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John. A Commentary. (New Testament Library) Marianne Meye Thompson, (Louisville: WJK, 2015) 532 pp.

There are more commentaries on the Gospel of John than any one of us needs to study it, at whatever point of entry we choose. I have a shelf full of 12 commentaries and about 20 monographs, and that excludes books I've borrowed from libraries over the years. And I am still intrigued by fresh work, new scholarship and all the undiscovered country of this familiar, strange, demanding and perplexingly profound book. Despite all the early scholarly ink and papyrus, the plethora of academic paper and print, the ocean of digital, electronic and online resources, the Fourth Gospel continues to speak deeply and clearly to those who read John's Gospel itself with uncomplicated faith and readiness to listen.

Marianne Thompson’s commentary was published in 2015. It is readable, learned, thoughtful, written by an author who writes for church as well as academy, and does so out of her own confessional commitment to the Christian faith. That makes her no less a scholar with a critical mind, reverent and respectful of the text and therefore not prepared to short change this Gospel by foreclosing on problems, avoiding questions or claiming more interpretive authority than the evidence allows.

Marianne Meye Thomson has worked on this commentary for 17 years, which is a large chunk of her professional life. In an interview held at Fuller Theological Seminary where she is Professor of New Testament, she spoke openly about the joys, demands and disciplines of writing a commentary. Sometimes those who write commentaries are criticised for not covering all the issues of background, social context, textual developments and pre-history, rhetorical strategy, theology and reception history, while also interacting with the waterfall of monographs and other commentaries. In her interview Thompson conceded there would be those in the academy discontented that the commentary is not a vade mecum of recent scholarship; but her aim is to write for students and pastor-preachers while also making a contribution that other Johannine scholars will appreciate.

Her approach is succinctly stated: "I have not endeavoured to reconstruct or pass judgement on the historicity of events, words or accounts in John. John;s Gospel is assuredly a selective, interpreted account of some of the things that Jesus said and did; it presents Jesus and his works and words to be the life giving deeds of the one God of Israel for all the world. The goal of the commentary is to illumine the witness of that narrative. (p.23)

This clarification is important, ensuring the reader is aware of the author's stated purposes and intentional omissions. Thompson makes no attempt to carry on a multi-sided dialogue with all the secondary exegetical and historical literature. She seldom engages in prolonged discussion with other commentators except where they add further interpretive clarity to the text in hand. Footnotes are rich in additional information and comment, and are the more valuable for being limited in number, reserved for the more important matters. That said, there are approximately 1100 footnotes, and she spoke ruefully of the large file of footnotes cut from the text to keep the volume within the publisher's word count! Some of us would like to see and follow those scholarly footprints! 

There are nine Excurses and each is a richly textured essays on crucial theological and historical issues in John, as for example the signs, the I am' sayings, faith and discipleship, and the one she confesses she struggled with most, "The Jews" in the Gospel of John. Reading the excurses is a mini course on Johannine theology and history. The Excursus on the woman taken in adultery is an exemplary piece of textual criticism in which the pericope is not seen as original, but is nevertheless expounded in an exercise of canonical exegesis. A 23 page Bibliography, and around 82 pages of indices enhance the usefulness of the volume, pointing the reader to further resources and gathering page references to a host of subjects as they are treated throughout the commentary. 

The water into wine pericope is a favourite of mine, and one I have preached on several times and studied and returned to ever since C K Barrett and Raymond Brown showed me what could be done by digging into the Old Testament texts and establishing bridges between John's storytelling and the Jewish and Greco-Roman world out of which such writing came. Her exegesis is laced with cross references to the OT and other Second Temple literature, is written in lucid and imaginative prose with an eye to the theological payload, so that she brings a freshness and, on occasion, a surprising light to bear on an already well worked text. Likewise her understanding of the story of the Temple cleansing is to respect John's chronology in placing it at the start of Jesus ministry, but also to acknowledge the Synoptic account may be the more historically plausible. Rather than seek to harmonise, she works at explaining what John was about, and why the Temple cleansing sets off foundation shaking Christological reverberations. These are two examples of her approach.

I had occasion to preach on John 14.7-11, a typical passage of Johannine theology suggestive of long rumination on the meaning of the Word made flesh, and how the one who was close to the heart of God is the only one who can make God known: "He who has seen me has seen the Father" is a statement that takes the reader to the highest ridges of Johannine Christology, and containing ideas far seeing in their suggestion of a nascent Trinitarianism. Thompson shirks none of the hard questions in exploring the identity of Jesus the Son and his relationship to God the Father. In a couple of paragraphs she unravels John's meanings with the clarity of a scholar who previously published two substantial monographs on God in John's Gospel. She is a reliable guide and a good commentator on the theological landscape of John.

The NTL commentary series is intended to be medium sized, mid range and deal with paragraphs and flow of thought rather than treating the text in the more atomistic, comprehensive and detailed analyses of larger scholarly commentaries, such as Keener, Michaels and from a previous generation Brown and Schnackenburg. This is a commentary which sits alongside its nearest competitors Lincoln, Beasley Murray, Ridderbos, Moloney, and Carson. I would compare it in quality, freshness and usefulness to Gail O'Days fine work in the New Interpreter's Bible, but with a substantial update in the scholarly interaction.

In her practice of exegesis Thompson has little interest in competing or arguing with other writers for the sake of showing her control of the field. Of course she is often in conversation with other scholars, and there is wide and deep learning informing this volume. Her concentration, however, is on the meaning of John's narrative and witness, which is unbroken throughout as she opens up the message of the Word made flesh, dwelling amongst humanity, and displaying the glory of God. The pivotal verse for her is "In him was life and the life was the light of all people."

Her own translation (a feature of this series) is supported by textual notes, and in working at it she was aiming for idiomatic English, but staying as close to the actual text as possible. She is both modest and sensible in acknowledging that just as John had to select, choose and omit material, she had to do the same in order to keep the commentary within the parameters of the series. In doing so she has produced a commentary that will be of genuine usefulness and stimulus for preachers and students. Scholars will likewise encounter a commentary that has deep roots in both learning and faith, and which offers an engaged and energetic wrestling with this complex, infuriating, comforting, disturbing but intentionally tendentious text. 

Thompson is cautious in the use of criticism but honest about wrestling with the text; ready to offer new conclusions but rarely speculative; her writing is readable, which is to say I am reading it through over several weeks, and at times have been drawn to read on further to follow the flow of a well written exegetical narrative. I've waited eagerly for this book since Thompson was announced as its author. This book was worth the wait. The time taken has resulted in a mature, lucid, authoritative commentary, qualitatively different because the writer has demonstrably lived with, and within, this text.

Below is the text of the Saturday Sermon published today in the Aberdeen Press and Journal. I've done this now for over 25 years. The word count has to be 175 words maximum. It's a good discipline!

………………. 

“I don’t know what the world’s coming to.” I remember older people saying that when I was growing up! Now I find myself wondering along the same lines. The world seems to be a conflicted place; globalised, polarised and destabilised. Our own country is experiencing depths of division that are putting families, communities and friendships under such strains, that they threaten the common good of shared and caring communal life.

“Blessed are the peacemakers”. Jesus knew about the more challenging life skills. Wherever we are there are situations going wrong. People get angry, words are said, resentments are verbalised on social media, alliances are formed and though we might not use the word, enemies are made.

Christians serious about following Jesus work hard at being peacemakers, servants of reconciliation, exemplars of forgiveness. Wherever we are, home, office, the checkout, the car park, our default disposition is peacemaker. In places of conflicted hurt we dismantle walls and build bridges:

• by persistent, patient actions of peace,

• by resilient, responsive acts of reconciliation,

• by gentle, gracious words of goodness,

• by faith-filled, faithful prayers of friendship,

• by holy, hopeful gestures of  healing.

The other day I had an appointment that needed a clear head. So I went to the head clearing clinic down at the beach. I hadn't taken my camera, but I had my phone which does the job pretty well. A turbulent sea, a whole tribe of turnstones, (over here on the migration trail), and an amazing sky did the job fine.

I've often wondered about what it means to "clear the head", and whether prayer is a way of doing that. If what is meant is a recovery of focus, a centring of attention, a reboot of the inner hard drive, then yes, prayer does that.

So is a walk on the beach a form of prayer? I think it can be, though for me it usually takes the form of looking for God on the horizon of the landscape, or seascape, of my life. Walking along the beach, or standing watching, and listening to the rhythm of waves breaking and rushing towards me, I find strangely comforting and comporting. Comforting in that the horizon is open and promises new possibilities beyond them; comporting because the rhythms of heartbeat and waves begin to synchronise, producing a sense of being part of something beyond my own inner world of preoccupations, anxieties, sadness and grief.

It is almost a year since Aileen, our loved and lovely daughter, died. Many a time now I've walked this beach with the same questions. Much of life is now lived in the interrogative mood, and for a parent searching for a lost child, they come with the same regular rhythms of waves breaking at my feet: why? what if? how?

I know my deepest questions are unanswerable. But that doesn't excuse or reduce the urgency of their being asked. So walking the beach is often now an exercise in scanning the horizons of the life I now have, and whatever futures are now possible; and it is a place where, whatever the questions, I feel keenly the love and the memories of a daughter who was God's gift to our world. 

There are moments when the sound of the waves breaking is followed by the gentler sound of water-flow and a brief near-silence, before the next wave breaks. Sometimes, somewhere, hidden in those near-silences, and before the next wave breaks, there is space for questions to become prayers which may not have any answer other than that your love and loss are known, and held in the heart of God. Most times, that is answer enough.

No experience in life has more profoundly changed the way I think about prayer, God, love, faith and hope than Aileen's death and the sense of incompleteness there will always be without her. Yes, life goes on. But it is life diminished, reduced in possibility, and requiring to be lived with gratitude tempered by grief. That is not a complaint. It is a recognition, that much of the journey is behind me, and there are still horizons ahead. Walking on the beach, remembering the past with thankfulness tinged with sorrow, and looking at the horizons in front of me, the heart is comforted, the head comported, and prayer happens.   

I first came across the name Abraham Joshua Heschel while reading early books by Walter Brueggemann. It was Heschel's work on the prophets he cited. It's a remarkable exposition of the Hebrew mind in prophetic mode, when the world is looked at with God on the horizon, and through the lens of trust, even if at times that trust was expressed in defiance. After that I went looking for other volumes by this philosopher Rabbi and found myself absorbed into a mindset that can best be described as reason within the limits of faith. This was Jewish faith in love with a world that exists by the gift of God, and in which every human being is a guest expected to behave with courtesy, gratitude and wonder.

Indeed one of Heschel's recurring chords is made up of notes like wonder, amazement and awe. I have read few writers whose words carry within them such freighted ideas of holiness, mystery and the sense of God's immediacy. His best work was written in the 1950's and 60's, two decades of turmoil, change, excitement, danger and expanding possibilities for human hope or harm. A post war and post Holocaust world; a world of atomic weapons and an arms race, an iron curtain, a space race, and a cold war; Korean and Vietnam wars, and civil rights movements; growing affluence and the birth of the consumer society. They were years of radical change, technological development and an increasing sense of moral peril as human technical capacity outstripped human moral maturtity.  

Heschel was convinced that hope lay in human co-operation, mutual respect and help across racial, religious and national borders, an enhanced awareness of how to contain human capacity for conflict born out of fear, greed or lust for power. He had fled Europe and survived when many of his family and those who lived as his neighbours perished in the Holocaust. He never forgot the dehumanising rhetoric, demonising political ideologies, developed systems of bureaucracy and administration which were used as webs and nets to capture and exterminate his people. Carbon copies, index cards, ledgers of figures, updated address lists, birth and marriage certificates – good office management at the service of a murderous regime

Yet Heschel betrays no nurtured enmities nor cherished bitterness. He lived looking forward hopeful but not naive, passionate about justice and peace, and his view of the world clarified and deepened by his immersion in the Torah, and in the literature of his people. He was a deeply religious man. If that sounds obvious, then let him describe what that implies in his own words:

"A religious man is a person who holds God and man in one thought at one time, at all times, who suffers in himself harms done to others, whose great passion is compassion, whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair." 

When I'm looking for a refresher course on compassion I go to Heschel; if I forget what holiness looks like and acts like, I read Heschel; If I look at the mess of the world, globalised, polarised and  destabilised, I ponder words like those above and pray to be the kind of person he describes, and that last clause, "whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair." I can happily make that a mission statement for life lived well.  

Two of my favourite pastimes – walking on the beach and writing Haiku. The two came together a few years ago after I picked up several shells. I'm not sure what it is that so fascinates about beach walking, but there's a combination of curiosity and unpredictability that often compels me to walk with head down. 

Stones shaped by the motion of millions of waves; shells which used to be home for creatures now long gone; wood seasoned and smoothed by the actions of sand and water; fragments of pottery and glass worn and polished and now discarded for the pleasure of the finder. Such are the gifts of the sea.

That parable about the farmer ploughing a field and hitting a box that has treasure inside. Now and again I've felt a similar lurch of excitement on finding just this object, here, now. My mother often said to me when I was a child, "You're easy pleased." I guess I was, and am, because I've always valued and taken pleasure in things that weren't expensive, some of them items which have little value, if by that is meant commercial worth or sale-ability. 

Take these three shells. I don't have them now. They were picked up years ago and disappeared some time after. At the time, they made me stop and pay attention. These shells were handled, examined, enjoyed for the small if transient masterpieces that nature scatters everywhere.

The Haiku are neither exhaustive description nor clever semantic game playing. They are statements of admiration, and gratitude for the brief pleasure of contemplative seeing, which is like a low key but patient kind of wondering at the ubiquitous beauty at our feet. As a Christian, such ubiquitous beauty nudges mind and imagination to the thought of God's creative purposes and overflowing love for all that God makes. And that is theology in a seashell.

More recently I collected another handful of shells, which for now sit on my window ledge. Again I wrote a Haiku to distil my response to these lovely but discarded creations.

Calcified dwellings;
sadness, of homeless creatures,
and creatureless homes.

What prompted the sadness of those lines? I had been thinking of the rhythms and cycles of the natural world, such as the ebb and flow of life, the come and go of the seasons, the dependence of growth and new life on seeds sown in soil made fertile by the death of the very plants which produced the seeds.

So not unqualified sadness, more a poignant reminder of the fragility and transience that is the life we live. And therefore a reminder too, of the call to gratitude as one of the default dispositions of the heart and the mind. Life is more precious than we realise. Is it a new kind of besetting sin to be part of a culture so preoccupied with living, so relentlessly fixated on the cost of living, so often helpless to control the pace of living, that life itself slips through our fingers, like sand?

Ages ago, so it seems, T S Eliot asked the question more pointedly in The Rock, one of The Four Quartets. "Where is the life we have lost in living?" Walking along the beach can be for me, a time of inner recalibration of mind and heart. Those small discarded objects, with their strange allure and serendipitous appearance at my feet, dare me to slow down, and think, and wonder, and find time for thankfulness and to relearn the importance of patient wonder.   

For four months I have been working on a tapestry designed around the Revelations of Divine Love, by Julian of Norwich; in particular her vision of 'the little thing, the size of a hazelnut'. Here is the passage:

“And in this he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’

I marvelled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.

In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.”

Of course Julian is best known for her theology of hope, in words that have become so popular they are in danger of becoming a cliche: "And all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." But that theological hopefulness was never for Julian a misleading optimism about the reality of evil, and the human experiences of darkness, such as grief, suffering, loneliness, guilt, fear, and encroaching despair at the brokenness of the world. 

That future orientation towards a renewed creation in which all would be made well, was imagined and energised in a soul that had pondered for years on her visions of the Divine Love, which poured from the wounds of the crucified Christ. Julian's interpretation of the hazelnut, which to her seemed so vulnerable, precarious and fragile and with what seemed a tenuous hold on existence, took its form and confidence from her growing conviction of the eternal Love which creates, sustains and brings to purposed fulfilment all that God has made.

The tapestry images play with images of hazelnut, our planet and the ever expanding realities of "all that is made". The size of the hazelnut, the earth and the sun is the same, because in the Love of God significance is not in size or importance, but in the relationship of Creator to creation.

The work grew out of the text above, and was enriched over the months by regular reading of The Revelations. The eventual pattern evolved, and the lines and colours were trial and error, and occasionally I unpicked some parts which didn't work, seemed wrong, and needed to be reworked. As to the overall concept, one friend captured much of what was being attempted when she wrote, in response to the finished work, "the fluidity of line and shape feel right for Julian, who is never a straight edge person."

The decision to make the earth the same size as the hazelnut, and to frame them separately within the landscape, was made early on. I was playing with the idea of  her hand-held hazelnut, "round as any ball", and the round earth, indeed all that exists, being held in the hand of the Creator. The sun is the same size and the light emanates to the farthest reaches; it also shines brightest behind the hazelnut – a theme important in my own theology, "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not."

The blue ribbon has several layers of significance. Julian makes much of Mary, as one who brings together the humanity and divinity of Jesus; and her colour is blue. Across the landscape of "all that is" flows "the river of the waters of life", the life-giving energy of the God who will make all things well. In Medieval iconography blue is the colour of divine majesty, and in the crucified Christ majesty and meekness coalesce in the redemptive love that is revealed to Julian. That majestic love is edged in red, a colour that signifies sacrifice. 

Each will find their own meanings within the work. It's hard for me as the artist to reduce to words and explanation what is a work of creative and visual exegesis, using colours, techniques, materials and stitches which are both deeply personal choice, and creatively purposeful improvisation. It is a prayer in stitches, an exegesis in colour and form, a tapestry of a text in which theological truth, mystical vision and spiritual experience distil into Revelations of Divine Love. 

But one further thought. Julian has no interest in speculative mysticism cut loose from Christian orthodox doctrine. Oh yes, she pushes the boundaries to their limits, but when she writes of the love of God, her ideas are deeply embedded in orthodox Christology, coloured through and through by a richly embroidered atonement theology. Themes of creation, fall and redemption are woven throughout her work, and the central image of the Cross and the crucified Christ constrain her theological speculations, and results in a mind that is restlessly curious, yet patiently contemplative, and therefore produces a work that did not fit existing categories of ecclesial teaching.

Julian's Revelations are at one and the same time, securely orthodox but with deep and well nourished roots capable of subverting the foundations of some of those fixed boundaries; not to diminish the Gospel, but to expand understanding of inexhaustible truth. Some of that creative subversion may also be hinted at in the finished tapestry.    

One of my favourite places is Findochty, up on the Moral coast. Sitting above the fishing village is the Parish Church, a building which has been there well over a century and a half. Every time I see it, built on the rock, I hear again that strangely reassuring promise, "On this rock I will build my church…"  

That time when Jesus said to Peter, "You are Simon. From now on you shall be called Rock, and on this Rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hell shall not overcome it..ever!" Not the shifting sand that was the volatile Peter, as if such fragmented liquidity could bear the weight of the mission of God. The Rock of faith, embedded in what is revealed. That's what Jesus meant. "You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God", said Peter. True enough, said Jesus. But flesh and blood haven;t revealed that to you. It was my Father in heaven.

So brilliant as his insight was, it wasn't Peter's genius that made the penny drop. It was God, opening the mind to understand, opening the ears to hear, and opening the eyes to see, and opening his heart to the truth and demand of Jesus. That is the rock on which the church is founded, secured, rooted and grounded in the love of God. The church is made up of people; fallible but forgiven, human but called God's children, as far as the world is concerned, followers of Jesus are daft and deluded, but in truth, they have found a truth that unlocks life and opens up possibility.

Faith is not certainty; it is risk, but it is trustful risk. Faith is not something we work ourselves up to, as if it was about will power; faith is that strangely disruptive responsiveness to something that calls us beyond ourselves, to a different way of looking at the world, and a changed way of living.

Poor Peter, brilliant Peter, big-mouth Peter who spoke first and tried to edit it later. As soon as he had blurted out that impossible truth about Jesus, he's told he's got a new name, a different identity, a changed purpose for life, and he is called to a new faithfulness and obedience to this travelling carpenter Rabbi.

Such faith, risk, trust and obedience has a durability and stability that goes beyond flesh and blood. It's like granite. It lasts and endures and bears enormous weight of circumstance and change and challenge. It's a rock, and on that kind of rock-faith, Jesus said, I will build my church.

(This is the first of several reflections on the church set on a hill and built on a rock.)

Regular readers here will know that one of my interests is designing and working tapestry. Over the years I've completed around 20 original pieces, some of them as gifts to special people on special days.

More recently I've been experimenting with the use of tapestry as a form of visual exegesis. During the design and working of a particular tapestry, I 'dwell' within a text, reading it regularly and absorbing what the words seem to be saying, especially before working the next phase. Colour, image, shape and form are each allowed to emerge in an evolving design.

Most times there is no inner idea of the finished work, and often the design changes as I go along. At some point the design of the piece, which began as an undeveloped attraction to the text, and grew in the working, takes on a final form and is worked from a roughly sketched outline. 

The current piece (detail below) is based on Julian of Norwich, and in particular, two of her most famous passages from The Revelations of Divine Love. Her parable of the hazelnut has long been a favourite of anthologists; and any who have read her Revelations will immediately recall the simplicity and theological profundity of her vision of her own hand, and in it "a tiny thing the size of a hazelnut."

"And in this vision he showed me a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut, lying in the palm of my hand, and to my mind's eye it was as round as any ball. I looked at it and thought, "What can this be?" And the answer came to me, "It is all that is made". I wondered how it could last, for it was so small I thought it might suddenly disappear. And the answer in my mind was, "It lasts and will last for ever because God loves it; and in the same way everything exists through the love of God.

In this little thing I saw three attributes: the first is that God made it, the second is that he loves it, the third is that God cares for it." 

Out of that everyday ordinary miracle of a kernel in its protective shell, Julian drew a wondering sense of the immensity of God's creative and sustaining love, and a corresponding awareness of how small, fragile and dependent is the whole of creation. But that whole and entire Creation is held in the hand of one whose love pervades and sustains all and everything that is, including every 'dear soul'. 

The second theme, which follows logically and theologically from her vision of God's love sustaining in existence all that God has made, is Julian's famous cry of hope:"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well." Invariably quoted out of context, it reads like saccharine optimism, life's artificial sweetener. And when fitted within the universe of her revelations, it is a powerful cry of eschatological hope which, given her historical context of tragic and terrifying events, sounds even more like a classic denial and evasion of reality.

Not so. Few writers have faced up to the swathes of suffering that swirl around human life with more realism and look-the-world-in-the-face honesty. But she refuses to make sin the defining reality of the universe; indeed her faith in the cross as the source of redemptive and renewing power is a red thread woven throughout her Revelations. As James Denney, (another of my theological guides) once said to a Victorian Free Church of Scotland congregation in Greenock: 

"What is revealed at the cross is redeeming love, and it is revealed as the last reality of the universe, the eternal truth of what God is. It is before the foundation of the world; nay the very foundations of the world are laid in it….You wish to know the final truth about God? Here it is, eternal love bearing sin." (The Way Everlasting, p.24-5)  

I doubt there is a better summary of Julian's vision, notwithstanding Denney had no patience for either mysticism or metaphysics. But here's the thing. Where these two theologians of the cross intersect is precisely in their assertion that the love of God is cruciform and Christlike. And they agree on the most fundamental of truths, that it is that same Divine love which is the last reality of the universe, the eternal truth of who and what God is. 

"All shall be well is therefore a cry of the heart, but of the heart that has been broken by sin and suffering, and is now remade in hope of a New Creation. Julian writes in graphic detail about the lacerated head of the crucified Christ, the drops of blood on thorns, each one evidence of a love that bears all sin and speaks a love which draws from an everlasting and infinite mercy. 

So the current tapestry which is being stitched around these two texts, the hazelnut and the credo "all shall be well", will try to show the beauty and form of the world, encapsulated in the hazelnut as "all that exists". And all that vast universe of 'all that is', including our own jewel like planet, the size of a hazelnut, is for Julian interwoven with the Passion of God in Christ. The Divine love is redemptive, renewing and restoring, and is traced by a red thread of redemptive love running through and around a God loved Creation. 

A third voice to finish. Maria Von Trapp wrote a number of inspirational books. In one of them she reflected on life as a tapestry. She too sensed that the mystery of life finds its best understanding in the colour red, traceable in the fundaments of the universe, and in our own lives. 

“It will be very interesting one day to follow the pattern of our life as it is spread out like a beautiful tapestry. As long as we live here we see only the reverse side of the weaving, and very often the pattern, with its threads running wildly, doesn't seem to make sense. Some day, however, we shall understand. In looking back over the years we can discover how a red thread goes through the pattern of our life: the Will of God.”

When this tapestry is finished, there will be red thread.

Prayer of Intercession

Our Father, your kingdom come,Your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. You have called us in all our life together, to seek first the Kingdom of God and your righteousness.

We pray for our country, this place where we live, and where so much that is important in our shared life is under threat, and we seem to be stuck in a mess of our own making.

Brexit has made us stressed and angry, afraid and divided. We have strong opinions and not enough understanding; we take sides, point fingers of blame, refuse to listen to others and shout all the louder ourselves. God, forgive us.

We pray for our Parliament, and all those we have elected and appointed to represent the interests of our country and our people. Father that is one of our greatest fears – we are starting to choose who are our people. We use words like LEAVE and REMAIN as slogans and insults. We use phrases like ‘enemies of the people’, ‘no surrender’, ‘disaster capitalism’ ‘do or die’ as if we are at war with ourselves.

We pray that you will give wisdom and humility to those who have power; undermine the pride and arrogance that often closes off good ways forward; enable those who speak for us to do so with truth and integrity, and to refuse acceptance of lies as if the truth doesn’t matter.

God of the nations, our country must make far reaching decisions soon. Guide and direct us into the paths of peace; stem the flow of invective and hostility; bring minds together to find understanding and a way ahead that enables justice, the common good, and care for each other. Our continent has known terrible wars, and these past 75 years we have lived peaceably and constructively. Whatever the outcomes of these next weeks, may we find ways of living in friendship as partners rather than as competitors and rivals.

Father, in times of crisis and anxiety your prophets spoke words of comfort and truth. May we hear and obey their words, and make those words our prayers in these next weeks:

In our hearts, and in all places of power and decision-making, "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever rolling stream."

In our prayers for ourselves and for all who exercise power on our behalf, may we and they hear your command, "Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare."

Eternal God, remind us, because we forget far too easily in the heat of argument and in our determination to get our own way; You have shown every one of us what is good, and what it is that you the Lord requires of us, "to act justly, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with our God."

Teach us once again as a nation to be a place of welcome and refuge for others; lead us as a people to a new understanding of our place among the nations; bring us to repentance and changed ways; give us hearts less selfish and more generous, less afraid of others and more welcoming to each new stranger; give us minds less angry and more peaceable; show us how to turn down the volume of our own shouting and so to listen more carefully to what others say, and think, and feel; give us courage and wisdom to be impatient with lies and defenders of truth.

Forgive our own part in the divisiveness, by ways we speak, or treat others, or refuse to listen to those we disagree with; forgive the faintness of our light and the lost savour of our salt; make us peacemakers and seekers of justice; fill us with passion for a society where people are safe, where compassion is on the increase, where we learn again the joy of kindness, and in which we walk the way of Jesus with arms open in welcome to the stranger, hands reaching out to the hurting, and feet walking in the narrow ways of loving God and neighbour for Jesus’ sake,

Amen

One of my interests is designing and working tapestry. The theme, choice of colours, mixing of coloured strands, decisions about which stitches to use; the scope for messing it up is quite wide!

So there are times when doing freehand tapestry you realise, "No. That doesn’t work!" The colour isn’t right, or the stitch is wrong, and you've done a lot of them.

You’ve been stitched up! That’s when you need a wee tool called a stitch remover. See the picture. A needle pointed hook with a razor edge that cuts out the mistakes and gives you a chance to try again.

Not so easy though, when in the daily worked tapestry of our lives, we've stitched ourselves up by saying the wrong words, or made embarrassing mistakes, or misjudged someone, or behaved in a way we now regret.

Some things can't be unstitched; but where they can, we should do it. Words like forgiveness, reconciliation, acceptance, kindness, goodwill – they’re all good stitch removers where we made false stitches that don't fit the overall pattern of the life we're trying to lead.

“Blessed are the peacemakers…the merciful…those who hunger and thirst for things to be put right (righteousness)” Words that unstitch our mistakes.