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Matthew 5.7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”

Mercy is a soft word that makes tough demands. Mercy is more than empathy and compassion; it is a standard of behaviour, a habit of the heart,  a call to action for those who seek first the Kingdom of God. Generous giving, compassionate care, practical help, honest to goodness kindness, costly forgiveness, – these make up the barcode that when scanned, identifies true followers of Jesus.

The above is one of the brief Thought for the Day reflections I've been writing every day for our church community in Montrose. It is one of seven for next week, each based around one of the Beatitudes. As I tried to condense into around sixty words the meaning and demand of that word 'mercy', I was very aware it isn't a word we use much these days. Which made me wonder if it was an idea we hadn't much time for, in a culture fixated on value for money, addicted to buy one get one free, more in favour of quid pro quo than uncomplicated generosity looking for nothing back.

Could we ever envisage a society like ours able to act on a presumption of compassion, an inner moral instinct towards humane consideration of the needs of the other? Well, whether or not – what would it mean for me to be merciful, one individual, in a world of militarised interventions, displaced millions seeking home, consumer lifestyles built on exploitation, an asset stripped planet, racial hatreds and divisions, globalisation and the inequalities on which it is built?   

That kind of questioning thinking set me off looking with more care at the concept of mercy as an essential human quality and disposition. What becomes obvious as soon as you dig into the biblical texts is the that the originating source of mercy is God. Right at the beginning of his Gospel, Luke records the song of Zechariah praising God for becoming entangled in the eternally costly love affair with Israel and through his people, with his world.

And you, my child, will be called a prophet of the Most High;
    for you will go on before the Lord to prepare the way for him,
⁷⁷ to give his people the knowledge of salvation
    through the forgiveness of their sins,
⁷⁸ because of the tender mercy of our God,
    by which the rising sun will come to us from heaven
⁷⁹ to shine on those living in darkness
    and in the shadow of death,
to guide our feet into the path of peace.” 

Look at that line in verse 78 – "because of the tender mercy of our God." It all comes from and flows back to the tender mercy of God, a cycle of mercy. The motivation is mercy; the originating cause of the entire Christian story is mercy. The rising sun and the daylight rays of life shine in the dark places, and guide those 'in the shadow of death' back to God. Mercy is active, purposeful, determined and irrevocably committed to guide people from the shadow of death to the paths of peace. "You are the light of the world" said Jesus with more faith in the disciples than they had in him. 

Now. What happens if we use the Song of Zechariah as our definition of mercy as we go about the business of being merciful? This individual me in a globalised world, choking on its own overgrown web of connectivity, consumption, and competition – how do I become one of the blessed merciful? 

Old Zechariah gives this advice, don't only look for the light, be the light. Find ways to shine on those living in darkness and the shadow of death; ask yourself what we need to do to guide people into the path of peace. Mercy is the sunshine breaking through the shadows of death and germinating new seeds of hope that life can change direction into paths of peace. 

Blessed are the merciful, the light shiners, those who appear in other people's lives like the rising sun.

Blessed are the merciful, those willing to come alongside those whose lives are overshadowed and be the light of hope and new possibility

Blessed are the merciful, those whose patient kindness slowly opens doors closed by fear and anxiety

Blessed are the merciful, those whose faithful compassion can be depended upon when life is overshadowed by too many rejections

Blessed are the merciful, those unafraid of speaking the truth in love, and speaking love truthfully to lighten the darkness of those whose hollowed out by guilt, regret and self-condemnation

Blessed are the merciful, those who shine the light of hope and affirmation on people undermined by low self-esteem and diminished self-worth

Blessed are the merciful, those whose daylight openness and love befriend the soul haunted and made suspicious by old hurts that make new trust and new friendships seem impossible

Blessed are the merciful, those who see unjust and power based systems which humiliate people, diminish hope, oppress and exclude, and in the seeing bring to bear a moral light which can guide our feet into the paths of peace.

Mercy is not an option. Not if we want to be shown mercy. Jesus is not making a suggestion we might wish to consider. He is making a promise that has two possible outcomes. If you show mercy you will be shown mercy. If I live carelessly, without caring, complicit in a world of unmercy, I can have no complaints when I am the one who needs mercy and nobody cares, or listens, or comes.

Blessed are the merciful -perhaps at the start of each day, to repeat to myself as a daily imperative, "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful."

                                    – perhaps at the end of the day, indeed at the end of each day, that is a rigorous criterion by which to judge my performance as a human being, a follower of Jesus, one to whom great mercy has been shown. 

                     Sabbath Poems

                       1999     VI

We travelers, walking to the sun, can’t see
Ahead, but looking back the very light
That blinded us shows us the way we came,
Along which blessings now appear, risen
As if from sightlessness to sight, and we,
By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward
That blessed light that yet to us is dark.

I don't know another poem that speaks so audibly into that experience we all have of looking backwards in order to understand where we are now, how we came to be here, and the mystery of seeing blessing at times and in places we never thought them to be. The wearyingly repetitive cliche of 'the journey' has lost for many of us the freshness of that metaphor before it became banal. It is now overused, and a lazy way of talking about change, development, and even an excuse for making decisions and taking turnings that turn out to be wrong choices and missteps. 

But Berry is too allergic to cliche to reiterate the obvious. Instead, he takes us into his confidence from the start, with the inclusively knowing words, 'We travelers'. He has taken time to consider the meaning of travelling from 'here' when we are not sure where 'there' is. We 'can't see ahead', and in that phrase Berry touches a raw nerve. Often enough I've said, and heard said, "Just as well we don't know what's ahead of us.' There is an ancient wisdom in that recognition that life is lived in the now, and if we knew in detail what is coming it would inevitably skew our decisions, distort our choices, tempt us into hedging our bets and thus failing to live the life we have because we are so anxious to anticipate and even control, the life that is ahead. 

So we can't see ahead; but if we take time to stop and look backwards, we can see the road we have come, "Along which blessings now appear." It's that word now. Only when we stop and look back, and survey the scenery, and trace backwards from where we are to where we were, only then do we see what was there to be seen all the time. "Risen" always has a double entendre for people of Christian faith, whether or not Berry intended it. I think he did. The triple use of the word blessing, and the common trope of light / darkness as attributes of God, suggest Berry's own inner standpoint is trustful of the often unseen presence of God

"From sightlessness to sight", from shadow to light, blessings that went unnoticed 'now appear / risen.'

"and we,
By blessing brightly lit, keep going toward
That blessed light that yet to us is dark."

To stand at the edge of a forest, or pause on a mountain path, is the action of someone for whom travelling is more than movement from here to there. It is considered movement, the stopping is a required interlude in a reflective journey, and turns mere journey into attentive travelling on the alert for epiphany. The purposeful patience required in keeping going is sustained because we are "by blessing brightly lit', by a light that dazzles.

Every time I read this short poem it reminds me of much better known lines from Henry Vaughan which I assume Berry knows

“There is in God (some say) a deep but dazzling darkness.” 

And whether or not the allusion is intentional, Berry's poem is a developed paraphrase of Vaughan's speculative theology, acknowledging the cataphatic and apophatic tensions in Christian theological talk of God. Those tensions create a force field within which theology is wrought, seeking to articulate that which is revealed and that which is hidden, the gift of revelation and the divine reticence in mystery, the via positiva (light) and the via negativa (darkness).   

So we travel…by blessing brightly lit, looking back the way we came, along which blessings now appear, risen. 

For six decades Wendell Berry has been writing about citizenship. But citizenship with it widest most inclusive meanings: global citizenship, human citizenship, socially responsible citizenship, community building citizenship, agricultural and environmentally friendly citizenship; not those narrower forms of nationalism and consumerism, built on models of competitive economics which encourages upward spirals of production, consumption, waste production and the ultimate exhaustion of our planet. 

 

Wendell Berry is the original friend of the earth, because the friend of the creatures that live on earth, and especially the friend of humanity, people like ourselves who have the capacity to nurture or ruin the planet on which we all depend. If you haven't read Wendell Berry then you are missing one of the most distinctive, patient, informed and passionate voices of the past half century, speaking on behalf of your future, your welfare, and your responsibility to care about how the way you live your life impinges on everyone else's future and welfare.

 

This post is the first of several in which I reflect on Berry's work, and how in ways I don't always realise, his words have been like the best compost, taking time to break down into ideas that nourish the intellectual topsoil and make it more hospitable to imagination, vision and hope. Essays and novels, poems and short stories, have become for his readers like blades of the plough Berry so admires and advocates, turning over the soil, preparing the ground for newness, growth and organic developments of human minds, technology as servant not master, the natural world as gift to be enjoyed and stewarded rather than exploited and laid waste by runaway greed.

 

The collection of Sabbath poems that Berry has written over the years is one of those books that you can read repeatedly, or browse in occasionally. What makes the contents of This Day. Collected and New Sabbath Poems so special is that the poems were written on the Sabbath day, in the disposition of rest, when the poet purposely and purposefully takes pencil and paper and writes what he sees, feel, and prays. They range across the subjects and causes to which he has devoted his time and energy, in a vocation of priestly care for creation. Few writers, practitioners and advocates have spoke with more eloquence and humane learning on behalf of a natural world besieged by forces unheeding of its ruin. His Sabbath poems are forms of contemplative prayer, or brief soliloquy, or thought experiments in environmental renewal, each of them a hopefully imagined turning point in the health of both the earth with its creatures and the human community entrusted with a world.

 

The poems are gathered in chronological order. In 1998 three poems enable us to overhear Berry, or to look over the shoulder of the poet, and learn what it is he fears, (IX) what gives him hope (V), and how he looks on the ordinary and find there extraordinary grace (I). There is a poignant yearning for it not to be so, when he speaks of his fear of despair; there is an indomitable trust in love as eternal in consequence when he writes of what matters whatever happens; and there is visionary hopefulness in his conviction that when the river overflows it mirrors the overflowing love and sorrow of God.

 

                                            IX

         What I fear most is despair

         for the world and us; forever less

                                          V

Whatever happens
those who have learned
to love one another
have made their way
into the lasting world
and will not leave
whatever happens.

                                        I

Last year I found a first edition of Pietà, by R S Thomas, his seventh published volume, issued in 1966. It's a serious looking slim volume, wrapped in now slightly faded mauve, and black. The austere appearance and stark title image, anticipate rather exactly the mood and gravity of much of the book's contents. The font used in the upper case title, the tau cross T, and the segnaccento above the A, are hauntingly evocative of Roman crucifixion nails. The dust jacket was designed by M.E. Eldridge, whom Thomas married in 1937.

The lamentation of the Christ (Pietà) is one of the most strongly evocative images in Christian art. The Pieta is a visual representation of a son's love-compelled suffering and death, and a mother's love inconsolable in grief. The the two human forms, mother and son, are entangled in the anguish of loss, death and bereavement, draped together in a love both serene and defiant of the world doing its worst.

Two poems can helpfully be read together from this collection; the title poem 'Pietà', and 'In Church'. Both poems express the anguish and ambiguity of the poet's faith at a time of crisis in his life and vocation as poet, priest and theologian on the trail of the elusive presence and compelling attraction of his God. Both poems also intimate a shift in Thomas to a more theological form of reflection on the presence and absence of God in the context of both the Passion pf Christ and Thomas's personal inner crucifixion of soul. Out of his experience of God's nearness and distance, presence and absence, occasional intimation of divine acknowledgement and frequent disappointment of unexplained silence Thomas, torn between faith and doubt, wrote some of his most faith-interrogating poems. In both 'Pietà', and 'In Church' he explores the concept, and the theological and spiritual implicates, of "an untenanted cross." 

Pietà

Always the same hills
Crowd the horizon,
Remote witnesses
Of the still scene.

And in the foreground
The tall Cross,
Sombre, untenanted,
Aches for the Body
That is back in the cradle
Of a maid’s arms.

Pietà, the title poem locates the incarnate and crucified Christ beneath a dominant cross and lying helpless in his mother's arms, the cradle that first held him. The scene is as still as death. There are no explanatory glosses, but a foregrounding of the Cross which is personified and invested with feelings. The wood-worked cross, sharing that same sense of cosmic loss, aches for the body of the carpenter, the whole creation groaning and awaiting redemption. It is an astonishing juxtaposition of ideas. 

The Michelangelo Pieta most naturally comes to mind as the defining image of a mother's lamentation overflowing in tears for the world. I don't know if Thomas ever went to Rome to see it, but behind that masterpiece is a huge square, sharp-edged 'untenanted cross', in stark contrast to the softly flowing drapery, human formfulness, and intricate detailed intimacy of the mother cradling her dead child. (See image below)

The entire mystery of the Incarnation as the story of God in Christ, from cradle to cross, resides in this short second stanza. The suffering of the Christ is mirrored in the face of his mother, her arms a cradle, the lifeless body suspended in that time between the times, post crucifixion and pre-resurrection. The untenanted cross aches to hold the crucified, and the arms of the mother though full again as she cradles her son, ache with the weight of his body, and are themselves cruciform. The poignancy of the poet's softer words are made more acute by the way he hints backwards to the nativity, and a maid holding her first child, and in those same arms, the destiny of humanity.

At the end of the Pietà collection comes 'In Church.' I wrote about that poem a year or two ago and the post can be found using the link below. I simply want to draw attention here to its connection to the poem Pietà. Waiting in the empty church is Thomas, the priest. When everyone else has gone, he is listening, searching, hoping for some glimpse or whisper of presence, some inner assurance that the crucified God he serves, though hidden is present, and though silent speaks even in that silence. 

There is no other sound
In the darkness but the sound of a man
Breathing, testing his faith
On emptiness, nailing his questions
One by one to an untenanted cross.

'Pieta' and 'In Church' are clear poetic intimations that the faith of the priest R S Thomas was in critical dialogue with a theology increasingly apophatic, expressed in negative terms because language breaks under the strain of expressing the inexpressible. Yet a theology rooted still in the central Christian narrative of the Incarnation and the Cross of the Redeemer, celebrated in Eucharist, and despite all evidence to the contrary, embodied incarnationally and ecclesially, though often obscured, in the lives of Christian communities such as those amongst whom he toiled and struggled. 

Thomas understood human suffering. He knew that it was more than physical pain, that the ache of grief was another kind of heart attack, no less life-changing and debilitating. He understood with a tenderness not often attributed to him, human frailty, and arms that, however aching, will cradle the child, and the dead Jesus, and in their desperate holding will express the indefinable limits of human joy and human sorrow and human love.

All this in two poems. But in their turn towards a more overt and persistent interrogation of what kind of God is to be discerned, discovered, and divined from that 'untenanted cross', they signal the poet's future quest and questions about the Divine in the poems to be written beyond that pivotal collection of 1966, Pietà.    

  https://livingwittily.typepad.com/my_weblog/2018/10/in-church-often-i-tryto-analyse-the-qualityof-its-silences-is-this-where-god-hidesfrom-my-searching-i-have-stopped-to-list.html

Several times in the past week or two I have found myself crossing a bridge. Nothing spectacular, mostly built for utility and convenience over a river, a burn, a stream, the usual geographical features that prevent you taking the shortest distance from one side to the other, from here to there. The one not in the photo spans the River Deveron. It is a photo of both sides, taken from the middle, above the water, with my feet dry. The bridge is a means to an end; it is a makes-all-the-difference means to a makes-all-the difference end, of passing over an obstacle.   

I like bridges. They take you places. They are also viewpoints where you can stand and see both sides. One of my all time favourite songs is about those special people who are like a bridge over troubled water.

One of the most significant texts in the entire New Testament is from 2 Corinthians 5.18-21. It is all about bridge building: "God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation…and he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors…"

Really? Is that what the church, each community of Christian faith, is?

Forget the developed strategies for a wee while, scrap the strap lines, rethink the re-brand.

Think bridges. Think churches as bridges. Think Christ as reconciling bridge, the church as a community of bridge-building reconciled reconcilers. Then imagine the good news as the lived reality through the renewed structures of a church whose defining passion is reconciliation.

Then think again Paul's text, too easily overlooked by those who want to use God as a name of division, over-againstness and hostility, "All this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave to us the ministry of reconciliation." Bridge building is God-like work, and will sometimes cost what it cost God.

The Cross of Christ is the bridge that spans the troubled waters or a broken and divided world. A paraphrase of 2 Corinthians 5 could well be, "Like a bridge over troubled waters, I will lay me down." That is cruciform language, the language of the bridge as a place of meeting, holding two sides together.

Those who know me know my love for the writing of one of Scotland's finest theologians, Principal James Denney. His last book is called The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation. It is a profound, and at times anguished examination of the cross of Christ as the reconciling centre of the universe. I still remember the afternoon I found a previously unknown letter of Denney's in which he lamented to his friend William Robertson Nicoll, the latest casualty figures from the Somme. He had been notified earlier of the deaths in action of several of his students from the United Free Church College in Glasgow.

Those events compelled Denney to think ever more deeply about the meaning of the cross, until he came to what he believed the deepest layer of mystery, the cross as the place of reconciliation, where judgement and mercy meet on a bridge that spans from eternity. 

Near the end of his book, and probably one of the last things he wrote before his unexpected death in 2017, he wrote this paragraph on what he called "the life of reconciliation":

"The life of reconciliation is a life which itself exercises a reconciling power. It is the ultimate witness to that in God which overcomes all that separates man from Himself and men from each other. Hence it is indispensable to all who work for peace and good will among men. Not only the alienation of men from God, but their alienation from one another — the estrangement of classes within the same society, the estrangement of nations and races within the great family of humanity — yield in the last resort to love alone. Impartial justice, arbitrating from without, can do little for them. But a spirit delivered from pride and made truly humble by repentance, a spirit purged from selfishness and able in the power of Christ's love to see its neighbour's interest as its own, will prove victorious alike in the class rivalries of capital and labour, and in the international rivalries that are now devastating the world. It is in its all-reconciling power that Paul sees most clearly the absoluteness and finality of the Christian religion."  (The Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, James Denney, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1917, pages 329-30) 

The life of reconciliation is bridge shaped. Bringing together two sides, joining what is divided, refusing to function as a wall, overcoming estrangement in the power of Christ's love, seeing our neighbour's interest as our own, spanning and supporting the road to friendship and the two way travel of mutually acknowledged dignity, rights and obligations.

The life of reconciliation is lived under the shadow of the cross. The cruciform life is a bridge capable of bearing the weight of a world's sin, overcoming cycles of hostility, wearing down intractable indifference, deconstructing competitive rivalry, curing habits of suspicion, and expelling long nourished hatreds – all of this, in the power of Christ's love.

I like bridges. They take you places. They introduce you to the other side. They are meeting places, a two way conversational encounter of people travelling in opposite directions. The life of reconciliation is such a bridge.     

Every month at our Deacons' Meeting we finish by singing this two verse hymn. 

1 How good is the God we adore,
Our faithful unchangeable Friend:
His love is as great as His power,
And knows neither measure nor end!

2 'Tis Jesus, the First and the Last,
Whose Spirit shall guide us safe home;
We'll praise Him for all that is past,
And trust Him for all that's to come.

No it's not the greatest poetry, and its sunny piety might occasionally jar with the realities of life's steep braes and sharp turnings. But it expresses the rich variations of faith and devotion of our folk, happily using superlatives that cannot be exaggerations when predicated of God.

It is also Trinitarian, the faithful God who is Father of every family named on earth, Jesus who is the beginning and end of all that matters most in life, and the Spirit, "who guides us safe home."

These past few months, I've missed singing that. And when by God's mercy we are through all this, I'll look forward to singing it, and those last two lines:

We'll praise Him for all that is past,
And trust Him for all that's to come.

Last evening I was restless. Lock down does that. For all our attempts to look for the positives, and all the well meaning urgings from others to find ways of using well the time and freedom from routine responsibilities, some days during lock down are just mince. 

Now, in Scottish vernacular the descriptor 'mince' has important negative vibes. Indeed, the Scottish slang use of 'mince' found its way into Hansard, the record of Parliamentary proceedings at Westminster in 2016.

Kirsty Blackman, MP for Aberdeen North described some of the standing orders as 'mince'. On being asked subsequently for a translation, she Tweeted,  "The word I used was *mince*." Mince is Scottish slang used to describe something which is below par or rubbish." That is now a footnote in the official record. 

So I use the word advisedly, and in its Hansard definition. Some days are mince. But not many days, and seldom a whole day. When such times come walking helps, and so does the spiritual practice of taking photographs.

My camera has become a way of re-framing the world. Walking with eyes attentive to what is there, and mind deliberately turned outward to the world, you begin to see what otherwise would simply not exist to the preoccupied mind. So much time and energy is needed to sustain the inner life of the introspective temperament; so in recent times I've come to recognise when the time has come to quieten the inner conversation, still the swirling movements of thought, and turn to the world outside of this ever present inner me. It's the thing to do when the day just doesn't seem to be working.

I walked down to Arnhall Moss, a mile from our door, and stood on the path, the sun slanting behind me, and noticed what looked like a sunlight footstep pointing the way. Of course it was mere coincidence, an accident of light requiring a far fetched hermeneutic to think that it could have been, well, meant. But in fact it was well meant. On yet another day of sameness and constraint, a Hansard day, that was beginning to feel like mince, "below par or rubbish", I stepped into a wood touched by late sunlight. And that light falling across my path  for all the world shaped to reassure, a beckoning forward, an invitation to walk in the sunlight and shadow. 

Only when I came home and looked at the photograph did I make all these connections, and sense the heart-lightening message of that sunlit footprint. And then a further nudge from Who knows where, the familiar rhythm of a favourite song we will sing again in our church as soon as we meet again in the freedom of friendship, fellowship, worship and praise: 

The Spirit lives to set us free, 

Walk, walk in the light;

He binds us all in unity,

Walk, walk in the light! 

And then from a very different source, another hymn, written by someone for whom many days were mince. The poet William Cowper suffered throughout his life with prolonged periods of depressive illness, a chronic sadness that could escalate from low grade self-doubt to desperate self-despair. Out of such inner anguish he wrote several hymns about how to survive days that are mince:

Sometimes a light surprises
the Christian while he sings;
it is the Lord, who rises
with healing in his wings:
when comforts are declining,
he grants the soul again
a season of clear shining,
to cheer it after rain.

Last evening in Arnhall Moss, I proved Cowper right: "Sometimes a light surprises….. 

This Scottish Paraphrase goes back to 1745. The Scottish landscape of mountain and glen is in the background; so are the Jacobite rebellions and the desire for peace and harmony between nations. 

"The biblical phrases are incorporated into the verses with a dignified rhetoric that is in the best tradition of metrical Psalmody." This Scripture paraphrase of the eschatological vision of Isaiah, combined with the tune Glasgow, is one of the most powerful peace hymns I know.

Long before the more recent Make Me a Channel of Your Peace, the Scottish hymn and liturgical tradition produced a deeply contextual theology of peace between nations and longed for reconciliations.  

(The hymn was sung at the close of the funeral service for Scotland's first First Minister, Donald Dewar.)

1 Behold! the mountain of the Lord
in latter days shall rise
on mountain tops above the hills,
and draw the wondering eyes.

2 To this the joyful nations round,
all tribes and tongues, shall flow;
up to the hill of God, they'll say,
and to his house we'll go.

3 The beam that shines from Zion hill
shall lighten every land;
the King who reigns in Salem's towers
shall all the world command.

4 Among the nations he shall judge;
his judgements truth shall guide;
his sceptre shall protect the just,
and quell the sinner’s pride.

5 No strife shall rage, nor hostile feuds
disturb those peaceful years;
to ploughshares men shall beat their swords,
to pruning-hooks their spears.

6 No longer hosts, encountering hosts,
shall crowds of slain deplore:
they hang the trumpet in the hall,
and study war no more.

7 Come then, O house of Jacob! come
to worship at his shrine;
and, walking in the light of God,
with holy beauties shine. 

This hymn draws its power from the cruciform image of Christ's outstretched arms. Athanasius used that image to powerful effect in his De Incarnatione.

It's a good introduction to a hymn we could do with singing these days, a lot:

"How could He have called us if He had not been crucified, for it is only on the cross that a man dies with arms outstretched? Here, again, we see the fitness of His death and of those outstretched arms: it was that He might draw His ancient people with the one and the Gentiles with the other, and join both together in Himself."

When Christ was lifted from the earth,
his arms stretched out above
through every culture, every birth,
to draw an answering love.
Still east and west his love extends,
and always, near or far,
he calls and claims us as his friends
and loves us as we are.
Where generation, class or race
divide us to our shame,
he sees not labels but a face,
a person and a name.
Thus freely loved, though fully known,
may I in Christ be free
to welcome and accept his own
as Christ accepted me.
(Brian Wren, 1980)

This hymn is a rich exposition of what it means to believe "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself" and "He has given to us the ministry of reconciliation".

Honesty about our own sinfulness and propensity to excuse ourselves; honesty too about structural as well as personal sin; then to hear our true name called in the welcome of Christ who serves us before we ever get to serving Him.

The last two verses weave around themes of love, justice, hope-building, peace-making, in the multiform practices of those called to embody and enact God's love for God's word. 

Lord God, Your love has called us here,
As we, by love, for love were made.
Your living likeness still we bear
Tho’ marred, dishonoured, disobeyed.
We come, with all our heart and mind
Your call to hear, Your love to find.

We come with self inflicted pains
Of broken trust and chosen wrong,
Half free, half bound by inner chains,
By social forces swept along,
By powers and systems close confined,
Yet seeking hope for human kind.

Lord God, in Christ You call our name,
And then receive us as Your own,
Not thro’ some merit, right, or claim,
But by Your gracious love alone.
We strain to glimpse Your mercy seat,
And find You kneeling at our feet.

Then take the towel, and break the bread,
And humble us, and call us friends.
Suffer and serve till all are fed
And show how grandly love intends
To work till all creation sings,
To fill all worlds, to crown all things.

Lord God, in Christ You set us free
Your life to live, Your joy to share.
Give us Your Spirit’s liberty
To turn from guilt and dull despair
And offer all that faith can do,
While love is making all things new.

(Brian Wren is a prolific hymn writer, some of whose hymns are amongst the best in the modern tradition. He has a particular concern and interest in seeking language and metaphors for God that are inclusive and less freighted with ideas of power, dominance and the legitimation of oppressive ideologies. His book What Language Shall I Borrow remains a powerful challenge to the use and imposition of language more suited to Constantinian power politics than a Gospel of love, justice and reconciliation.)