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Wolff on Micah 1. Playing with words, not to hide truth but to make it unforgettable

You'll see from the sidebar that I've been reading Hans Walter Wolff's far too little known exposition, Micah the Prophet. Published in English translation in 1981 it is a different kind of commentary. The first half is exposition which is a brilliant example of erudition made accessible, and biblical theology made relevant to contemporary cultural realities.

The second half (remember, published 1981) looks at problems faced by the world then – early ecological concerns, injustice and the poverty of the "Third World", European terrosist cells. In this section of the book Wolff looks at terrorism, social responsibility, ecology, the future of the church, and examines the implications for Christian existence through the lens of Micah. It's a fascinating experiment in Bible study that was way ahead of its time and still excites to read.

One of my lightly and undogmatically held theories is that at different times in our own lifetime certain biblical books seem to have a specific relevance to our lived experience, personally, nationally and globally. Micah is a prophet whose time has come yet again. Around the time Wolff was writing, Jimmy Carter began his Presidency hoping he would be remembered for an administration that acted justly, loved mercy and walked humbly. However much he succeeded or failed, he did articulate the fundamental ethical essentials for human flourishing and co-operative existence, and those same meta-values remain required principles of political action and social responsibility. Without them we will have more of the world we presently have, and less of the world God intends where human community grows out of justice, mercy and dethroned pride.

Here's Wolff on Micah's use of wordplay, and I read it the night the news reports on the Iraq inquiry featured the evidence of Tony Blair, when it seems words were played with in a quite different way:

Micah is a master at play on words. They help to make his message unforgettable…I am not interested in inspiring you to construct linguistically more brilliant or substantively more accurate proverbs. Rather my point is this: prophetic language is well honed. It is clear, unambiguous and penetrating. As such, it is therefore language that can be remembered, not readily forgotten; a person has to have heard it only once. In our current crises…the language we use to proclaim our message dare not piddle around with generalities, four fifths of which go in one ear and out the other without any effect. Micah is concerned with every syllable that he employs. (page 40-1)

There it is – clear, unambiguous, penetrating, not piddling around with generalities, concerned with every syllable. That would give preaching a bit more bite, urgency and prophetic edge finely honed.

More of Wolff anon

Meanwhile, here's another kind of wordplay that subverts our cognitive sleepiness.

What did you read first – the colour or the words?

What happens in your head when you read the word orange and it is printed in green?

And what conclusions do we jump to when we read or hear words we think we already understand?

Words like act justly

love mercy

walk humbly.

.

30 January 2010
If truth is the first casualty of war, then untruth is often the first causality of war!

The Iraq war is a tragedy, whatever its legal justification.

When that legal justification is so politicised that the basis of the decision is coated in teflon misinformation, then tragedy deepens.

Some witnesses at the current Iraq enquiry have been depressingly predictable in their use of Orwellian discourse; so human tragedy is trivialised by self serving rhetoric.

Faith in the overall process of truth gathering is not helped by a recently announced 70 year gagging order on papers relating to the death of Dr Kelly, the expert on Weapons of Mass Destruction, whose suicide remains a tragic enigma.

The former Attorney General was quite open about his total change of mind following a visit to the United States and consultation with US lawyers from the State department.

At no time, we are told, was his arm twisted, by US or UK senior politicians. So we are left to conclude that US lawyers are more competent in International Law relating to war and UN Resolutions than our own Attorney General.

Today Tony Blair gives evidence. We already heard some of his case for his own defence on the Fern Britton interview. And it would be wrong to prejudge what he will say, I suppose.

So rather than say more I want to quote a passage from Thomas Merton, The Non-Violent Alternative, (published 1971 several years after Merton's death):

"War-makers in the twentieth century have gone far toward creating a political language so obscure, so apt for treachery, so ambiguous, that it can no longer serve as an instrument for peace; it is good only for war. But why? because the language of the war-maker is self-enclosed in finality. It does not invite reasonable dialogu, it uses language to silence dialogue, to block communication, so that instead of words the two sides may trade divisions, positions, villages, air bases, cities – and of course the lives of the peoploe in them. The daily toll of the killed (or the "kill ratio") is perfunctorily scrutinized and decoded. And the totals are expertly managed by "ministers of truth" so that the newspaper reader may get the right message.

Our side is always ahead. He who is winning must be the one who is right. But we are right, therefore we must be winning. Once again we have the beautiful, narcissistic tautology of war – or of advertising…There is no communicating with anyone else, because anyone who does not agree, who is outside the charmed circle, is wrong, is evil, is already in hell." (Merton in Non Violent Alternative, 243-44)

Forty years on Merton's words are worth reading again,

after we hear the news reports of what was said,

what wasn't said,

and what wasn't said in what was said,

at the Iraq inquiry today.

29 January 2010
Celtic myths, Gaelic blessings, and “Deep Peace” nevertheless!

My friend Donald Meek, retired Professor of Celtic Studies, has a healthy and quite sharp scepticism about what is often stated and overstated about Celtic Christianity. Not so much the reality and existence of such a tradition but its romanticisation, its overblown eco-friendliness, its surprisingly comforting resonance in a culture looking for nostalgic comfort. His book on Celtic Christianity feels like a bucket of icy peat-tinted water drawn from a Highland river in full spate and thrown over the heated imaginations and ahistorical enthusiasms of those who confuse feelgood vagueness with the realities of the darker ages on these islands.

All of which said, there is a rich tradition of poetry, story and oral liturgy that does indeed still convey a devotional and historically valid form of spirituality. There are rhythms of language that survive translation so long as the translator resists the urge to 'improve' or 'adapt' the words to contemporary taste. Translation of a historical text isn't about pleasing the contemporary consumer – it's an act of communication that works hard to make an original voice heard and read in all its integrity and oddity.

Over Christmas I bought a compilation of music on which Lesley Garrett sings a Gaelic blessing. I've come to love this piece of music, words sung out in compassionate benediction, and the words themselves capable of stirring restlessness as longing for peace and rest in a world that is so often hard-edged, demanding, selfish and lacking – well compassionate benediction.

Deep peace of the running wave to you

Deep peace of the flowing air to you

Deep peace of the quiet earth to you

Deep peace of the shining stars to you

Deep peace of the Son of peace to you, forever,

(Early Scottish)
The photo is from imagestar here.

28 January 2010
Dan Paterson’s poem “Correctives”

Guest post from Graeme Clark about a favourite poet and poem.

I have been reading a new poetry book, Rain by Don Paterson. An accomplished Jazz musician and a wonderful poet who has recently received the poetry medal as well as other numerous awards. He has twin sons. One
had an easy birth, as he says, Russell was fine, ‘He just popped out’,
but Jamie, had a more difficult birth and was left with a slight
disability, a tremor in his left hand. The poem below is about this but about much much more . . .

Correctives, by Don Paterson

The shudder in my son’s left hand
he cures with one touch from his right,
two fingertips laid feather light
to still his pen. He understands

the whole man must be his own brother
for no man is himself alone;
though some of us have never known
the one hand’s kindness to another.

Don Paterson, Rain (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 2009),16

27 January 2010
“The greatest of these is love” – On not looking too hard for the Church’s raison d’etre

Below is the Prayer of Intercession I composed and offered within the worship service at which I was also preaching yesterday. I don't often post prayers of my own. This one touches deep places in the way I look at the world, the church and the people who move in and out of our lives. If using some or all of it lifts your heart and hands to God so much better. It is written around the seldom noted superlative at the end of I Corinthians 13, "Faith, hope and love remain, but the greatest of these is love". For all our talk of mission and missional – there is a job description for the Church that isn't hard to understand – just hard to live in, live up to, live towards.

Eternal God and
Father,

Whose infinite yet
intimate love

shared from all
eternity between Father, Son and Spirit,

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

We pray for all those
people in our lives,

Who have been 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

overcoming
differences in language, race, gender, religion.

O God, in that rich
life of love as Father, Son and Spirit,

We see love’s
inexhaustible possibilities:

So 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 broken promises;

Families fractured
by social pressures, whether poverty or affluence;

Neighbourhoods
where love is weakness and compassion despised

Businesses whose
bottom line isn’t the welfare of the work-force;

We pray for
Churches, and for our church

which you have
called to be the Body of Christ,

to embody and to model
the love of God in Christ,

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

May our love for
others, like your eternal love,

Be generously
given, lovingly available,

patiently faithful,
willingly sacrificial

persistently
hopeful, and self-evidently joyful.

We pray for those
we’ve only heard of on television,

Those whose lives
disintegrate under pressures of hate and violence,

Whose lives are in
different ways, damaged, diminished, defeated,

by the absence of love, a vacuum
filled by the power of hate.

Two boys whose home
was so toxic they tortured other children

The 19 year old
whose reckless driving killed his friend

The mother who made
her own son ill, to gain media attention

The teacher injured
trying to separate fighting pupils

The baby abducted
in Ireland, and returned on the Cathedral steps

The Sikh neighbour
stabbed to death defending a young woman from a mugger

These and so many
more, human lives caught in the crossfire of love and hate,

we hold them before
your healing mercy:

God of love and
hope,

we pray for our
society, our city, our neighbourhoods,

and for ourselves
as your ambassadors of love

Make us ministers
of reconciliation with a passion for peacemaking

Fill us with
compassion for the poor, the hungry, the lonely

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

courage to ask the
name of violent terrified Legion;

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

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

to see the best in
the Samaritan and go do likewise –

to open our arms in
welcome like the prodigal father

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 its radiance,

whose rain of mercy
falls with life giving refreshment,

who reaches out
with a love that warms and waters,

embraces, holds
and heals a broken world,

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

Amen.

25 January 2010
“The table is spread….”
I like it when two entirely different people, write in two very different styles, on a similar theme, and from two historically and culturally alien perspectives, enrich our theological understanding, and restore faith in the continuity and congruence of the Christian tradition.

A Seventeenth Century rural parson poet, and a Twentieth Century Swiss Reformed dogmatician, writing on what it is that goes on in the heart of the unworthy guest, just before sitting at the Lord's Table.
"The conversion which the Word of grace ascribes to him consists in the exercise of the freedom which he does not need to assume or give to himself because this is not necessary, since it has been already given in what God has long since done for the world and for his own salutary humbling and therefore for his peace and for that of the whole world.

The Word of grace simply tells him that the table is spread for him and for all, but that a few places – his own included - are still vacant, and would he be so good as to sit down and fall to, instead of standing about and cleverly or foolishly prattling. Everything else will then be discovered, or is really discovered already.

Karl Barth Church Dogmatics,The Doctrine of Reconciliation, IV.3.1, page 247.

*************************

Love (3)

Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack

From my first entrance in,

Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,

If I lack'd anything.

A guest, I answer'd, worthy to be here:

Love said, You shall be he.

I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah, my dear,

I cannot look on thee.

Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,

Who made the eyes but I?

Truth, Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.

And know you not, says Love, who bore the blame?

My dear, then I will serve.

You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat:

So I did sit and eat.
George Herbert, The Temple.
24 January 2010
Today our John Lewis Hessian shopping bag kept scuffing the pavement.

So either

The handles are too long

Or

My arms are too long

Or

My legs are too short

Or

My posture has slumped

Or

The pavements undulate without warning

Or

I need a shopping bag with length adjustable handles.

23 January 2010
Kierkegaard and the ministry of cogntive dissonance

OK I know it's late. (See Monday's post, for what exactly it is that's late). The book was elsewhere and I had other things to do than go looking for it. That time of the year. A concatenation of my own and other people's deadlines, and an understandable desire to preserve the fugitive fragments of a rapidly eroding sanity.

But I've now retrieved it. So here's the promised Kierkegaard passage in which he makes cognitive dissonance an art form, and in doing so makes Christian discipleship modelled on Jesus sound far too difficult. Which Kierkegaard (and Jesus) would say, is as it should be.

"To be sacrificed is…as long as the world remains the world, a far greater achievement than to conquer; for the world is not so perfect that to be victorious in the world by adaptation to the world does not involve a dubious mixture of the world's paltriness.

To be victorious in the world is like becoming something great in the world; ordinarily to become something great in the world is a dubious matter, because the world is not so excellent that its judgement of greatness unequivocally has great significance – except as unconscious sarcasm."

(Quoted in the superb Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity and the Trinity. A Brief Systematic Theology (Fortress, 2001), 124

See what I mean? Makes you feel positively cognitively dissonated, eh!

But read it till you get it!

And then be grateful for those Christian radicals like Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer, Simone Weil, J H Yoder, and other theologians of the cross, whose task is to disperse the algae of complacency and intellectual comfort, that threatens to suffocate thought and heart by occluding light and reducing oxygen.

I know. A far fetched image. But whatever else Kierkegaard does, he agitates the depths of thought, breaks up the settled mental surface, and makes the heart beat faster.

…………………

Just after writing the above, I was chasing through a biography of Malcolm Muggeridge for something, and came across this from one of Muggeridge's favourite writers, Simone Weil:

"He whose soul remains ever turned in the direction of God while the nail pierces it, finds himself nailed on to the very centre of the universe…It is at the intersection of creation and its Creator. This point of intersection is the point of intersection of the branches of the Cross."

From Simone Weil, Waiting on God (Fontana, 1950) 93-4.

23 January 2010
Larkin, Vivaldi, Monet and a walk in the park

Walked in the park yesterday and found myself looking for signs of life on the trees.

No joy. Too early.

It was around 4.00p.m. and still light.

Yet felt as if something was being signalled.

Nearly a month after the shortest day.

And in that month all but unbroken cold.

Wanting it to be Spring doesn't make it so.

But in anticipation here's Philip Larkin.

THE TREES

The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said;

The recent buds relax and spread

Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again

and we grow old? No, they die too.

Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

……

This should be read just before listening to Vivaldi's Spring Suite….and then read again as it finishes.

Yes.

Honestly.

Try it.

Oh, and then admire a Monet!

22 January 2010
Tightropes, risk aversion and life

It's one of those very occasional coincidences about which I am unreasonably and quietly smug. Several months after I did a paper on Carol Ann Duffy's poetry at a Theology Colloquium, a year or two ago, I touted her for poet laureate, – and there you go – she's nominated and appointed. I've enjoyed her poetry for years. The poem below is a favourite, one of those playful imaginings that takes a serious view of human risk-taking and fulfilment. In it we are participant, spectator and narrator – and we do understand that frisson of danger, the vicarious wishing it was us up there but glad it isn't, which is why we are the first to applaud his success.

Listening the other day to the CEO of the Health and Safety Executive, fighting back against the urban and rural myths about alleged Health and Safety regulations zealously applied to all things fun. She said something that I want to think about in relation to Christian discipleship. She said those responsible for risk-assessment had contracted risk aversion. her point was that a risk assessment was never meant to be a reason to prohibit an activity just because there was any perceived risk. Risk aversion is when decisions are made out of fear, when no matter what the activity someone wants to put the safety catch on, when excitement, thrill and uncertainty are so comprehensively extracted from life that all you are left with is bland, safe and a diminishment of the spirit.

So here's Carol Ann, exploring the ambiguous relationship we all have with risk and danger, and that inexplicable urge we shouldn't always repress, to step out on the tightrope, or as Jesus might have said, " to launch into the deep"

Talent

This is the word tightrope. Now imagine

a man, inching across it in the space

between our thoughts. He holds our breath.

There is no word net.

You want him to fall, don't you?

I guessed as much; he teeters but succeeds.

The word applause is written all over him.

Carol Ann Duffy, Selected Poems (Penguin: 1999), Page 17

21 January 2010