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Mobile Phone Priority, or God and the Blackberry

Two scenarios observed, and one reported, on the same day.

Walking behind three visitors to Old Aberdeen, who were wandering three abreast on the pavement. They are engaged in conversation with each other when one is called on their mobile. He answers, just as a second mobile rings and she too answers. Leaving the third, who promptly took out her mobile, punched a number and started talking. Three people move from one conversation with each other to three conversation with three different other people. But then they start talking to each other again, while each is still on their phone. Is this a modern parable of the tower of Babel, or is this the evolution of multiple conversation?

Walking in Crathes Castle we come across a woman playing cricket with her son. He is bowling and she knows how to handle the bat. Half an hour later we are walking past again, this time the boy is batting and mum is – well mum is bowling, while talking to someone on her mobile (not hands free!). Now I don't know a lot about cricket – but I think when bowling, the non bowling arm is supposed to come down before the bowling arm, to allow balance, alignment and accuracy. Anyway, the lad was becoming frustrated because mum is multi-tasking instead of paying attention to the fine art of bowling. The mobile conversation is more important than attentiveness to her son.

Talking with a friend later the same day about a minister who last week was leading a half day church conference. At the time for quiet prayer together in which the participants had been asked by the minister to reflect on the significance of listening to God, the minister was observed thumbing away on his Blackberry.

All of which makes me ask – when the choice is between a person and a mobile, which is to be given priority? I know – there is also a person at the other end of the mobile. Yes – but that just makes me ask the same question another way – how important is it for us to be present to those who are in our presence? Including God, who as far as I know doesn't require ICT to speak – just our attention. By the way, this post isn't an apologia by a luddite, or a swipe at technology as such – just some shared observations on changing patterns of behaviour that seem to me to have important implications for our practice of what used to be called courtesy.

30 June 2009
Astringent Spirituality and the Prayers of Kierkegaard

Burrowing around in my friend Chris's second-hand bookshop up in Old Aberdeen, I unearthed one of those instantly recognisable gems. You know, those ones that you know exist, you've just never seen this particular one before. The Prayers of Kierkegaard, edited by Perry D Lefevre, is a book of two halves – the first a collection of his prayers from throughout his works, the second a brief but brilliant editorial introduction to Kierkegaard's thought.

Given that P T Forsyth and James Denney were admirers of the Danish philosopher-theologian, I'd expect to find in his writing rebuke and consololation, gospel seriousness and humane sensitivity, moral demand anchored in a radically transformative conception of enabling grace. And it's there in thick chunky nuggets of pastoral truth-telling. Instead of the self-concerned individualism and privatised fulfilment of much contemporary spirituality, Kierkegaard (like Bonhoeffer), calls to a much more astringent way of life.

Like many others Kierkegaard is unfinished business for me. I've read several of his books in English translation, but there is much more I've never read. You can't read everything. But I've a feeling there's more of Kierkegaard I should have read. Still, for now I'm using one of these prayers each day – there's around a hundred of them. Here's one I've already lingered over….

NOT TO ADMIRE BUT TO FOLLOW

O Lord Jesus Christ, Thou didst not come to the world to be served, but also surely not to be admired or in that sense to be worshipped. Thou wast the way and the truth – and it was followers only Thou didst demand. Arouse us therefore if we have dozed away into this delusion, save us from the error of wishing to admire Thee instead of being willing to follow Thee and to resemble Thee.

29 June 2009
An Aberdeen wedding and a wee reflection on Christian marriage

Just back from Aberdeen where I was conducting a marriage ceremony for a family I've known for many a year. The groom was 10 years old last time I saw him before he emigrated to Australia (16 years ago). Came back to Scotland to get married though – Australia doesn't have a University founded in 1495, nor a University chapel with oak carving older than the Reformation!

I still think a Christian marriage service bears witness to a way of living that at its best is a demanding critique of our throwaway, serial relationship, obsessively individualist culture. Faithfulness gives love its discipline and its joy; covenant promises have no inbuilt guarantee they won't be broken, but they are a clear and public statement of intent to which each is accountable.

Amongst the extraordinary privileges of being a minister, is being invited to turn water into wine, to take the hopes and desires and loves of two people, and through their promised faithfulness and incredible courage of trust in each other, produce that intoxicating joy of knowing, against all the odds and to their endless surpise, not only that they are loved – but that they say so in public, and bear witness to their intention to live the rest of their lives cherishing and exploring the mystery that is this other person who out of all other possibilities, said yes to them, on that day, and in front of all the people who matter most in their lives. I never cease to wonder at the sheer crazy hopefulness that informs that kind of risk taking – and thank God that still, there are those like John and Julie, who do so.

28 June 2009
Walter Brueggemann: “Decrease / Increase” as a rule of life
"He must increase, and I must decrease."

Any excuse to post this Caravaggio painting of a young Jesus daring ageing Peter and Andrew to follow into an unknown future. Discipleship is risk and trust, and following becomes a way of life in which self fulfilment might mean giving ourselves away for the sake of something bigger than our selves.

Walter Brueggemann turns John the Baptist's ambitious lack of personal ambition into such a way of living, relating, reconciling and healing.

Decrease / Increase as a rule of life triggers deeply subversive responses to the life around us, and within us.
- Decrease what is greedy, what is frantic consumerism, for the increase of simple, life-giving sharing.
- Decrease what is fearful and defnsive, for the increase of life-giving compassion and generosity.
- Decrease what is fraudulent and pretense, for the increase of life-giving truth-telling in your life, truth-telling about you and your neighbour, about the sickness of our society and our enmeshment in that sickness.
- Decrease what is hateful and alienating, for the increase of healing and forgiveness, which finally are the only source of life
Walter Brueggemann, The Threat of Life. Sermons on pain, Power and Weakness (Fortress, 1996), page 68
25 June 2009
Not to serve but to be served is also a biblical principle

Just back from a 24 hour meeting of our denominational Ministry Resource Team. As committee's go this group is about as good as it gets. Different perspectives, wide experience, the right combination of frankness and courtesy, a safe place for adventurous thinking and the contemplation of risk, newness and different possibility.

One of the times of prayerful reflection was around John 13. We were asked to sit quietly and read it, reflect on what it might have to say to us in our work together, or in our own journey towards a deeper grasp of what it means to be a minister of Jesus Christ. I've read this passage so many times – its cadences in the RSV are like footprints in my textual memory. Again and again it surprises me. And did so again.

It's that discordant note that Peter can't help sounding, his habit of not getting the point, of wanting to set the terms of every relationship. Evelyn Underhill, one of the finest spiritual directors the Anglican communion ever produced, pointed out the hard work of unselfing the self, the humility to make space for the other. And there it is. Peter won't wash feet so Jesus does. Jesus washes feet but then Peter doesn't want his own feet washed by Jesus. Then he wants to be washed all over, hands, head and all.

John 13 is often seen as a depiction of ministry as serving others, just like Jesus. But this embarrassing exchange is also yet one more time when the self gets in the way. Peter isn't prepared to be served, unless it's on his terms. Underhill also spoke of the claimfulness of the self, the issue of status, rights and reputation. And so, maybe the hardest thing about ministry isn't the serving of others, which may or may not require of us a healthy humility. The more Christlike attitude may be that degree of humility that accepts service from another, that is humble enough to have our feet washed without complaint or sensed diminishment.

And, subversive thought – before Jesus washed the disciples feet, his own feet had been washed, by a woman's tears of gratitude. And again everybody else had an opinion about it. Whereas Jesus received the gift of service with the grace and the mercy of the gracious and merciful – and both he and she were blessed.

This ministry thing – not as straightforward as we'd all like to think.

The sketch by Vellatton as always says multum in parvo. "She has covered my feet with perfume and washed them with her tears."

23 June 2009
Team Winnie: running the 5K at 202 years old

The age of ageism is shown to be ridiculous by two remarkable women, Winnie Hudson and Margaret Hill.

Winnie aged 102 completed the Cancer Research Race for Life 5K in York last year (with a wee stop for a cup of tea half way through).

This year her young friend Margaret joins her. Decided either I need to get fitter, or I should try the half way cup of tea……

Photo is courtesy of The Herald on Saturday.

21 June 2009
Two Big books in one Week. 2 Beginning from Jerusalem, J D G Dunn

The first book I read by J D G Dunn was his Unity and Diversity in the New Testament. Then his commentary on Romans in the word series. Those who want a readable and theologically rich reading of Romans (from the "new perspective") won't find much better than the Explanation sections of Dunn's two volume commentary – except Tom Wright's Romans in the New Interpreter's Bible. Then there was his The Parting of the Ways, followed by The Theology of Paul the Apostle, his two books on Galatians and the first volume of his magnum opus on Christianity in the Making, Remembering Jesus – which I am now well through but with a few hundred pages to go! And now this huge weight training resource has landed with a satisfying if intimidating thump on my desk. So finishing the two Dunn volumes over the summer has become an ambition that has every chance of being frustrated – but not if I can help it!

Over the years I've slowly worked through a number of big books on biblical studies – some of them shifting my perspectives, opening up new ways of coming at the biblical revelation, and time and again challenging me to think myself towards a much more reflective and much less predictable take on that wonderful complexity of faithful understanding, critical integrity, prayerful patience and immediate human communication, that, at its best, we call preaching. Brueggemann's Old Testament Theology; W D Davies, The Setting of the Sermon on the Mount; N T Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God; Beasley Murray, Jesus and the Kingdom of God; F F Bruce, Paul. Apostle of the Heart Set Free; Gordon Fee, God's Empowering Presence; Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament – and so many more.(The volume by Bruce is hardly cutting edge now – but it is still one of my favourite books, a tribute to the kind of scholarship that makes a difference to what and how you preach – or so it did for me.)

I'm not qualified to review Dunn's life work, carved and shaped as it is from an enormous accumulation of knowledge – in this volume 1330 pages! I'm just happy to sit at the feet of this Scottish Gamaliel, exiled to Durham, and admire and ponder the work of a virtuoso scholar whose grasp of the field of NT studies is sure and whose treatment is respectful. Today I jumped to a late chapter on Ephesians – which he doesn't think Paul wrote (I'm not so sure) – but there are sentences, footnotes, paragraphs and references that coax you back to the text, to think again – because Dunn is a master at critical appreciation and theological appropriation of text. What more would you want from a NT teacher than that persuasive invitation to go look again.

19 June 2009
Thank God for meetings!

Today is the fourth consecutive day of meetings. I don't mean days in which there was a meeting. I mean days which were entirely made up of meetings. it's not that I don't like meetings. It's just that meetings involve, well meeting; they are held indoors; meetings function by people talking, something that comes too easily for me; the food is usually bought in to allow us to have maximum time for meeting rather than eating.

And if I ask what's been achieved by all this meeting – quite a lot actually. It isn't that this week of meetings has not been worthwhile – more that they are all on the one week. But even with the most creative diary juggling, such a meeting of meetings in the one week has simply proved impossible to avoid. Today there will be four meetings. Well, now – I could become super-spiritual and pedantic and say that tonight isn't a meeting. Since it is our annual College Thanksgiving Service it is worship – and if that's a meeting it's planned, an intentional time for us to meet with each other and with the God whose presence is promised not only tonight but in the academic year that's just gone.

But I don't want to be super-spiritual. Whether committee or worship service – offered to God our time, gifts and service is in the most important sense, worship. For me, every meeting this week has been about trying to serve God in our lives by doing well what we are all called to do. So Monday was Subject Panel and Programme Panel when student performance was reviewed and confirmed. And that performance ranged from good to stunningly good – which is reason enough for thanksgiving, by students and staff. Tuesday and Wednesday were Board of Ministry days when we walked alongside four people seeking God's will for their future as they tested their call to Baptist ministry – in prayer, conversation and discussion – that too is reason for thanksgiving. Today one meeting will be about ongoing financial challenges and encouragements, the next will explore issues around learning and teaching and how to do both better, then College Committee which is the group responsible for College Governance and Development and for exploring more widely the next stages of our life together. I see all of these meetings as integral to what we will do tonight in our worship, thanksgiving and celebration of the ministry of God.

So. A day of meetings, at the end of a week of meetings, but all of it ending with thanksgiving – and our glad meeting together to say so, to God, and each other. If you read this on time, and tonight have the time, come and share the evening with us.

Scottish Baptist College Annual Thanksgiving Service

When – Thursday June 18, 7.30

Where – in Central Baptist Church in Lady Lane (Just across from Thomas Coats Memorial Church).

The preacher is the Rev Brian More, Senior Pastor for Congregational Leadership at Newton Mearns.

As always the folk from Central Baptist congregation will provide refreshements at the end. Come if you can.

18 June 2009
Two big books in one week! 1. English Literature and Theology

Just received the first of two big books being delivered this week. This one I so wanted to buy for my sabbatical last year – but £85 in hardback and no paperback edition till May 2009. So with patience born of frustration, I waited. Now it's here, in a stout and well upholstered paperback version, at the more affordable (and justifiable) price of around £25.

The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology is one of those books that's about four volumes in one. The first part is an introduction to the relationship between literature and theology. Next comes a chronolgical section with nine chapters on the formation of the tradition, spanning the earliest origins of the English tradition, through reformation, enlightenment and on through romanticism and modernism to postmodernism. This is a 150 page book in its own right.

Part three explores literary ways of reading the Bible and 200 pages are devoted to such literary explorations as the Pentateuch, Judges, Psalms, Song of Songs, Wisdom books, prophetic literature, Gospels, John and apocalyptic. All of them major tributaries of the biblical river. I note, and probably want to reflect on the editorial choices that lay behind the exclusion of a chapter on Pauline literature and OT historical books, each in their own right theology and literary genre. Paul in particular is inextricably woven into the moral categories of Western thought and story, and is inexplicably omitted – Bunyan for example is deeply Pauline in his portrayal of the soul's drama, and Puritan theology was called a Pauline renaissance.

Part four examines theological ways of reading literature and contains chapters on major figures in the English literary tradition. Eleven chapters, 300 pages, and a near comprehensive coverage of major figures and movements. Part five looks at theology as literature, 230 pages on a selection of major theological influential figures – Cranmer, Bunyan, Butler, Keble, Newman, Arnold, C S Lewis – again editorial choices, but a broad selection – Ian Ker on Newman is a 15 page account of a man on whom he wrote a book which at 788 pages is almost as thick as this one!

The last section looks at great theological themes and how they have been treated in literature. Evil and the God of love, death and afterlife, pastoral trditions, the passion story in literature (Paul Fiddes), redemption, heaven and hell and several others. These essays offer important alternative perspectives on Christian doctrine and how foundational doctrines may be better expressed in novel, drama, poem, which aim less at precision and more at cumulative persuasion.

Anyway – not going to read it through. But several of the chapters are on the 'when I have a spare hour' list. Incidentally, not to name drop, but one of the editors, Andrew Hass who lectures in religious studies at University of Stirling, was in the church I attended on Sunday. It occurs to me that when I preach there, I sometimes use literature to help explore theology. Hope he wasn't marking my sermon………

16 June 2009
Bonhoeffer on Christian renewal: lives which are cruciform and vivified by resurrection hope

Renewal is a hopeful word. Like renovation, taking something as it is, keeping what is of value in what it was, building what is now necessary to make it even better. Church renewal is a phrase that likewise opens up more hopeful perspectives. When speaking of the Church I think I'm coming to prefer the word "renewal" to "fresh", or "emergent", probably because it holds two important sine qua nons together. [What is the plural of sine qua non? :))] The Church is what it has been, and its long storied tradition, its history, can neither be ignored nor made normative. But the Church is also a living spiritual reality, the Body of Christ, and growth, change and movement are definitive of life.

It's probably fruitless to ask what Bonhoeffer would make of the Church's task in a post-Christendom and post-modern (at least post-Western modernity) culture, in an age of cultural flux, globalised economics, ecological crisis and the irresistible urge of the Church to reinvent itself in order to survive. Which makes the following extract from the Letters and Papers from Prison all the more intriguing as a perspective on the renewal of the Church at one of the darkest moments in 20th century history:

Reconciliation and redemption, regeneration and the Holy Ghost, love of our enemies, cross and resurrection, life in Christ and Christian discipleship – all these things are so difficult and so remote that we hardly venture anymore to speak of them. In the traditional words and acts we suspect that there may be something quite new and revolutionary, though we cannot as yet grasp or express it.

That is our own fault. Our Church, which has been fighting in these years for its self-preservation, as though that were an end in itself, is incapable of taking the word of reconciliation and redemption to mankind and the world. Our earlier words are therefore bound to lose their force and cease, and our being Christians today will be limited to two things: prayer and righteous action among humanity. All Christian thinking, speaking and organizing must be born anew out of this prayer and action.

Letters and Papers from Prison (London: SCM, 1971) (pp 299-300)

Bonhoeffer isn't giving up on the earlier vocabulary of the Church. He is arguing that they must be born anew out of a Church which provides lived evidence of what it is these older words bear witness to. "Prayer and righteous action amongst humanity" implies reconciliation, love of enemies, cross and resurrection proclaimed through lives which are cruciform and vivified by resurrection hope. The great words of the Gospel are not redundant, they need translation into something much more persuasive than what is now a forgotten discourse – communities embodying the Gospel they preach, prayer and righteous action, empirical demonstrations that the love of God for a sinful world is given credibility by what God makes the Church – forgiving forgivers, reconciled reconcilers, peaceable peacemakers, grace bestowers because grace receivers. And perhaps, out of such retranslation of the Gospel into Gospel-demonstrative Christian community will come the old words to be reminted in new language that again has meaning, credibility and a recovered capacity to communicate the love of God in Christ.

And how to do this? Only if through the cross and resurrection of Christ, we have learned ourselves the Gospel we preach, and its great realities have remade and renewed our own humanity in Christ. Renewal has its deepest and most permanent roots in hearts that are made new, in what Paul calls "new creation", and in that changed worldview that looks out on the broken, fragmented world at odds with itself and God, and believes "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself", – "making peace by the blood of His cross". And then to own and surrender to the great apostolic affirmation of the Church "He has given us this ministry of reconciliation". I have no doubt, a ministry of reconciliation, energised by faith in the cross and in the resurrection, is one of the primary imperatives of the Church today.

15 June 2009