub-Christian and unethical mindset. Consequently, it seemed like a good hermeneutical move to put this prophecy into quarantine where it can't infect essential Christian values of peace-making, forgiveness, and love of enemy.

Which is the old trick of setting the Old Testament God against the New Testament revelation of God in Christ, and thereby avoiding the discomfort and theological potency of competing voices within the Bible. But as I've read Nahum recently, I've also re-read another prophet for whom I have much more time – Jonah. Mind you, Jonah too was out for vengeance, so much so that he managed to be offended by God's mercy and opposed to God's steadfast and faithful love in forgiving those who repent. 

What makes Jonah more palatable is that vengefulness, the desire to see retribution and justice through punishment, is finally and at the last moment thwarted by God's steadfast refusal to go back on his promise of forgiveness to those who truly repent. And, of course, both Nahum and Jonah have Nineveh in their sights. For those who suffered under the excessive cruelty and merciless power of Nineveh, that city was the focus of their greatest fears and most intense hatred. Those who suffered most at Nineveh's hands prayed to see it destroyed, dreamed of witnessing its violation and humiliation, and wanted to gloat over the impotence of mighty Nineveh before the unstoppable judgement of Israel's Almighty omnipotent God.

That longing for a changed world where the oppressor is oppressed, where the practitioners of cruelty experience some of the torture and trauma of the victims, is a deeply human form of psychological survival. In recent years trauma studies have begun to be used as an hermeneutical key to unlock the nature and motivation behind texts of terror, trauma, lament, grief and rage. The application of trauma studies to Lamentations and Jeremiah has opened up new ways of reading lament and texts of judgement as they issued from the experiences of the Exile, and the people's lived horror of suffering, loss, forced migration, cultural dislocation, and religious failure and humiliation.

Against such a background, and allowing for Nahum being written before the final Fall of Jerusalem, the end of the Judaean state in 587BCE and subsequent Babylonian exile of the people, this too is a text written out of trauma and the threat to the religious survival of a people. The book is unabashed in its language. The poetic skill of Nahum is in full flow, using a conveyor belt of fear-inspiring metaphors and a pervasive tone of joyous gloating over Nineveh getting its come-uppance with a vengeance! There is mockery and relief, rage and laughter, at long-remembered grievances and concentrated hatred of Assyria for unforgivable atrocities. The fall of Nineveh in 612 BCE was cause for unrestrained celebration by Assyria's conquered vassal states. The dam that had held back hatred and grief, rage and despair, collapsed under the weight of historical circumstance engineered by the God of Israel, vindicating the religious faith of an entire people disillusioned by the long nightmare that was Nineveh. But even in their worst nightmares, they had refused to disaffiliate from the Covenant God. No wonder what we get in this short prophetic book is Nahum unplugged.

But what to do with such a text of terror aimed at enemies who deserve all they get? How as a 21st Century Christian do I read Nahum and find some valid and viable application to where our world now stands? Why do we feel it necessary to harmonise the diversity of voices and biblical theologies that form our canon of Scripture? Is there an important place for those biblical voices that cry out in complaint and express longing for freedom, justice and the right to live without fear of oppression, suffering and the whim of the powerful? If so, have we any right to sanitise, or quarantine those voices born out of pain and sufferings borne, that many of us will never know in our own so limited and protected experience of life in a world broken, and we hope not beyond repair.

Over the next few weeks I'll try to work some of that out, and report back here when there's more to say.   

Now here's a thing. Some time last year I went looking for this wee book. It's a special little thing, fewer than 70 small pages, less than 30 pages. But I've read it and re-read it. I know some of the poems by heart. But could I find it?

Earlier this year I renovated the study and took every book out of it, and still no sign of Levertov's little gem of a book.

Then, just over a week ago I went to the University Library for the first time in over a year. I took out my wee satchel thing I use for such visits, and in one of the zip pockets there was my wee book!
Today looking for something else by Levertov there are copies of this 70 page book for £41.83 on Amazon – glad I found my copy!

Here is one of her finest poems from the volume:

For the New Year, 1981

by Denise Levertov

I have a small grain of hope–

one small crystal that gleams
clear colours out of transparency.

I need more.

I break off a fragment
to send to you.

Please take
this grain of a grain of hope
so that mine won’t shrink.

Please share your fragment
so that yours will grow.

Only so, by division,
will hope increase,

like a clump of irises, which will cease to flower
unless you distribute
the clustered roots, unlikely source–
clumsy and earth-covered–
of grace. 

When I first gave my life to Christ, at the age of 16, I was given money to buy a Bible. I went on the 240 Bus from Lanark to Glasgow, and found my way to Pickering and Inglis, in those days the leading Christian bookshop in Scotland. I chose one in soft black leather and with a zip. The sight of a long haired teenager in jeans and a leather jacket, reading a shiny new black Bible sitting in the top front seat of a double decker bus, on a Saturday afternoon probably bemused some of the other passengers. For the next year or two I read that Bible till it began to wear through, the spine split and the zip became detached. I wish I had kept it.  

A month or two after buying my first Bible, I was at the Filey Christian Convention on the Yorkshire coast, a huge annual gathering of Christians at the Butlin’s Holiday Camp. This was Spring Harvest for families in the 1960's. They had books. Oh they had books, a huge tent filled with tables, groaning under the weight of Christian books by the thousand. I bought a book – the first of so many! It was my first Bible study book, and it introduced me to the joy and the wonder, and the formative discipline of Bible study as a form of Bible reading. The book I bought was Only One Way. The Message of Galatians, by John R W Stott. Soon after, I also bought his Tyndale commentary on the Epistles of John. These are two parts of the Bible I have loved and studied ever since, and that’s now a long time!  

Let’s stay with Galatians. There are verses in this passionate and sometimes angry letter of Paul that are now part of the way I think. Isn’t that true of each of us? Aren’t there one or two verses of Scripture that we know have changed us, have made us think of God differently, that strengthen us when life has been hard to get through, and they live somewhere deep inside and are the bread of life to us? They are just like the hymn says:

Lord, for that word, the word of life which fires us,

   speaks to our hearts and sets our souls ablaze,

teaches and trains, rebukes us and inspires us,

   Lord of the word, receive your people's praise.

Galatians 2.21 is such a verse. Early on I learned this verse by heart, and it remains one of the words of God that pulls me back to Christ as the centre of my life. “I am crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (Galatians 2.20)  At times when it is hard to know what to pray, or how to thank God for the grace that saves, just saying these words in the presence of God is itself a prayer of thanksgiving, confession, and renewal of love. As the hymn says, it’s a “word of life which fires us, speaks to our hearts and sets our hearts ablaze.”

That Bible study book written by John Stott was the start of a long education for me, culminating 25 years later in the publication of a book with a chapter exploring the spirituality of John Stott! But further education is for every Christian. Lifelong learning through Bible study is open to all of us, and is a journey to which every follower of Jesus is called. This isn’t a course for those who can produce qualifications and academic credentials to gain admission. We are saved by grace through faith which is the gift of God. What qualifies us for a lifetime course in reading and praying and living Scripture, is the call of God. What enables us is the grace of God, and the one who teaches us is the Spirit of God. The set text is the Bible whether a black leather one surrounded by a zip, (can you still get these?), a brick sized study Bible, or one of the multiple available Bible Apps.

So a final verse from Galatians that has been remembered and internalised as a reminder of what Christian living is about. “Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. (Galatians 5.25) For years now, Strictly Come Dancing has been a highlight for those who are into such reality shows. What makes for a good performance is timing, movement in unison, anticipation of the moves, mutual understanding, shared enthusiasm, familiarity with the music and rhythm, and practice; lots and lots of practice. If we keep in step with the Spirit, and perform the music of Scripture with practised precision, then we become like those Paul described as those who live by the Spirit, and receive the promise: “The one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.” (Galatians 5.8) And it all started with a Bible, and a paperback commentary on Galatians, written by a writer to whom my personal debt remains on the books.

(The tapestry above was designed and worked for a friend for whom it is an important theological image.)