Living Wittily

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  • From Windfarms to Worship.

    I was down leading worship and preaching at Montrose today. One of the joys of those journeys, apart from the people, is the journey. I drive from Westhill to Stonehaven through Maryculter, and past Netherley. Over the past year like everyone else I've become accustomed to the appearance of windfarms and the occasional

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    solitary windmill, towering over farm and fields. Now I see them and resent them less. They are inevitably intrustive, giant geometric structures with their own engineering aesthetic, but clashing with the different geometry of anatomy and topography. I'm aware of the pluses and minuses, the clashing interests of green sustainable energy and the massive carbon footprint created every time one of these colossus sized machines is manufactured and bolted into concrete buried in the ground on top of hills and moors. In a country with so much beautiful scenery and naturally formed landscape, much of it unspoilt, it will walys be possible to object, to complain and to resent the intrustion of machinery that forever alters skylines. Mind you they are also far less intrusive than pylons criss crossing the country.

    It's hard not to notice the Windfarms. But on the journey, paying attention, there are other things to notice.
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    Like the whitethroat sitting on a fence beside and acre of nettles south of Inverbervie.

    Like the intensely lemon yellow fields stretching to the shoreline with oilseed rape in full flower, and against an azure sea reflecting a sunlit sky.

    And speaking of colour, like the pink meadow flower (name to be confirmed and photo to follow!) clashing magnificently with the blazing yellow fields.

    Like the police speed trap cleverly sitting off the road and quite well camouflaged with said yello fields behind them. I use my cruise control in speed limits!

    Like the ostriches in their pen at Maryculter, long necks, long legs, evil eyes and pickaxe bills, looking at passing cars and dreaming of the race between souped up speed and the real thing.

    Like the spire of St Cyrus Church, seen from miles away, reminding me of many a walk along St Cyruse cliffs and beaches. And slopes emblazoned with another shade of yellow, gorse this time.

    And at the end of that journey, time spent with folk who work together at being a community of Jesus, sharing bread and wine, and finding in their worship and prayers, nourishment for roots and fruit.

     

  • Priorities, Prayers and Deciding Life is Unrepeatable Gift

    Readers of Living Wittily will have noticed my absence for the past week. One of the words I struggle to give priority to is prioritise!  That means most times I try to do everything in my diary and on my conscience, as well as meeting expectations, my own and other people's. That same perfectionist impracticality fuels a sense of responsibility for fulfilling promises, meeting deadlines, standing by commitments and therefore often living life with more energy than wisdom. Or so it seems now and again.

    This week I prioritised. Few things concentrate the mind more than the unlooked for advent of serious illness amongst those we care for most. So that's where energy, time, and all my focus has been. Thankfully we are now in a much better place and life goes on. But that very fact, "life goes on", is itself the reason for gratitude, humility and reflection.

    Gratitude because life is a precious and unique blessing of the Living God. Our deepest emotions and experiences come to us through those in whose lives we live and move and have our being.

    Humility because life is not ours to control, manage or dispose at will; we are human and have each our gift of years and days.

    Reflection because when it comes to happiness, fulfilment, meaning, being a gift to the world and the world being gift to us, with life we realise comes responsibility, opportunity, choice, the miracle of existence and that most human of perspectives, hope.

    This blog is about Living Wittily, serving God with mind and heart. Amongst the things this means is working out in the flux and frustration, the costs and consequences, the anxieties and aggravations, the loves and laughters, the gladness and the grief, the prayers and the promises, the give and the take of our daily lives, what it means to live with wise humility before the God who is sovereign in mercy and vulnerable in love.

    The photo below was taken by Sheila while on a walk last year – the tranquil beauty and delicate colour of the grass – if God so clothes the grass…..how much more….


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  • Psalms of Smudge 11: Under the Shadow of the Almighty…

    Smudge shadow

    Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow….. I will fear no evil.

  • Reading the Gospels and Psalms – A Daily Plan

    A number of years ago I decided I wanted to read through the Gospels regularly; likewise the Psalms. After some trial and error I created a daily reading chart that would take me through the four Gospels and the Book of Psalms every 3 months – four times a year. One chapter of the Gospel and one or two Psalms gets it done. Yes I try to do it daily; and yes sometimes I miss. But over a year I still get through a lot of Gospel and Psalms with odds on I've read them at least three times! This isn't a guilt trip – it needs discipline but with a small d. And the benefits are not surprising:

    The Gospels are read as narrative, not piecemeal. Granted a chapter can be a big chunk (John 6 isn't rec reational browsing) but over time there is a sense of coherence and unfolding story.

    The four Gospels take on their own characteristics and you become aware of Jesus as a multi-dimensional figure rather than a vague confluence of Gospel fragments arranging themselves in our minds as if the Gospel writers didn't mind us playing Scrabble with the text. Matthew's Jesus is didactic, a re-presentation of Moses and Exodus and new covenant on the Mount; Mark's Jesus is God in a hurry; Luke more than the others reaches to the margins in a story of inclusion, scandal and healing with Jesus as the protagonist of the Kingdom of God and the prophetic critique of power; John is all about glory, but a strange and beautiful glory of kenosis, the Word made flesh and dwelling amongst us, the presence in our history of I AM, and the defining confrontation of light and the darkness which can neither comprehend it or overcome it. 

    The voice of Jesus becomes familiar, and the different accents noticeable from Gospel to Gospel. There is the voice that speaks the words; and their is the message of how Jesus acts, what he does, how he behavesm who he is. By the way I want to do another post on What Would Jesus Do? I'm not at all sure we can be as confirdent of answering that question as is sometimes claimed.

    Then there's the Psalms. A book of prayers that disturbs as much as comforts; in which complaint and praise can pour from the same heart; in which silence can be companionable or threatening, contemplative or crushed; and in which the conversation with God moves from intimacy and joy to alienation and fear.

    Regular reading of the Psalms has been a spiritual habit of the church from the beginning. And no wonder. The whole range of emotion and human experience, the peaks and troughs of the faith journey, the endless perspectives of the soul arguing with, wrestling with, resting in, trusting in, fearful of, mindful of, angry at, wondering at, God.

    My new RSV New Testament and Psalms was bought to continue a daily exposure of heart and mind, conscience and will, to those four Gospels and the Prayer Book of Israel. Below is a file showing the first half of 2013. Soon I'll produce the one for July to December.

    Download Gospels and Psalms Daily

  • Retro RSV New Testament and Psalms – The Joy of Sacred Text


    When I quote the Bible from memory I always quote the RSV. I became a follower of Jesus in the late 1960's just at the time when the Good News for Modern Man New Testament was published. The non inclusive title showed how un-modern it was. A year or two later it graduated into The Good News Bible. By then I had been reading and studying the Bible for some years in the RSV, and some of its phrases, verses and chapters had become part of my newly furnished mind and increasing store of Bible knowledge and discourse.

    Neither the Good News Bible, nor its paraphrased rival The Living Bible ever displaced the RSV as the translation which spoke most convincingly to me with that combination of strangeness and familiarity that always creates the right balance of inner tension and attention when we read a sacred text for daily food. When the NIV came along, and Evangelical christians hailed it as an 'evangelical translation', it took me some years to concede that a preacher's translational preference is not a matter only of personal taste and experience. The text familiar to those amongst whom we live and move and preach our sermons becomes the preferred text for all kinds of practical and pastoral reasons more important than the personal. So for much of my  ministry I've preached from the NIV. Then came the New RSV, with its inclusive language, updated vocabulary and widespread adoption as the translation of preference for many Christian communities and denominations – but my sense is that the NRSV has little foothold amongst Evangelical Christians, and the NIV remains the default translation.

    Now, for study purposes, I use the NRSV and NIV together and with my leather bound not small RSV to hand – years of continuous reading make it still the most familiar text. Nevertheless. Regularly I dive into my King James Version ordination Bible and immerse myself in a language strange, familiar and beautiful, in those places where it is still unrivalled as the repository of sacred text rendered memorable and mysterious. Psalms, Isaiah, Genesis, John, Romans, the Parables, – how on earth did a committee produce a masterpiece? The question is mainly rhetorical – to try to answer you have to begin with the plagiarism of Tyndale's translation, woven into page after page with never a footnote acknowledgement!

    This narrative of Jim and his Bibles is by way of saying I recently bought myself a new RSV New Testament and Psalms. Now be careful. I didn't say a New Revised Standard Version New Testament and Psalms; but a new Revised Standard Version and Psalms. I mean the RSV not the NRSV.The picture at the top is of my new RSV and Psalms. Compact, portable, beautifully made, very clear and readable print, high quality paper, two ribbon markers, gilt edged. Come on – this is a real New Testament, a sacred book that by appearance and handling says – 'I'm not an Argos catalogue; |'m not a PDF; I'm not an airport paperback; I'm not the cheapest in a 3 for 2 offer; I'm not a Kindle; I'm not a niche market ploy; I'm the real thing – strange, potent, holy. Go on. Risk it. Open me!'

    Every 4 months I complete a daily reading pattern, working through the four Gospels and the book of Psalms. I'll say more about that soon in another post. This new RSV is now a daily companion for that journey.

  • Prayers of Intercession as Trinitarian Thoughtfulness

    Below is a prayer of Intercession written recently for a worship service I was invited to lead. It's probably a bit long and tries to do too much, but then again  if a prayer is written around the theme and reality of the Triune Love of God then it is likely to suffer from an embarrassment of riches and an overload of possibility! Yet to take the eternal inexhaustible communion of self-giving love of Father, Son and Spirit, as the pattern and paradigm of prayer, is to be called to prayer that is outwardly generous and forwardly hopeful and patiently creative. Anyway – this is one attempt to combine prayer for ourselves and for the world in a way that acknowledges the reproductive power of the Triune God in whose Love we live and move and have our being.

    The photo is from the cliffs at St Cyrus. The gorgeous golden gorse, the old fishing cottage and smoke houses, and miles of sand and waves – what's not to love about a world like that, eh?

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     Eternal
    God and Father, whose
    infinite yet intimate love,

    shared
    from all eternity between Father and Son,

    is
    the love you have now poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

     

    Drawn into that life of loving communion,

    we
    pray for those in our lives, touched and transformed by love,

    faithful,
    unselfish, generous, joyful, love.

    Lifelong
    friends and good neighbours,

    wives
    and husbands, parents and children,

    sisters
    and brothers, best friends and new friends:

    love overcoming
    differences in language, race, gender, religion,

    so that in the rich life of love between Father, Son and Spirit,

    we
    glimpse and discover love’s inexhaustible possibilities

     

    We pray for those whose lives are broken for lack of love:

    children
    whose safety and health come second to adult demands;

    friendships
    ended by exploitation and backstabbing;

    marriages
    shredded by unfaithfulness and shattered by broken promises;

    families
    fractured by social pressures, whether poverty or affluence;

    neighbourhoods
    where to survive love is weakness and compassion despised;

    businesses
    whose bottom line matters more than the welfare of their people.

     

    We
    pray for Churches, and for our church which
    you have called to be the Body of Christ.

    Give grace and imagination to
    embody and to model the love of God in Christ,

    which
    is gift of the Spirit and the sign of your Presence.

    Make us living conduits of your eternal love,

    generously given, lovingly available, patiently
    faithful,

    willingly sacrificial,persistently
    hopeful, and self-evidently joyful.

     

    Like
    Jesus gives us eyes to see Zacchaeus hiding in shame;

    voice to ask the name of violent terrified Legion;

    courage to
    stand between the vulnerable victim and those holding the stones;

    compassion to
    touch with tender risk those who like the leper are feared and excluded;

    generosity to
    see the best in the Samaritan, and go do likewise;

    reckless kindness to
    open our arms in welcome like the prodigal father;

    faith to
    take our loaves and fishes and bless them to the use of others;

     

    …and
    so to be perfect, as our Heavenly Father is perfect,

    whose
    sunlight love gives life to all within your radiance

    whose
    rain of mercy falls on each with life giving refreshment,

    who
    radiates and rains love that warms and waters,

    whose embrace holds and heals broken worlds and broken hearts alike,

    and
    all this in Jesus name and in the power of the Spirit,

    Amen

  • The Grace in Which we Stand

     

    Lord
    how much juice you can squeeze from a single grape.

    How
    much water you can draw from a single well.

    How
    great a flame you can kindle from a tiny spark.

    How
    great a tree you can grow from a tiny seed

    My
    soul is so dry that by itself it cannot pray;

    Yet
    you can squeeze from it the juice of a thousand prayers.

    My
    soul is so parched that by itself it cannot love;

    Yet
    you can draw from it boundless love for you and for my neighbour.

    My
    soul is so cold that by itself it has no joy;

    Yet
    you can light the fire of heavenly joy within me.

    My
    soul is so feeble that by itself it has no faith;

    Yet
    by your power my faith grows to a great height.

    Thank
    you for prayer, for love, for joy, for faith;

    Let
    me always be prayerful, loving, joyful, faithful.

    (Guigo the Carthusian, died 1188.)

  • Sunrise, Sunset and the Faithfulness of God

    Sunset on the mearns
    I took this photo on an evening drive down to Glasgow. I was looking across the Mearns to the west and stopped at a layby for ten minutes to gaze. Then continued to drive, this time with more care and attentiveness to a world both fragile and durable, and to a rhythm whose regularity recurs in the Psalms as a metaphor of God's faithfulness and the dailiness of blessing. "From sunrise to sunset the Lord's name is to be praised."

    In the Fiddler on the Roof, the image of sunrise and sunset describes growth and maturity, as the love of parents for children begins to relinquish and set free while still acknowledging that the investment of our deepest feelings in those we love, and enlarging the circle of those we love, is life's high calling. And in the lyrics, the recognition that life is movement and change, happiness and tears, and what we hang on to, what hangs on to us, is that same rhythm of faithfulness and the recurring cycle of light and life, sunrise, sunset. 

    Sunrise, sunset

    Sunrise, sunset

    Swiftly flow the days

    Seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers

    Blossoming even as we gaze


    Sunrise, sunset

    Sunrise, sunset

    Swiftly fly the years

    One season following another

    Laden with happiness and tears

    "Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father, there is no shadow of turning with thee…" Well, yes, that's true – though there are shadows, and sometimes it feels like they are cast by the back of God! And then you see a sunset, and our faith holds on for dear life to mystery, and we are smitten by a beauty redolent of love, gently revealing the goodness and mercy that surely follows us all the days of our lives, sunrise, sunset. 

  • The Christian Theologian, Nuclear Weapons, Strange Love, Original Sin, and the Sermon on the Mount


    300px-Christ_of_Saint_John_of_the_CrossI still remember the chill and existential angst as an impressionable if more than a little rebellious teenager watching Dr Strangelove. Two years after the Cuban crisis, and one year after the assassination of President Kennedy, the film dropped into a cultural worldview already distorted by fear, suspicion and the growing insanity of language that spoke of MAD, as mutual assured destruction. The mad antics and the terrifyingly implausibly plausible script did nothing to reassure, nor wat it meant to.

    I came across this clip here the other day and watched it with scared fascination. It isn't only the content, it's the jaunty optimism of the narrator describing the triumph of Britain dropping its first hydrogen bomb to explode in the atmosphere in 1957. At the time the fear was an icy terror, a remorselessly spreading glacial fear dubbed the cold war. Perhaps the upbeat BBC commentator was expressing relief that Britain was no longer defenceless against an evil and ambitious Russia. At the very least we could destroy cities of the perceived enemy in retaliation for any attack on our cities. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a million for a million, it's the same principle. It's called deterrence.

     



    MushroomThere has not been a nuclear exchange in the 56 years since that first successful atmospheric detonation of city killing bombs. Supporters of deterrence would say that's because deterrence works. Maybe. Opponents will argue that nuclear weapons are morally unjustifiable and pose an extinction level threat to human life, and indeed to the future of the planet. I don't know that the argument can be settled – by definition the proof would either never be forthcoming (in which case it worked, maybe) or there will be a catastrophic exchange in which case the argument becomes academic in a nihilistic sort of way.

    What's your point Jim? It isn't a global politicised point. I am not an expert in global security, military mind games, or defence strategy and policy. As a Christian theologian I have other concerns, a different perspective, alternative intellectual tools to think through the meaning of human existence and what makes for human flourishing. I watched the clip with a profound and solemn awareness that amongst the crucial components of a Christian worldview is an adequate doctrine of sin. The hydrogen bomb as it was then known carried a mushroom shaped shadow of ultimate menace for humanity's future – and the clip celebrates the success of British efforts to obtain this instrument of mass destruction. I use instrument deliberately – in the background of the clip it would have been entirely appropriate to play Holst's brutal and relentless Mars the Bringer of War to trumpet and announce the newly acquired capacity for orchestrated death on a symphonic scale.


    MacleodCelebrating the success of such a creation as nuclear weapon capacity is according to the late Lord Macleod, blasphemy, the original sin of creating from the foundation blocks of God's Creation, an instrument capable of global annihilation. I do not see that theological pronouncement as an overstatement. It is one of the most important prophetic denunciations of military and political power in the history of Scottish theology; theology, not politics. But it is theology effectively used to critique all intellectual accommodations to nuclear weapons as an option for the Christian mind. Of course not everyone agreed with Macleod; and not all will agree with what I'm writing here. But go back and look at the clip, listen to the narrative, and then read the Sermon on the Mount. How do the two inhabit the same moral, theological and political universe? 

    One further thought – the bomb lauded in the 1950's clip is a mere firework when compared with the destructive payload of current contemporary capacity. I recall Jesus argument from the lesser to the greater…how much more…?

  • The Psalms of Smudge 10: What are cats that you are mindful of them?

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    But their idols are…,
        made by human hands.

    They have mouths, but cannot speak,
        eyes, but cannot see.
     They have ears, but cannot hear,
        noses, but cannot smell.
     They have hands, but cannot feel,
        feet, but cannot walk,
        nor can they utter a sound with their throats…

        But I Praise you

        for I am fearfully and wonderfully made,

        your works are wonderful,I know that full well.