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 "The church is not the building, it's the people." Those words are a truth which, if pushed too far, lose their grip on the truth they affirm. A church is a people being formed in community, gathered and scattered and gathered again for worship. A church building is a place where prayer and praise, baptism and communion, year on year, are offered. The building is not sacred; yet what is done there, like slow falling rain, soaks the nutrients of holiness into the soul. In this building, over centuries, souls have prayed, and holiness has taken root in their lives.

August in Aberdeen, early morning mist, laden with drizzle, the crown and the cross silhouetted against soft grey skies.

The cross that, when lifted up will draw all people to the Crucified, seen rising above the trees, the gentle wetness seeping through branches and leaves, coalescing in large drops that fall as tears on those walking below.

The rain falls on the righteous and the unrighteous; not a thow-away remark, but one of Jesus' one-liners in which is condensed an entire theology of the love that falls with extravagant benevolence, and gentle mercy, on our broken, God-made, love drenched world.

Round your table, through your giving,

show us how to live and pray

till your Kingdom's way of living

is the bread we share each day.

bread for us and for our neighbour,

bread for body, mind and soul,

bread of heaven and human labour –

broken bread that makes us whole.

Dean Ramsey tells of the parish minister of Stonehaven giving thanks for the safe ingathering of harvest, "except for a few stooks between here and Bervie". Clearly it's good to be precise with the Almighty and the extent of blessing received, not to limit gratitude, but to earth praise.

The beauty of old wood, satin to the touch, warm and worn to a dust induced patina, painstakingly rubbed by accident or intent, polished by a procession of worshippers, done and dusted over decades.

The interlocking triunity of carved circles are symbols of grace love and communion; creating, redeeming, sustaining, life, light and love; gifts of Father, Son and Spirit, set within garlands of fruit and flowers.

The durability of cared for wood creates in King's College Chapel a sense of time, past present and hoped for. To sit and rest against wise old timber, is prayer.

A lot of books come into our house from libraries, ordered online, gifts, picked up in charity shops, now and again from someone doing what I'm doing quite regularly now, filleting and downsizing. Once you get to a certain age and stage it's worth asking if a book is worth buying as a lifetime investment! Howver there are times when the answer to that is still, yes. 

There are hundreds of books in our house, most of them in my study, which were bought with a view to future use, and in fairness most of them have been used, many of them read through, some of them still on a long term pending list. 

There are books read years ago I'll not read again – they are slowly finding new homes. I've a number of books I've had for years and never opened and they sit there offended at my inattention. But there are also books I've read two or three times and opened much more than that, and some of them are now bricks in my intellectual foundations – and some of these are biblical commentaries.

This one on Revelation is the most recent acquisition. It's expensive, nearly 1000 pages, and is easily now the critical commentary that comes nearest to being definitive, certainly in my lifetime. A biblical commentary on this scale is a work of exegetical art, and executed with the consummate skill that comes from deep scholarship, long thinking, a huge capacity for organising mutli-disciplinary sources of information, and in the case of Koester, a fluid and smooth writing style. The result is an encyclopedia on Revelation, and an interpretation of the text by an acknowledged expert.

There is a section on the history of interpretation, and few documents have been subjected to such weird, wild, misinterpretations; even amongst the more responsible and disciplined approaches there are differences and collisions of ideas. What lies at the heart of this book is an ancient and strangely contemporary confrontation between good and evil, life and death, violence ond peacemaking, empires clashing in the night as Arnold would say. Yes I have other commentaries on this strange book – and I've used and will still use them – but this is the book which will gather into coherence the results of a detailed, up to date exposition that pays attention to literary, historical, theological and textual issues, and do so against the social, political and cultural backgrounds of Greece, Rome and Israel. 

I was at a fruit garden and coffee centre in Montrose on October 1 (Yesterday). I was taking a funeral a bit later and came down early because I like to sit and think and prepare inwardly. Conducting a funeral should never become a familiar and well practiced set of skills. Death is an inevitable outcome of life, and each person's death is unique, special, important, and changes the way the world is. A presence has gone, a voice has fallen silent, a face only now visible in memory, a fellow sojourner has finished their particular and once travelled journey.

One of the first lessons of pastoral theology is to acknowledge with reverence the limited time and unlimited hopefulness of human life, our capacity as human beings to grow and change, to discover or hide from who we are, to be in fact, human. Death is that moment when potential and possibility have come to fulfilment, and the rest is left to God.

John Donne's words remain amongst the most cliched, quoted and irresistibly humane words on the way we should look on the death of another.

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less.
As well as if a promontory were.
As well as if a manor of thy friend's
Or of thine own were:
Any man's death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind,
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.

And so on my way to take the funeral of a lady who to our knowledge had no close relatives, (and indeed no family member attended her funeral) I stopped for a coffee and some food, and some reflection time. I came back into the car, started it, put it into reverse, and my eye caught a movement in the long grass about 30 feet away. I realised immediately I was looking at a stoat, frantically at work, hauling and pulling a young rabbit it had killed towards, presumably, its den. I stopped, switched on my camera and managed only three or four pictures before the movement stopped and the grass was still. What I saw was a rare sight, one of those moments when several random rare circumstances coincide, and you are by entire accident, a witness.

Life can be unpredictably cruel. As one philosopher said, death is the possibility that overshadows all my other possibilities. As a theologian yes I can create a framework of creation, fallen and broken, where accidents happen, where life only survives by the death of some other part of creation; even vegetarians consume parts of the world to go on living in the world. And I can ask questions, interrogate my own faith claims, wonder what kind of God creates this kind of world, ask the futile question which reduced to my recent encounter with creatures reads, why this young rabbit and not another? Who kills the stoat? Why is life so ridiculously cheap and so infinitely expensive, so casually disposed of but to the one whose life is taken the tragic stopping of a unique unrepeatable existence?

At which point, it was time to go and conduct a funeral, and to celebrate a life, the infinitely expensive gift, and to remember with gratitude someone uniquely precious, and to do so from the standpoint of hope, trust and faith. The New Tesament vibrates with life and shudders with hope in the face of a creation which groans and awaits its redemption. The last reality of the universe is not death, but eternal love, the creative patience of the God who says "Behold I make all things new!" Death is the last enemy, but it does not have the last word. That word is God's word, and it is a word that spoke the world into being, called into existence each person and all creatures into the mystery that both terrifies and liberates, life and existence within the purposes of a God defined as the Love, Light, and Hope of all things.

In a week or two I'm doing an evening of Desert island Discs with a crowd of folk in our church at Montrose. Eight pieces of music is a strict ration when there are so many kinds of music I like. But choosing them has taken me back to CDs and LP records I'd all but forgotten I had.  Some music I used to like and now have grown beyond. Tastes change and I've often wondered about the various factors and influences that underlie our attraction to certain kinds of music.

At certain times in life we hear a piece of music and it 'fits' or 'takes', in any case it becomes an important vehicle for our joy or sorrow, our questioning or celebrations, our love life or the life we love. Gabriel's Oboe is one such piece. I'll never forget that scene in The Mission where a Jesuit priest calms the fears of the native people by playing the oboe, and that sublime melody Morricone composed replete with a yearning that translated perfectly the human sense of wonder and longed for community with the other.

Other times particular circumstances coincide with music we have known and liked, but for these circumstances becomes a vital language for our faith, or our lack of it, our hopes or their absence, our confidence or our fears. I remember sitting in a friend's living room, a friend who accompanied me through some impossibly difficult days, and who put on Spem in Alium as background music. I had never heard it, and its complex harmonies and calm slowness of movement wrapped me in a sense of new possibility and hopefulness. It didn't solve the problems, answer the questions or take away the challenges of making tough decisions and walking through dark places. But ever since it has been a source of hope, pleasure, spiritual consolation and inner replenishment. Not all music does that.

Then there is the music you heard when you were young and which you'll never let go because it has become part of who you are and who you have been and are becoming. I watched the Johnny Cash concert in San Quentin as an 18 year old. I was hooked on Cash from then on. His anthem Man in Black remains for me an exemplary lyric of social protest, cultural critique and sheer humane defiance of all that dehumanises. Sunday Morning Comin' Down remains for me an authoritative reference point for understanding the pain, cost and loneliness of alcoholism. His later music is deep, dark and amongst the most moving and poignant laments for guilt and regret, and occasionally gives voice, and what a voice, to the trustful openness of redemptive love that enables forgiveness, life and hope in the midst of all that contradicts it.

These three pieces may or may not make it onto a final list which needs some balance, a story to tell, and a point of contact with those who will privilege me with listening to my choices of music. But the choosing has posited some quite intriguing questions about how and why we like the music we do, and what music does in the shaping and enriching of our view of the world.

You know you must be getting on a bit when you're prepared to read a 700 page tome replete with dates and names, and theories and movements about how people in the last 80 years have read and interpreted the New Testament. Why would you do that?

It's not as if historical critical study of the New Testament is at the cutting edge of contemporary life, unless it's in the academy, the learned society and those who have nothing better to do with their time.

Now that's an interesting evaluative criterion about a book which spends quite a lot of time examining evaluative criteria for authenticating the words of Jesus! I read this book because I had nothing better to do with my time. What would have been a better use of my time?

Well, read the New Testament itself, not what a lot of dead people wrote and said about it. After all if it really is the historic witness to the greatest story ever told, what it says is more important than the revisions and excisions of  generations of scholars.

Or. Read something that deals with one or other of the huge issues facing our world today, like the mass migration of refugees as people move away from war looking for safety; or the pollution and slow asphyxiation of our planet. Justice and creation care are surely more relevant than whether a demythologiser of ancient texts might have been right or wrong, or whether Matthew or Mark were first to post the patent application for the idea of a written Gospel? 

Or write something yourself that is about your own passion, your own interests, that comes out of your own lived experience rather than merely rehearsing what others have got excited about, or upset about decades ago.

Or bake a cake, cut the grass, go shopping, climb another mountain, read a novel, visit the sick, write and preach a sermon, go a run in the car, do some tapestry, paint the windows, go see a film, walk by the sea, get a haircut, pray for a while, listen to music, read some decent theology, take your camera to the country, support a charity…. actually I do all these things, but I also made time to read this book.

I suppose the point is we will always have something better to do than what we are doing, unless we can give good reasons for what we are doing, and why we are doing it now. So here's a go at three reasons why the time and mental energy reading this book would not have been better spent doing one or some or all of the above.

Intellectual humility. I read the Bible a lot, and anyone who does knows that it bristles with problems, upsets our assumptions, comes from strange places in even stranger times, is embedded in many cultures and that the texts were produced over the centuries of 5 empires. The New Testament is a literary masterpiece made up of documents that were so embedded in their context, so specific to occasion, so soaked in cultural and religious norms, beliefs and values, that the idea I can simply read off what's there as if it were an email from God, is not to reverence Scripture but to trivialise it, not to submit to Scripture but to compel the Bible to be what I think it should be by giving an arrogant primacy to what I think. One way to avoid that is to learn how others have read and tried to understand; the questions, insights and approaches of previous serious readers. Hence names like Dodd and Betz, Conzelmann and Kummel, Barrett and Sanders, Bultmann and Cullmann, Martyn and Wright, are not mere debating ciphers in a tedious display of ongoing literary and theological pedantry. They were and are amongst the Church's most important voices calling the Church to faithful engagement with its own foundation charter.

Balanced Perspective. Bultmann's famous dictum about no exegesis without presuppositions should need no further argument. I read from the standpoint of a western, white, late middle aged male, whose life has been spent in Scotland, a small island nation on the edge of Europe. My education is in philosophy, history and theology, supplemented with 50 years of serious reading around other subjects including natural history, biography, social sciences, poetry and literature. I speak only one language with any fluency; all I know of the southern hemisphere is from TV, online and other distance learning; I am a Scottish Baptist, a small evangelical presence in a country with a powerful Presbyterian and Calvinist history. I read the New Testament through these and other lenses I haven't mentioned, and even some I'm not even aware of. I need other viewpoints and to be shown the landscape of the text from other standpoints. The text requires of me that I listen with care to what others in the community of faith have seen or failed to see; I'm willing to borrow the binoculars of this or that companion on the way in order to see more clearly, and realise that what I took to be a faraway rock is in fact a cleverly built house.

Fruitful Conversation. I don't have to agree with all, or even much, that someone else writes in order to learn from them. Often the important gift brought to the table is not the definitive answer but the defining question. To be made to think, and often enough made to think again, is one of the ways the Spirit of God gets it through our thick skulls that we are not the arbiters of truth, nor the copywright and permissions controllers of the New Testament. To borrow the image from the unknown writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, "Seeing we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…" why wouldn't we listen to their testimony, the story of their journey, the discoveries they made that I missed when I was last there? That verse goes on "running with perseverance the race set before us…..looking to Jesus, the starter and finisher of our faith."

The mainstream of New Testament Study is overwhelmingly populated by men and women who seek to be faithful within academy and church. Yes many of these scholars dig deep into the foundations of faith and at times rattle us all around with questions and conclusions we don't like. But just one example. Those who dismissed and trashed the work of Rudolph Bultmann overlooked, or worse still deliberately ignored, Bultmann's ministry of preaching sermons deep dyed in Gospel urgency, his faithfulness against Hitler in his witness to the Gospel of Christ, and his own deep piety that was a powerful underwater current in his intellectual and spiritual life. 

I was minister of this church in the early 1980's.

It was completed in 1894, an historical accident in which serious money, skilled craftsmen, highest quality materials, a brilliant architect, and a family dynasty coincided in the building of a memorial church.

Thomas Coats Memorial is the magnum opus of Hippolyte Blanc, an architect who has around 40 church buildings to his credit, most of them in Scotland.

The other day visiting the University of the West of Scotland, I stood in the new student reception hub and took this photo through the window.

Inside there are some of the finest examples of ecclesiastical craftsmanship – alabaster figures adorn the pulpit, three panels of the life of Christ are illuminated in the chancel above the organ, the choir stalls are each decorated with carved oak angels, the walls are decorated with rosetta carving and the lead panelled glass is all hand made and crystal clear.

Above the chancel a vaulted ceiling has painted angels and stencilled work, and the 3 manual Hill organ with over 3,000 pipes is still in regular use. The mosaics in the vestibule were laid by Italian craftsmen, the royal doulton fitted toilets are a sight to behold, and the massive chandeliers which when lit display around 300 bulbs illumine the waem stone pillars. There is no stained glass as Blanc wanted the building to be bathed in natural light.

The open baptistry is made of finest Italian marble and is a major feature dominating the front of the church behind the large intricately carved communion table. Blanc insisted that the overall concept was to be viewed in its completeness; so while any one piece had its own integrity and identity as a work of art, it was its context in the overall building that gave it significance.

The church is a prominent landmark for miles around, and the tower rises as a dominent feature of Paisley High Street. If you haven't seen it, and you like history and architecture the building is really a must see. The congregation is now modest, and the building a massive drain on limited resources, but for 120 years they have sustained this landmark church at the centre of the town. If you are around on an open day, go in and enjoy.