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Some years ago in a favourite antique shop I found this bust of Spurgeon. It is an original Victorian piece by John Adams Acton, dated 1878, when Spurgeon was at the zenith of his powers as a preacher, Nonconformist leader, and staunch defender of Reformed Calvinistic orthodoxy. I've never doubted either the genius or the incendiary spirituality of the most popular preacher in an age of celebrity preachers. His sermons still read as inspired and inspiring ruminations on the biblival texts. His love of the Bible and his total immersion in the text make him an exemplary Baptist. He spoke of soaking in the text as in the bath, until his body, deep dyed in the words of the Word, became bibline. 

He sits there on my church history bookshelves as a reminder of the importance of preaching, the centrality of the biblical text, and also as a reminder of the Gospel as centred in the person of Jesus. Yes, I know Spurgeon was a thorough-going Calvinist, and that to him Arminian theology was like a high pollen count to hay fever victims. But when he expostulated on Jesus, (no other word really captures the lyrical, emotional, imaginative flights of his  Gospel storytelling), he spoke of One who was quite simply his friend and Saviour, a crucified Lord and risen Companion, One in whom love and sacrifice gladly offered, pulls the rug from every pretention and excuse.

If speculation has any value, I'd speculate about what Spurgeon would now make of the way Jesus is preached today. He might even ask IF Jesus is preached today in any way that would make Jesus accessible, attractive, demanding, unignorable in the magical mystery melee of post-modern, post-Christian, post most things culture. Because Spurgeon knew how to connect with his own culturasl context. The sentiment and emotional appeal, the theatrical performances of extempore preaching, and the reasoned apologetic for a Saviour in an age where private guilt and public shame were powerful undertows, instilled in Spurgeon's preaching a magnetic core, pulling on the cultural longings of Victorian society.

Spurgeon was a man of his age, that's what made him a great preacher and a great man. But by the time he died the world had changed, and the theological climate was altogether more Acrtic for a theology more declarative than interrogative. He had been faithful in his time, as he saw it, and as he understood faithfulness to the Gospel and to Jesus. Even in his own lifetime he was becoming a man rooted in the past, drawing inspiration and strength from his beloved Puritans and Calvin.

His bust sits there, safely placed amongst my books on Puritanism, well away from modern authors and new theological thought forms that would seriously upset him. I think he would deplore hermeneutics; too much like evasion, dissimulation and intellectual mind games with the text! That wouldn't make him right, but it does point to a serious reminder for those of us charged with responsible biblical interpretation for and in our own age. To be faithful to truth doesn't mean a mind made up and closed to all further traffic; it does mean knowing where I stand, and why, and enough humility to confess my knowledge is partial, my judgements provisional, and my task of hearing and obeying the living Word of God a continuing discipline of listening. I treasure the words of another Evangelical statesman, John Stott:

"Life is a pilgrimage of learning, a voyage of discovery, in which our mistaken views are corrected, our distorted notions adjusted, our shallow opinions deepened, and some of our vast ignorance diminished. (Christian Mission and the Modern World, page 10)

Dialogue and humility, intellectual honesty and theological integrity, faithfulness to a tradition and refusal to close the mind to new and better ways of understanding and seeking truth – these are the characteristics of what that other old Victorian evangelical, Alexander Whyte, affirmed as the required stance of the hospitable hearted Evangelical. And it means this. If I live under an imperative to handle the Bible with reverence, respect and humility before God, then before God I am also required to follow where truth leads, to handle holy things with care, and therefore to tell my own presuppositions to quieten down so that the text can be heard above the din of my own opinions, conclusions, or even, God give grace, my certainties. Perhaps the most we can claim with certainty is that over a lifetime, by that same gentle, corrective grace of God, some of our vast ignorance is being diminished!

So Spurgeon looks across at my desk, from behind my shoulder. I honour both his memory and his work. He being dead yet speaketh as one of a great cloud of witnesses who give testimony to the power of the Bible to transform and convert, to sanctify and make new, to lift up heads and give strength to those who struggle and restore hope in those whose lives seem empty of life itself.

"God veiled the cross in darkness, and in darkness much of its deep meaning lies, not because God would not reveal it, but because we have not the capacity to discern it all..God only knows the love of God."

I love someone who can preach like that!

"In the beginning was the Word", the first clause of the theological masterpiece which is the Gospel of John. "And God said, "Let there be light….", the first words of God at the beginning of all things, according to that equally remarkable meteor of theology, the creation story in Genesis. For Christians, those two moments of divine articulation should be enough to teach us respect, indeed reverence, for words. Whether written or spoken, words have performative power, they make things happen, they have an impact, they influence for good or ill, persuade of truth or lie, affirm or diminish, enlighten or deceive, liberate or oppress, heal or hurt.

As a Christian I have a responsibility to give an account of my words; indeed Jesus warned that the day would come when we will give an account of every word we have spoken. Now there's a warning for the biblical literalist self-righteously ramming their words of truth down other people's throats. Elsewhere in the Gospels there's a quite different scenario; of a Roman Centurion, a man of few words and most of them were orders to other people. His personal servant is about to snuff it, but he has heard Jesus is a healer, someone who speaks with authority. So he uses his networks and his influence, he sends Jewish Elders to bring Jesus. To cut a short story shorter, the centurion gets a message to Jesus, "Say the word and my servant will be healed." Now there's a man who knows what words are for, who understands the power of the spoken word, someone used to seeing the performative power of words.

We live in a culture buried under words and blinded by an endless supply of new or familiar flickering images. We hear so much, we are losing our hearing; we see so much our sight is blurring from image overload. But stayng with words for the present, Marilyn Chandler McIntyre in her book Caring for Words in a World of Lies states with prophetic frankness, "Like any other life-sustaining resource, language can be depleted, polluted, contaminated, eroded, and filled with artificial stimulants."

I am persuaded – I like the confidence and settledness of Paul's phrase in older translations – "I am persuaded" that an ethic of language, a care for the words we speak and for the words we hear, is a crucial aspect of Christian witness. From the praise songs we sing to the texts we send; from our conversations at work to the confidences we hold in trust for others; from the jokes we tell and laugh at to the lies we refuse to tell; from the clever put downs of those we dislike to the caring affirmations of other people's worth; language carries with it obligations the follower of Jesus has to attend to.

That's why this Lent – only a week or two away, – I want to consider the nature of language, what it is that we do when we speak words to each other, how to endow words with sacramental significance so that speech becomes a means of grace, a strengthening of the soul in ourselves and others, and an influence for good, compassion, truthfulness and conciliation in our society. I'm tired of cliche and spin, of the conspiracy, not of silence, but of unworthy words spoken in half-truth, evasive rather than clarifying, cruel rather than compassionate, empty of human communion rather than full of attentive human presence.

I've just bought James Boyd White's book, Living Speech. Resisting the Empire of Force. I've read some of his writing before. As a Professor of Law at Harvard, and an accomplished literary critic, and a Christian, he knows about words. At a time when the Western world near absolutises freedom of speech and expression, it's time to examine much more closely the proper constraints on speech and expression; time too to recognise the power of language to dehumanise and diminish other human beings in the interests of our own agendas, prejudices and unacknowledged as well as confessed enmities.   

In the Old Aberdeen Book Shop yesterday for a long trawl through the shelves, a browse amongst the novels, a meandering nosey around the art books, and then a final quick reprise up and down the theology bookcases. And the providence of God rewards my perseverance!

This World and the Beyond. The Marburg Sermons of Rudolph Bultmann. Published in English in 1960, but these sermons were preached in Germany between 1936 and 1950, in the heart of Hitler's Germany. Bultmann was one of the giants of 20th Century New Testament scholarship, whose programme of demythologisation earned him bogey man status amongst more conservative biblical scholars. But even his most severe critics acknowledged the genius, brilliance and erudition of a scholar who dominated the discipline of New Testament Studies for two generations.

But these sermons are something else. They are the flip side of Bultmann the demythologising critic; they are the words of a kerygmatic theologian proclaiming the Kerygma, and extolling the reality of the crucified risen Christ. But they are also fearless preaching from the pulpit of a persecuted and pressured church, targeted by the most ruthless and ultimately godless of ideologies, and in danger of selling its soul and betraying its own family by colluding with an increasingly anti-semitic and lethal regime. Bultmann lived the Christian faith with a courage and hopeful forthrightness that is too easily forgotten by those opposed to his theology, and arrogantly dismissive of his Christian credentials. These sermons are Bultmann at his most devoted to Christ. Some of them positively ring with a confidence and boldness that was the last thing a regime seeking to domesticate the church wanted to hear.

Here are some lines from December 1939 – they should be read slowly, then once again imagining words like these proclaiming the Word in Germany 3 months into war:

He bestows upon us the light of life, that unquestioning transparent luminosity of our being. For in Him the love of God shines fully; because, if we are so prepared, he becomes understandable to us as the very act and initiative of the divine love, as the gift to us of the Divine love. It is the love of God which has always sustained us and ever will sustain us. To be sustained and held by the love of God means to have an attitude of unquestioning childlike acceptance, to be comforted and commit ourselves to the control of a hand which guides everything for the best even when we ourselves do not know what the best for us is.

By this means our life gains clarity and peace. This does not mean that in the ground plan of our life, in its purposes and aims, we embody an intelligent solution to the riddle of existence. Every question which is aimed at mastering the secret pattern of existence must in fact be silenced; and we remain ignorant of the goal to which God is leading us. No, our life gains clarity only because everything He sends us we may and must receive as the gift of His love.

"Let his loving glance deeply penetrate your soul, and His eternal light and joy will flood your being. Heartt and mind and spirit shall then awaken to new life."

That is the pure Gospel according to John. That is devotional writing of a quite different order from much of today's fast written, quickly thought, and swiftly forgotten Christian equivalents of the Mind, Body, Spirit and Self Help genres. What a generation of theologians in Germany in the second third of the 20th Century. Barth, Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, Brunner, Lohmeyer; these were heroes; but there were others whose scholarship and academic weight was thrown behind the Nazi will to power and allowed themselves to be used as justification for anti-semitic policies that would lead like iron rails to Auschwitz. Bultmann was not one of them.

Here's one of the things that make a Bible commentary the real thing. Scot McKnight has written a superb commentary on James – I hesitate to say the best because there are several other very good ones that do different things, or do what he does differently.

A big question is what kind of document is James? Calling it a letter or epistle or sermon or homily doesn't quite describe the tone, contents and assumed audience of this New Testament book – even the word book seems a misnomer. So McKnight asks the question, what is a letter intended to do, and he quotes some of the words of Seneca when he was accused of writing cafrelessly and informally:

"Now who talks carefully unless he also desires to talk affectedly? I prefer that my letters should be just what my conversation would be if you and I were sitting in one another's company or taking walks together – spontaneous and easy….If it were possible I should prefer to show, rather than speak, my feelings."

So, through Seneca, McKnight gives us the handle on this letter of James:

James is speaking, sometimes forthrightly and prophetically and other times more didactically, as if he were in the recipients' presence speaking to them. The letter is not an abstract "epistle" designed for posterity or intellectual reputation. It is a gritty in your face pastoral letter zippered up at times with some heated rhetoric" (61)

Reading James as a 21st Century Western middle aged white male kind of removes me from the immediacy of a relationship between James and those who would have heard his voice not only in the words but in the tone and the history of the relationship they shared. McKnight's suggestion is very helpful, especially as a caution when we try to over-exegete what at times is a Christian leader's exasperation or anxiety, or annoyance, or sadness or genuine anger. Students of James have always known the practical, in your face, this is what being a Christian sounds and looks like approach of James.

McKnight sees no compelling reason to deny that the author was, as tradition affirms, the brother of Jesus. And I wonder if there are memories and echoes of his brother's actions and words in his words, "Religion that is pure and undefiled is  this: care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world." Compassion and purity, mercy and single-minded faithfulness to God. Not for James the world-rejecting ethic; he is more interested in followers of Jesus being themselves the evidence of God's faithful mercy.   

The photo is of a sparrow hawk which flew into our patio doors and knocked itself out. It flew away a minute or two later with a headache, but posed long enough for a selfie!

In Scotland this week a gamekeeper was convicted and jailed for trapping and killing a goshawk. Wildlife crime is a significant threat to a number of rare and protected species in Scotland, often committed by estate workers trying to protect stocks of game birds, or by those stealing eggs or young birds for the black market in hawks and falcons. Now it seems Dundee University have developed a forensic technique for recovering human fingerprints from flight feathers. One further weapon against those who persecute and threaten the viability of some of Scotland's finest and rarest wildlife.

In a separate news item the house sparrow, the starling and a cluster of field and garden birds are in serious decline across the country. I remember on the farms in childhood the common sight of starlings congregating on trees or under eaves to roost, preceded by the dusk starling flight ballet which is one of the wonders of bird watching. And the noise of a clutter of several dozen house sparrows in the hay shed was regular background music. But it seems modern houses are too green now; there aren't as many gaps and holes, fewer undisturbed outbuildings, there is much less noise free and menace free space and spaces.

In a piece of badly stretched eisegesis I hear the words of Jesus, "Consider the birds of the air", and wonder what we are doing to our world. There is an entire multi-million pound industry in wild bird food, evident enough at garden centres and supermarkets, so obviously some people consider the birds. We've just had the annual garden birdwatch and await statistics which help us understand what's happening to bird populations. The onward trend has been downwards year on year On the radio yesterday a Professor of Environmental Studies who specialises in the impact on the environment of wildlife populations and species extinction raised concerns that human beings seem oblivious to, or wilfully ignore the fact, that in destroying living space and pushing species to extinction we are permanently impoverishing the biosphere that is our planet.

So what would Scotland be like without starlings, sparrows, blackbirds, chaffinches, greenfinches, robins, blue, great, coal and long tailed tits, wrens, yellowhammers, thrushes, siskins? And in the fields curlews, lapwings, partridges, skylarks, snipes, wheatear? "Consider the birds of the air" – there's a sermon in those words that goes deeper than not worrying about clothes and food. Because here's the irony. In the Palestine of Jesus' time birds weren't threatened with extinction – otherwise Jesus wee illustration wouldn't have worked very well as an anxiety reducing image. "Consider the birds of the air, how the starlings have fallen by 90% in four decades….." No. Doesn't work as reassurance. 

My lifelong interest in birds goes back to earliest childhood, so my own perspective is now over 6 decades. I still thrill to the cry of a curlew, my favourite Scottish bird call, but it's a sound heard now only rarely, and in special places. In Ayrshire in the late 50's and 60's it was part of the usual accompaniment of a walk in a field. My inner life is still smiling from memories of roosting starlings, squabbling sparrows, diving lapwings by the score, soaring skylarks several to a field, and in every farm I lived on, 8 in 16 years, there were also pied wagtails, on several farms yellow wagtails, and in the burn, dippers.

It's hard to see the bird population ever recover from the human footprints trampled all over the countryside. So Jesus' words are increasingly difficult to take at face value in a world where we cheerfully or carelessly consider only ourselves. They need to be heard in a new context, as a reminder of creation care, stewardship of life, and human wisdom. Ornithology as natural theology, a theology of nature, ornitheology.

The word sentimental has variable currency value for most of us. Sentimentality is often portrayed as over-emotional responsiveness, the heart rules the head, and then our feelings get the better of us. The assumed better course is to be rational and cool, to look at things in the cold light of reality, to make decisions or responses based on evidence weighed. Most times that's fine. It works. Sentimentality has a lot to answer for. Much of what we hoard is kept not because it has inherent value or usefulness, but because of what it means to us. From pets to cars, from a favourite shirt to a crumpled photo, we value and hang on to stuff that nobody else would give house room. 

I've quite often caught myself out being sentimental. I have a shirt that is worn, frayed, is still just about wearable, but only about the house. On my computer is a photo of my mother when she was 21, it sits on my desktop and can be opened to full view with a click. In my desk drawer are assorted items of greater and lesser value if you mean what they cost, or what they could now be sold for. But their Ebay value isn't even irrelevant to me; it's a non question. These objets d'art are life-savers, gifts and fragments of kindness that have come my way over the years. They include a pewter dove, an olive wood cross, a cold chisel a century old that belonged to my great grandfather who was a miner, a letter opener and a beautifully lacquered and gold fountain pen. There are books on my shelves I won't read again, but I did once, and they were the right words at the right time. I could give them to a charity shop, a good few of them would sell for a good price, but I've not managed to be as ruthless and utilitarian with them during my periodic purges. See. Heart ruling head, feelings dictating, the emotional blackmail of the object!

There's a serious point to these meanderings. While sentimentality may be an undesirable trait, and may be a self-indulgent weakness for the emotional payload, it isn't always the cheap option of the immature. A much older word we might do well to recover is sensibility, and that word is about emotional intelligence, capacity for compassion, commitment to understanding and a predisposition to courtesy. Sentiment is about our inner sense of things, and is at its most significant precisely when it challenges the cool head, the decisions and actions that are dictated by rational thought in the cold light of day. Sentimentality is no worse and no better than rationality if either of them excludes the other as a way of knowing, of understanding the world and of encountering wisely and relating well to other human beings.

And here's the point of all this. The other day I realised my ring was loose on my right hand. It was an engagement gift from Sheila, and the carnelian stone had come out. No idea where it is, and unlikely to find it. So should it be repaired with a new stone, or not, or get another ring? Well another ring replaces a ring but the new ring will always be a mere reminder of the original, and will have none of the history, wear and tear and deep emotional connotations of the first. If I don't repair it or replace it I'm left with an unwearable piece of gold in the shape of a ring, with neither beauty nor usefulness.

If I get it repaired it will cost a fair amount of money. And you know what. The ring is worth it. Not in hard cash terms as gold. But for what it signifies; for its sentimental value. Economics don't come into it, so long as it can be afforded. Commonsense cutting of losses, or going for something more modern (Hah! I've had it long enough for it to be a very young antique!) – these thoughts, and others like them were dismissed by the jeweller who peered at the hallmark and at the stoneless ring and said, with what can only be described as a categorical imperatival tone, "You must get it repaired." And she wasn't talking about the gold value either. She was upholding deeper values, and implicating me the customer in what was really a conspiracy to outwit all the pragmatists, rationalists and economists. This ring isn't about anything else but two people's stories told as one story for over four decades. That ring fits my finger because it has worn itself into the slightly off-circular shape of a human finger impressing for years on soft gold.

Sentimentality at its best is the recognition that feelings are important indicators of truth. The fixing of my engagement ring is a statement to a culture where barcodes and bargains, best value and disposability are systemic. Some things are not disposable, best value doesn't always have to mean cheapest, and barcodes are for markets but not, ever, for those peopled events in our lives that are without price.