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This week's TFTD follows on last week's reflections on putting on the whole armour of God. It's too easy to stop at 'the good bit' and not read how Paul ends the letter. The endings of Paul's letters are never casual. They are carefully worded towards encouragement, and well worth our taking time to read to the end. 

Monday

Eph. 6.18 “And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.”

It’s impossible to over-pray, seems to Paul’s point! Having described the Christian’s armour and the seriousness of spiritual struggles, Paul urges the Christian community to pray in the Spirit. Life in the Spirit is about living a life of trustful dependence on the power and grace and leading of the Holy Spirit. To pray is to speak our hearts and minds, and have these same words, thoughts and feelings interpreted by the Spirit. Any prayer anywhere, diversity of need finds voice in a diversity of prayers.

Tuesday

Eph. 6. 18b “With this in mind always be alert and keep on praying for all the saints.”

In this one verse Paul uses the all-inclusive vocabulary four times. “Pray on all occasions…all kinds of prayers…always alert…praying for all the saints.” Prayer is not so much a good option as an absolute necessity; not something we do when it suits us, but a way of living, thinking and seeing the world. “Be alert”, keep your eyes open, be faithful, and keep your heart open to the needs “of all the saints.”

Wednesday

Eph. 6.19 “Pray also for me, that whenever I open my mouth, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains.”

This is one of those moving moments of confession from Paul. He’s human like the rest of us. It’s hard for an anxious person to speak fearlessly, and Paul makes no secret of his own struggles with self-doubt and fear of failure.  When it comes to mission, the words of our prayers have a way of putting words into the mouths of those for whom we pray, as they try to live and speak faithfully for Christ.

Thursday

Eph 6. “Pray that I may declare it fearlessly, as I should.”

Paul’s fears were real, and he acknowledged them, not as failures of faith but as reasons to go on trusting and depending on the God who had saved and commissioned him as ‘an ambassador in chains”. While it’s true that we are saved by grace, and have new life in the Spirit, Paul’s prayer request is a reminder that we have the treasure of the gospel in jars of clay – fragile, and maybe even cracked!

2 Cor. 4.7 is the bonus verse this week! “We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God, and not from us.” By prayer we hold up those for whom we pray, before the grace that is sufficient and the peace beyond understanding, and the love from which nothing can separate.

Friday

Eph.6.21 “Tychicus, the dear brother and faithful servant in the Lord will tell you everything so that you also may know how I am and what I am doing.”

Transparency mattered to Paul. People should know what he is about, how his health is, what he needs, how the work of God is going. No PR stunts, no self-marketing, no selective narration of the facts of his story. That as it should be, not least our own transparency with ourselves, an honest acknowledging of how it is with us. Paul saw the Ephesians as a community who would understand him, and therefore pray for him. To do that well, Tychicus is to put them in the picture about Paul’s situation.

Saturday

Eph. 6.22 “I am sending him to you for this very purpose, that you might know how we are, and that he may encourage you.”

This verse is pure Paul! Sending messengers to keep the gospel network pinging with news, and hoping that by the prayers of the Ephesians, his role as an ambassador in chains might even go viral. By which is meant, when a community pray together with one heart, and identify with the work others are doing for Christ, and share the news with other communities, then prayer becomes a chain reaction of faith at work, love demonstrated, and hope encouraged. Paul understood how the spiritual dynamics of prayer work to sustain dynamic communities of the Spirit.

Sunday

Eph. 6. 23 “Peace to the brothers and sisters, and love with faith from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Grace to all who love our Lord Jesus Christ with an undying love.”    

Peace, faith and love, but the greatest of these is love. Three times Paul emphasises the relation of love to faith, and of grace to loving trust. We love because he first loved us, and Paul prays for grace to fall upon all those who pledge, and intend to live a life of undying love for Christ. Of course we fail and fall, our love is inconstant and the rhythm of sin and forgiveness, complacency and passion, wrong desire and right desire, is real enough for each of us. Hence Paul’s prayer, which we can take as a personal benediction tumbling down the centuries from Paul to us, here and now:

“Grace also to me, and love with faith from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, so that I too may go on loving our Lord Jesus Christ with an undying love.” Amen.

Every year I step out the front door around the beginning of March, and this happens. For two or three weeks, when the sun shines, there is this concerto in purple, the floral equivalent of Vivaldi's Spring. This year they are of special interest, because I'm currently designing and working a tapestry based on some lines from George Herbert's poem 'The Flower'. (Full text below – probably best to read it before the rest of this post.)

While the poem deliberately avoids naming a particular flower, I've been intrigued trying to figure out which flowers might be candidates that inspired Herbert's wondering question:

             "Who would have thought my shrivel'd heart

Could have recovered greennesse?"

However, at the time Herbert wrote, the crocus as we know it was still to be introduced to the English Garden, and therefore would probably be unknown to him as a perennial corm. Still, its spectacular resurrection every Spring makes the crocus a telling example of the metaphor Herbert exploits in his exploration of the rhythms of spiritual life. Soon after the flowering of crocuses, the flower fades, the greenery wilts, shrivels, and the plants go "quite underground" where "dead to the world," "[they] keep house unknown."

Herbert has known times of "recovered greennesse" but also the inevitable aftermath of flowering – withering and shriveling down to the "mother root." The poem is a complex interrogation of the ways of God with a human soul. There is the longing to be past and finished with the inevitability of change, with its rising and declining, of faith and doubt, of gratitude and complaint, of contentment and resentment. There is also perplexity that try as he will to grow towards flowering, even when well watered and plenty of sunshine, nevertheless the cycle of the seasons of the soul relentlessly brings change, inconstancy, and impermanence. So for Herbert there is the added disappointment of unfulfilled longing, and frustrated desire for a settled intimacy and secure sense of loving and being loved.

There is so much more to this poem, most of which evades analysis and is more easily apprehended in readers who recognise in Herbert's experience much of  their own spiritual struggle. I mention this here because like all of Herbert's serious readers, I recognise in myself something of Herbert's ache and longing towards God, and how regularly and at times inexplicably, the spiritual life is a struggle of life and death, growth and decline, the heart now all "greennesse" and soon all "shrivel'd".

Twice Herbert pulls himself together with a good theological talking to.

"These are thy wonders, Lord of power, / killing and quickning, bringing down to hell".

There is in the being and actions of God that which is inscrutable, a mystery of divine purpose that human reason will never penetrate or reduce to a comfortable conformity whereby God does what we want or expect.

But Herbert is too good a theologian, and too fine a pastor, to leave it there. The last stanza reconfigures the basis of the divine human relationship by qualifying the nature, scope and purpose of the "Lord of power."  

"These are thy wonders, Lord of love, / To make us see we are but flowers that glide:"

In Herbert's poetry God's love is a cantus firmus, the underlying and integrating rhythm and beat of Gods ways with the world and with each Christian soul. There is warning and severity in this poem, as Herbert acknowledges there are experiences of divine anger and withdrawal, of personal anguish and inner dying. The life of the soul is mirrored in the flowers' dying in autumn, the apparent death of winter, and these before the promised resurrection of spring and the full flowering of summer. Christian sanctity and growth towards God requires a four seasonal cycle, bgoing on for the years of a lifetime.

 Herbert's choice of metaphor, a flower's fortunes through the annually recurring seasons, allows him a level of frankness in expressing his own spiritual vicissitudes and inner frustrations. The veil of metaphor also preserves some distance between Herbert's own disappointed affections and longings, his "shrivel'd heart", and the Lord of power who is also the Lord of love.

Within the story of his soul's struggles there is a sub-text of complaint that surfaces here and there in the poem, Herbert doesn't always know with which one he is dealing, the Lord of power or the Lord of Love. He is at the mercy of both the power and the love of God, but that word mercy is the theological key to the poem, and to many other poems in The Temple.  

This poem would require a much longer exposition to begin to do justice to its lyrical power and spiritual integrity. As I live with it and read it each day, it helps to frequently come face to face with a cluster of purple crocuses, a sacrament in colour, bearing witness to Herbert's hopefulness and wonder at "recovered greennesse." And travelling towards Easter with this poem, the slow work on a tapestry based on that phrase begins to take shape.

Incidentally the second photo is of irises, also from our front garden, though in North East Scotland they are some weeks later in flowering. Irises were certainly around in the gardens of Herbert's time, and they have a long history as symbols of resurrection. I don't think Herbert had any flower in particular in mind, at least no such hint is given in the poem. That is the strength of the image he has chosen, the changing seasons in a seventeenth century English garden provides a scene of ubiquitous examples of the soul's progress come rain or shine, frost or wind.

Monday

Eph. 6.10-11 “Finally be strong in the Lord, and in his mighty power. Put on the full armour of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes.”

Like a General marshalling his troops, Paul insists that each individual must rely on those on either side standing firm as a supportive presence. Paul is calling the Christian community to be steadfast and immovable in the strength of the Lord. The struggle against evil, injustice, and all that ruins God’s creation and creatures, is not finally dependent on our strength, but on the mighty power of God, made real through the energising of the Holy Spirit and the living presence of the risen Christ.

Tuesday

 Eph. 6.14a “Stand firm, then, with the belt of truth buckled round your waist.”

“Stand your ground…having done everything, to stand…, stand firm, then.” Three times in a sentence or two that command. Stand! To stand for truth is to refuse the lie, to recognise and call out untruth, to stubbornly insist that words matter, to believe that lies erode trust and corrode communities, and must be exposed and opposed. Christians of all people know the importance of truth and trust as the currency of human relations, and a key principles in Christian living.

Wednesday

Eph. 6.14b “Stand firm…with the breastplate of righteousness in place…,”

The breastplate of righteousness is the protective barrier covering the vital organs of lungs and heart. Christians breathe the oxygen of righteousness, imparted by Christ and practiced in Christ-like living. Likewise the believer’s heart hungers for justice, and longs for purity. The heart is covered by the protective breastplate of God’s righteousness, which is imparted and experienced as gift, and lived as the identity marker of the Christian in every struggle.

Thursday

Eph. 6.15 “Stand firm…with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace.”  

Paul, for all the controversy that surrounded him, was an apostle of peace and peaceable-ness, of forgiveness and reconciliation. Those who find peace with God through Christ, are sent out into a world of jagged edges and broken communities as peacemakers, peace-builders and peace advocates. Feet fitted with readiness for gospel peace means that, like the soldier commanded to stand firm, the Christian community stands on, and stands shoulder to shoulder for, the gospel of peace, as messengers of God’s peace and practitioners of reconciliation.

Friday

Eph. 6.16 “In addition to all this take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one.”

This is battlefield vocabulary. The shield of faith is held by each soldier, linked to those beside and behind, providing protection from the worst the enemy can do. The Christian community is a fellowship held together by the love, grace, power and promise of God. Faith is trust that “God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus.” (Eph.2.6) Whatever flaming arrows of doubt, temptation, suffering, or persecution are fired at us, they hit the shield of faith, and are blunted and extinguished by God’s faithful love and gracious power.

Saturday

Eph. 6.17a “Take the helmet of salvation…”

Take the shield of faith and take the helmet of salvation. These are imperatives. This isn’t a polite suggestion! Paul isn’t saying it might be a good idea! Grab your shield and get your helmet firmly fixed in place. These are life-saving fixtures of the soldier in combat. The brain thinks and co-ordinates the body, and for Christians, our salvation includes the transformation of the mind and having the mind of Christ. The helmet of salvation signifies a mind renewed, the conscience cleansed, a new way of thinking and acting, because “God has made us alive with Christ…”

Sunday

Eph6.17b “Take the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.”

Every piece of armour is defensive, except the sword. In Hebrews the Word of God is described as “sharper than any two edged sword”. It’s no coincidence that when Jesus was tempted and under attack, he quoted Scripture to the accuser. The Scriptures are light for the path, bread for the journey, water that refreshes, fire that cleanses – but in the battles of the soul, the Scriptures are a sword that slays the lie, that repels temptation, that allows us to fight back in the power of the Spirit and to stay faithful in the service of Christ.

……………………………..

Whoso beset him round with dismal stories,
do but themselves confound, his strength the more is.
No lion can him fright: he'll with a giant fight,
but he will have the right to be a pilgrim.

                                                                            John Bunyan

What are we to make of starving people being shot, and trampling on each other in the stampede for food to feed their dying children? In trying to take in the reality of human suffering and our capacity for inhumanity towards others, I refuse to say 'there are no words'.

Yes, there are words! Words are the building blocks of truth. Words are a sign of our humanity. By our words we seek to give meaning, and frame reality by naming what must be named with a combination of courage, compassion and moral maturity.

So yes! There must be words. There must be speech capable of addressing such outrageous events as unfold on our phones, computers and televisions, and doing so not to add to the sum total of hatred, but to defy despair, to cry for peace, to contradict with moral force the cruelties of war. There must be words: to pray, to lament, to negate the urge to violence, and then words to rebuild hope and words to bridge the chasms of our fears with reconciling intent.

Throughout his life, the Jewish philosopher A. J. Heschel carried within him the burden of his people. Some of his most powerful writings and most searing words, are the outflow of his responses to Jewish suffering. His writings, his words, relentlessly express his belief that from the tragedy of his people must come a safer world for children, a commitment to care for the weak, and an accepted responsibility to work for the freedom of the oppressed and the healing of the nations.

Here is Heschel, from an essay collected in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity:

"There is a pressing urgency to the work of justice and compassion. As long as there is a shred of hatred in a human heart, as long as there is a vacuum without compassion, anywhere in the world, there is an emergency.

Why do people rage? People rage and hurt and do not know how to regret, how to repent. The problem is not that people have doubts but rather that people may not even care to doubt.

The charity we may do is terribly diminutive compared with what is required. You and I have prayed, have craved to be able to make gentleness a certainty, and have so often failed. But there are in the world so many eyes streaming with tears, hearts dumb with fears, that to be discouraged would be treason.

We have lost the ability to be shocked. The malignity of our situation is increasing rapidly, the magnitude of evil is spreading furiously, surpassing our ability to be shocked. The human soul is too limited to experience dismay in proportion to what has happened in Auschwitz and Hiroshima.

We do not know what to pray for. Should we not pray for the ability to be shocked at the atrocities committed by man, for our capacity to be dismayed at our inability to be dismayed.

Prayer should be an act of catharsis, of purgation of emotions, as well as a process of self-clarification, of examining priorities, of elucidating responsibility. Prayer not verified by conduct is an act of desecration and blasphemy. Do not take a word of prayer in vain. Our deeds must not be a refutation of our prayers.

Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods."

(Quotations from 'On Prayer', in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, Abraham Joshua Heschel (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux,1996) pages 260-62.)

When it seems impossible to find words, sometimes we are helped by using words that have already been found to deepen understanding, offer wisdom, guide the conscience, and appeal to those deep springs of moral and spiritual value that prevent our humanity from being resigned to inhumane and dehumanising words, attitudes and actions. Like those words of Heschel. 

Please don't say there are no words. There are, if we search our hearts more thoroughly and make space there for those whose tragedy is better acknowledged by our words however stuttering and inadequate, than by a silence that sounds like "resignation to the evils we deplore." 

Years ago I read The Gospel of Anger, by Alastair Campbell. It combines biblical reflection, practical theology and applied psychology. It was an eye-opener. Anger was not described as 'a bad thing'. Nor was Campbell arguing that 'righteous anger' is always right. For the first time I encountered someone who had taken time to think out an ethic of anger, and the importance of anger in human experience and relationships. Anger has the potential to create or destroy, to energise or depress, to get good things done, or to make bad things happen. This week's TFTD explores the various expressions of anger and the part it plays in our daily lives. 

 

Monday

Matthew 5.22 “But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca is answerable to the court. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.”

It’s true enough. There is such a thing as righteous anger. But here Jesus has in mind unrighteous anger. All anger is subject to judgement, that is, examining whether our anger is justified or malicious, aiming at putting things right or intended to wound, intimidate and damage. Anger towards people who have annoyed us, hurt us, or offended us is part of being human. How we deal with it is part of what it means to follow Jesus. And on that path lie possibilities of control, forgiveness and mercy.

Tuesday

Proverbs 29.11 “A fool gives full vent to his anger, but a wise person keeps their anger under control.”

“Wise people turn away anger”, says Proverbs 29.8. One of the ways of doing that is not to give vent to our own anger. De-escalation is one of those lazy made-up words that nevertheless describes something useful and positive. When tempers are lost, so are friendships. Keeping our anger under control is one of the first steps of peace-making. Anger isn’t wrong. Anger can give the energy and resilience to work towards putting wrong right! There is a discipleship of the affections, a training of our inner responses so that constraining and directing our emotions is part of our inward obedience to God.

Wednesday

 Proverbs 15.1 “A gentle word turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger.”

The relationship between our anger and our words is often immediate. Expletives have their uses! But words that insult, ridicule, and aim at silencing the other, are incendiary. What’s more, harsh words create resentment, bitterness, and lodge long in the memory of those hurt by them. Gentle words are not mere giving in. Gentle doesn’t mean weak. Restraint requires strength, and there is wisdom in seeking conciliation rather than confrontation. Fasting from anger makes space for peace.

Thursday

Mark 3.5 “Jesus looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored.”

“Gentle Jesus meek and mild…” Aye, right! This is an important moment in any reflection on Christians and anger. Blindness to another person’s suffering, failure to see that mercy is more important than the rules of any power game, lack of compassion and simmering resentment at Jesus – and trapped in this vortex of callous disregard is a man who couldn’t work for a living. No wonder Jesus was angry! But his anger was for healing. And out of it came the question we all have to face in our angriest moments – is it lawful to do good or to do evil? Which means sometimes doing good requires us to look evil in the face, and defy it.

Friday

James 1.19 “My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.”

The blessings of being quick and slow at the right time! Whether in the politics of Parliament, of the church, of the family, of the office and other work places, this advice holds. The new dance step in human relations, is quick, slow, slow. But James’ point is serious. When it comes to righteousness (which includes justice and doing right and good) quick anger doesn’t cut it – it just cuts people. Quick to listen, slow to speak, that way tempers have time to moderate. That too is fasting from anger.

Saturday

Luke 15.28-32 “The elder brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, “Look! All these years I’ve been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!”

 ‘“My son,” the father said, “you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.”’

Not much comment from me. Let the text speak about anger, love and reconciliation.

Sunday

Ephesians 4.26 “In your anger do not sin. Do not let the sun go down while you are still angry…”

The other day I spoke with a friend who remembered her late husband for the way he lived the second part of this verse, for nearly 70 years of marriage. Anger is not wrong. There are right reasons for being angry, just as there are right ways and wrong ways of expressing our anger. But as Paul says elsewhere, “So far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone.” Peace-making is to fast from anger.

Have you ever wondered where those inner nudges come from? Why a memory interrupts you like one of those annoying pop-ups on websites?

Unplanned, you think of someone and decide to text, or phone?

You've had enough of other folk and need a wee while on your own.

What triggers an impulse buy in the shops?

Why did you say something that as soon as it was out, you wished you could press delete, or at least edit before clicking send? 

Why do we do what we do?

Oh, I know, there's a real danger of overthinking everyday experiences as if we could explain the machinations, complexities, unpredictabilities and inconsistencies of a human mind relating to the world, itself, other people, and God. Yes, God. And not just the mind as intellect and cognitive awareness; but our moods and emotions, memories and wounds, longings and disappointments, all swirling around every day in the realities of our everyday.

The above cartoon is a helpful corrective to that process of overthinking. But in the life of faith there are also dangers of underthinking; living without reflection so that we never come to know ourselves better. Or underusing the human capacity for curiosity and the adventures hidden inside the questions how and why. Or looking on a broken world with disinterest because the worst cracks don't affect us, and we can find easier things to think about.

Somewhere between overthinking and underthinking is responsible and responsive thinking. As a Christian who tries to be a thinking Christian I've always taken seriously the discipleship of the intellect, the Christian mind, or as Anselm called it "faith seeking understanding." It's true you can overthink some of the sayings of Jesus. Those words about turning the other cheek, or walking the extra mile, or forgiving 70×7 as a disqualification of all calculations about when forgiveness runs out of patience?

Ever since they were spoken people have either tried to explain them away, dilute the demand, reduce the ideal to what is thought to be feasible, practical, humanly possible. Or, on the other hand, there are those who take the words literally, and seek to live out the radical demands of Jesus in whatever contemporary context they inhabit.

I use the word inhabit deliberately. Christian faithfulness is the result of cumulative choices, some of them anguished and even conflicted. But gradually, choices become consistent, behaviour begins to reflect character, and character reveals the characteristics of the follower of Jesus. We inhabit the values and principles of the Kingdom of God. When that happens much of the thinking is done, and the decisions we make as Christians become habit. That's not to say following Jesus becomes merely a habit; it is to say that as those called to participate in the life of Christ, through the transforming grace of Christ crucified and risen, enabled by the energising of love of God, we are drawn into the communion of the Holy Spirit and into participation in the mission of the Triune God of love. 

So neither overthinking or underthinking, we are called to know and live in the mind of Christ, to offer ourselves as living sacrifices which is our reasonable worship, to love God with all our heart, and soul and body, and yes, our minds. An old hymn retains the hold it first exerted on me as a raw convert and a teenager with a heart intensely engaged and a mind both curious and hungry for understanding of what following Jesus involved:

May the mind of Christ, my Savior,
live in me from day to day,
by His love and pow'r controlling
all I do and say.

May the word of God dwell richly
in my heart from hour to hour,
so that all may see I triumph
only through His pow'r.

May the peace of God my Father
rule my life in everything,
that I may be calm to comfort
sick and sorrowing.

May the love of Jesus fill me
as the waters fill the sea;
Him exalting, self abasing:
this is victory.

May I run the race before me,
strong and brave to face the foe,
looking only unto Jesus
as I onward go.