Living Wittily

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  • We need to stop using “WE NEED TO….” in preaching

    We need to….

    We ought to….

    We must…..

    I once heard a brilliant Valedictory Address by Dr Derek Murray more than 30 years ago, in which he spoke about pastoral care as avoiding guilt-making. I’ve never forgotten the gentleness, compassion and pastoral wisdom of that address. Now I have no doubt at all that New Testament Christianity is profoundly, even outrageously challenging, demanding. And I know Paul especially, but John in his First Letter, and Peter and James, all assume a rigorous ethic of either imitating Jesus, being clothed with Christ, following Jesus in persevering obedience, getting the connection between discipleship and discipline, between trust and trying, between works and faith. But throughout the New Testament Gospel is Gospel, and the massive assumption that underwrites all Christian living is the invasive, radically renewing grace of God in Christ.

    3orsini Guilt is NOT the primary motivator; guilt is countered by grace and transmuted into gratitude which is then reminted in worship and service. New creation means the old has gone – including those buttons that are easily pushed to make us feel guilty, and which then act as levers to make us act differently, and live the way we are told to. But preaching the challenge of the Gospel is not about making sure I’m confronted with my own failure to live up to the demand of Christ; it is being reminded again of the grace unspeakable; it is being shown again the tragic beauty of holiness in Christ crucified and the triumphant glory of Christ risen; it is being drawn again towards that ingrasping love that reaches out to me in all my weakness, and failure and need. In fact the most important use of the word ‘need’ is not what I need to do, but that I need, and that Christ is all I need! What I need is not a moral makeover, but a miracle.

    Of course there is a place for conviction of sin, for recognising that even at our best we are unprofitable servants. But the wonder of the Gospel is that God doesn’t write us or others off as unthinkingly as we or others do. If it was up to some of us, and some of us preachers with our ‘we need to’ and ‘we must’, and ‘we ought to’ approach to ministry, the Gospel would be far less scandalous, grace would be far less free (by the way, how can something be less free anyway?), the love of God would begin to be brought under much more stringent theological control instead of being such an indiscriminate and endlessly patient mercy that pours down on our heads in huge cataracts of restoring, redemptive, renewing passion.

    The Christian heart is brought again to obedience and held in continuing obedience, not by any preacher’s scolding, not by diminishing me but by exalting Christ, by a Gospel proclaimed, by grace, mercy, and peace finding their ultimate focus on Calvary where God in the holiness of love encounters our sin at its most persistent and worst, and in its most trivialising disloyalty – and overcomes it. Grace is not only free it is liberating; holy love is not only forgiving, it is enabling; and my sin, my oft recurring sin, becomes by a mystery beyond telling, the occasion for a divine intervention that restores my soul. And if someone wants they can press my guilt button, but before I can ever think about changing my ways, I need to find my way, yet again, to the one who changes me.

    The hymn Amazing Grace is too easily eclipsed by cliche. But it tells a truth that should quality control all preaching that claims to be Gospel preaching.

    ’twas grace that brought me safe thus far,

    and grace will lead me home.’

    Newton was too clear-headed a Calvinist ever to make our relationship to God in Christ dependent on our own performance. ‘We need to….we ought to….we must….’ . Moral exhortation has its own importance, but when I go to worship what I need to hear preached is not my failure, but my Saviour; not my sins but the cross; not what I need to do, but what Christ has done with my deepest need.

  • Out and About: Walking in the Forest of Achray

    Dscn0563_3 Today Sheila and I gave our walking boots their first dirtying of the Spring. No doubt about it. Up in the Forest of Achray, above Aberfoyle, it was fresh, at times chilly, at other times balmy when the sun shone and we stood in the shelter of the pines. And it was Spring. Walked for a few hours and took time to work the stiffness and reluctance out of our legs, and by the end of the walk beginning to feel my body moving with some kind of rhythm and ease.

    Recent weeks of rain means there’s still a lot of mud, wet vegetation, but also streams running off the hills and the water crystal clear. Robins, chaffinch, greenfinch, several varieties of tit including blue, great and coal, pheasants shadow boxing amongst the brown withered ferns, and one of my favourite sights, multitudinous varieties of lichen in every variation of green and grey. I love the delicate filigree of these remarkable plants, and wonder at their capacity to cling to rock, bark and anything else that gives a life-hold by staying still long enough for it to grow. One of the most remarkable things about lichen is its capacity to capture the nutrients it needs from the atmosphere, having a 95% capacity to capture and fix nitrogen within its own life system.

    Bryoria20spp

    One of my favourite prose writers is the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. In one of his descriptive passages he draws a word picture of mosses and lichens, that is amongst the most beautifully observed and expressed passages of natural history writing I have ever read:

    No words that I know of will say what mosses and lichens are. None are delicate enough, none rich enough. How is one to tell of the rounded bosses of furred and beaming green- the starred divisions of rubied bloom, fine filmed, as if the Rock Spirits could spin porphyry as we do glass – the traceries  of intricate silver, and fringes of amber, lustrous, aborescent, burnished through every fibre into fitful brightness and glossy traverses of silken change, yet all subdued and pensive, and framed for simplest, sweetest offices of grace…

    Dscn0561_4 Yet as in one sense the humblest, in nother they are the most honoured of the earth children. Unfading as motionless, the worm frets them not, and the autumn wastes not. Strong in lowliness, they neither blanch in heat nor pine in frost. To them, slow fingered, constant hearted, is entrusted the weaving of the dark eternal tapestries of the hills; to them, slow-pencilled, iris dyed, the tender framing of their endless imagery. Sharing the stillness of the unimpassioned rock, they share also its endurance; and while the winds of departing spring scatter the white hawthorn blossom like drifted snow, and summer dims on the parched meadow the drooping of the cowslip god – far above, among the mountains, the silver lichen-spots rest, starlike on the stone; and the gathering orange stain upon the edge of yonder western peak reflects the sunsets of a thousand years.

    Beautiful.  A prose poem, a psalm to the beauty of the world, written by one of the great Victorians. That’s why I love Victiorian writers; they knew how to use words to render worlds afresh and anew. And isn’t that moss and lichen covered dyke a glorious festival of moorland colours – I took a few minutes simply to enjoy it

  • Realpolitik and Prophetic Truth Telling: Brueggemann on 1 & 2 Kings

    Andy asks in his comment about Walter Brueggemann’s commentary on 1 and 2 Kings. Do I think it’s worth buying? The book costs over £30, it has 644 pages, a CD Rom with the text of the book, pictures, maps, and other searchable data. Some folk complain about its cost, and right enough, it isn’t cheap.

    51rhh11tbkl__aa240_ But it is beautifully produced. This is a book lover’s treat. High quality paper, multimedia presentation, sidebars, two colours of ink, the book stays open on the desk. And I haven’t mentioned anything about the author, or the written content. Years ago I read David Gunn’s The Fate of King Saul, and encountered the biblical narrative in all its literary power. I realised that an understanding of literary genre, appreciation of skilled storytelling, and an understanding of linguistic devices and literary criticism was a remarkably fruitful approach to biblical interpretation, yielding quite unexpected theological results. Few scholars within the church have exploited this approach more creatively and productively than Walter Brueggemann. His first sorties into Kings include the old two volume Knox Preaching Guides which are still amongst the most stimulating comments on these royal narratives.

    This Smyth and Helwys commentary is on a different scale, and is worked at a much more sophisticated level of exegesis, theological reflection and biblical criticism. But those familiar with Brueggemann’s writing know that he is the master of biblical commentary and crafted critique which together call in question all status quos which dare to place themselves over and against God and his purposes. Few writers so consistently, persistently, even insistently bring to light the biblical critique of power. The hegemony of empire, the tyranny of the market, the idolising of the economy, the bondage that is consumerism, the hubris that disguises itself as political self-sufficiency. And all of this is to be found in this commentary where Brueggemann sets the biblical narratives of bad kings and good kings, of false prophets and true prophets, of cynical abuse of power and the divine exercise of power, against the backdrop of biblical history and our own contemporary realities.

    365624 Like several commentaries the Smyth and Helwys format has exegetical comment which explores text, history and canonical connections; but it also has sections called connections, where Brueggemann becomes more explicit about how these words and stories become the Word of God to our age, and within our story. I confess that I am a Brueggemann fan; have been since the early 1980’s, a bit before he became so well known. His tireless  explorations of violence and intrigue, speaking truth to power, prophetic faithfulness and divine loyalty; the thick texture of his prose; the subversive intent of his language; the transformative power he discerns in the stance of hopeful imagination; these and many other qualities in his writing have brought major swathes of scripture to life for me. This commentary does all of the above, and is simply a joy to read. I am reading through this big, sumptuous, illustrated, exegetical wrestling match between text and interpreter during Lent. And if Lent is supposed to be the time when we discipline ourselves in an ascetic way, then I am surely failing. because this book is pure pleasure.

    Not that I agree with all that Brueggemann writes. And yes when he focuses the ancient text on the power games of contemporary empire he often has his own nation in the sights. And there are times when he is so keen to show the free floating application of the bible text that its historical rootedness seems of little consequence over and against the critique it offers to our current history. But can he write! That isn’t a question, it’s an exclamation.

    But if what you are looking for is a guide into the undomesticated realities of biblical politics and power games, read Brueggemann.

    If issues of justice and peace, violence and power, faithful living and faithless existence, God centred worship and self centred atheism, are crucial issues for contemporary reflection, Brueggemann offers unrivalled access to the key texts, including in this volume the books of Kings.

    If the study of Scripture is for you both an adventure in learning and a seeking of God’s Kingdom through a life of graced renewal and faithful obedience, then Brueggemann the Lutheran scholar will be a demanding but rewarding companion.

    And if it matters to you that a biblical commentary should avoid the obvious, challenge our safe assumptions, mess up our comfort zones, and yet seek to remain in sensible touch with the meaning of the biblical text, then read Brueggemann’s books.

    As to whether this expensive, expansive commentary is worth buying? Those who buy commentaries are usually preachers, pastors, scholars. And there are cheaper alternatives to this on Kings. The Interpretation commentary by R D Nelson, is a very fine treatment of these books, theologically astute and seriously engaged with the text. The New Interpreter’s Bible (a set I rate very highly – I often use it for lectio divina) also has a good entry but it’s bound with about 6 other biblical books and costs as much as this big Brueggemann volume. Marvin Sweeney’s new entry for the Old Testament Library is just out and yet to be reviewed, and is very likely to establish itself as an important mid-range critical and theological commentary. But none of these offer the one thing I prize most about the Smyth and Helwys volume – the original mind and brilliant writing of Walter Brueggemann.

    Is it worth buying? Not for me to encourage others to spend their money pursuing my enthusiasms – but for me, this commentary mingles aesthetic enjoyment in a beautifully produced book, literary pleasure in reading such articulate and truth-slanted theology, intellectual provocation by a mind restlessly and faithfully prophetic, and spiritually clarifying argument both for the life lived faithfully towards God, and against life lived faithlessly in the endless spiral of wanting that is the consumer empire. Yet buying this book may well be just another such surrender. Precisely the double bind Brueggemann is so good at exposing. But yes – if book buying is part of your budget, and good commentaries are important voices in your conversations, then this one is a shrewd, ethically astringent and theologically imaginative voice that few of us can afford to ignore in our conversations about the meaning and demand of scripture.

  • Come on you reds! Aberdeen and Bayern Munich

    Aberdeen 2 – Bayern Munich 2

    1908 Just spent a couple of hours sitting on the edge of the sofa, looking at the TV screen between my fingers, from behind the cushion, and sometimes squinting through near closed eyelids. Most of us were prepared for a hard lesson in due humility, or even overdue humiliation. But the boys done good. And the return is next Thursday on my birthday – so I get to choose the food for our meal, and the entertainment for the night. 

    Come on you reds!!!!!!!!!!!

  • St Valentine’s Day Conversation

    On my way to a funeral I was conducting and had to cross the Kingston Bridge at 8.30 am. Those who have to do this regularly have stamina, patience, and an abuility to endure tedium way beyond my meagre reserves.

    But it wasn’t as bad as I thought and I was able to go into the Garden Centre off the motorway at 9.01 am. Which was a bit early for the counter staff who were still putting on the aprons and getting ready to serve us customers. I was there for a latte and a scone just coming out the oven, when I was given the best excuse / explanation / reason for being a wee bit late I’ve heard for a long while.

    "Sorry I’m a bit later" she said. "Ah had that many Valentines tae open".

    I’d just been listening to the radio and the news that to send an e-valentine is now considered by many employers to be an unwanted advance, and could lead to dismissal. I mentioned this to my Valentine delayed friend who snorted, (and I quote her exactly) " Whit? Valentines by email? Ah’d juist delete them. They’re beneath contempt! Naw. Ah like the Victorian wans, hand made, and wi’ the price still on them tae let ye see how much they spent!"

    I hoped she was indeed late for work because of the volume of Victorian hand-made cards, with the price visible.

    As I left she shouted, "Have a good Valentine’s day yersel".

    Valentine_2 St Valentine’s day is a celebration of love. I suppose a lot of what we say and buy and sing and do to declare our love can be transient and flippant, or funny and affirming, and maybe even genuine and sincere. Cards, flowers, daft verses, jewellery, romantic meals – a whole industry based on romance, and why not?

    The funeral I was conducting was of a family friend, and he and his wife had been married for 60 years and 6 months. Now when it comes to declarations of love, I think 60 years of passionate caring, faithful companionship, shared journeying, and well kept promises, is a demonstration of what human love is capable of. Faithful friendship that grows out of the passionate yes of two people to each other sixty years ago, is a beautiful gift, both to those who make such commitments, and to those of us around them who see what love looks like when we are given the long view of it.

    "Have a good Valentine’s day yersel" I was wished. For all the sadness that is inevitable in the separation of a lifelong relationship, that’s just what I’ve had. These three abide – faith, hope, and love – but the greatest of these is love. And sometimes its most beautiful face is old.

  • Charles Wesley and the Holy Triune God of Love

    C_wesley2 In an age of theological rationalism when the Trinity was seen as a form of manufactured speculative metaphysical maybe, but so what, doctrine, Charles Wesley produced a series of hymns that some argue did much to conserve Trinitarian orthodoxy by embedding it in hymns. Doxology became the durable form of theology, because Wesley’s genius was to take theological truth and spiritual conviction and turn them into the prayers and praises of hymns. In 1767 the Wesley brothers published Hymns on the Trinity, and gifted to the church some of the best theological reflection on why Christian spirituality must have a Trinitarian foundation.

    Fountain of Divine compassion,

        Father of the ransomed race,

    Christ our Saviour and salvation,

         Spirit of consecrating grace;

    See us prostrated before Thee;

        Co-essential Three in One,

    Glorious God, our souls adore Thee

        High on Thine eternal throne.

    .

    While we in Thy name assemble,

        Overshadowed from above,

    Let us at Thy presence tremble,

        Holy Triune God of Love;

    Father, Son and Spirit bless us,

        Who the true Jehovah art;

    Plenitude of God in Jesus,

        Enter every contrite heart.

    The first verse places theological reflection within an attitude of adoring contemplation. The second verse moves from adoration to petition, and from contemplation of the Divine beauty to petition for the Divine presence in the human heart humble enough to welcome the Holy Triune God of love. Charles has little interest in speculative analysis, though he treats the doctrine here and there in his sermons. But as Geoffrey Wainwright pointed out, in the hymns he moves from the calm prose of his written sermons, to the ‘incandescent orthodoxy’ of hymns intentionally experiential; analysis yields to adoration, and speculative thought is transmuted into spiritual response.

    The two verses of this hymn would be an interesting call to worship – doxology as adoring contemplation, and as humble petition.

  • Charles Wesley’s extravagant theology: Stamped with the Triune character…

    Much of my research time is now taken up preparing lectures I’m scheduled to deliver at South Wales Baptist College in a few weeks time. Given the general title Evangelical Spirituality, I’ve chosen to explore the role of Charles Wesley’s hymns in helping give shape and content to emergent Evangelical spirituality. The combination of experience, theology, scriptural discourse and rhetorical skill are all evident in the remarkable literary achievement of A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People called Methodists.

    Cwesley2 Edited by his brother John, Charles wrote most of the hymns gathered and orgainsed into a handbook of the spiritual theology and theological experience of the Evangelical Revival; it is a key source of early Evangelical theology. Charles Wesley is too easily eclipsed by John, but in recent years there has been a revival of scholarly activity focusing not only on his hymns, which are magnificently presented in the Bicentennial Edition, but on other aspects of Charles life and contribution to the Evangelical revival. The critical notes, Introduction, and comprehensive indices of the Bicentennial Edition have made this book one of my most cherished possessions, especially since mine is the early Oxford Edition, beautifully bound in Oxford blue and decorated with John Wesley’s monogram. This month S T Kimbrough and others publish the first full critical edition of Charles’ Journal in two volumes; and a few years ago Oxford printed a critical edition of his sermons. Then too, several important biographical and theological studies add to the growing list of monographs and secondary studies. It’s a good time to be studying the hymns of Wesley, and I’ll do a post soon of the key resources, primary and secondary.

    My own specific interest at present is the rhetorical and polemical use of language, poetic skill and device, and the pastoral strategy that can be discerned in Charles’ work. Theological imagination, speculative mysticism reined in by biblical constraint, doctrinally definite assertion having to accommodate bold even reckless aspiration for all and every blessing made available by an infinite grace. Charles’ theology is not for the faint hearted conservative scared of overstating the divine readiness to bless. Amongst his more adventurous efforts are a number of hymns on the Triune God, in the form of prayers that the eternal Trinity come in renewing power to indwell and renew the human heart. The renewal of God’s image in the redeemed, renewed and perfected heart is the definitive goal of Charles Wesley’s theology. He never, ever, underestimated the possibilities of divine grace and eternal love as they worked on fallen, fallible human nature with redemptive intent. If that gave his hymns an unsettling note of extravagance, Charles would have preferred that to a theology always wanting to qualify and limit grace to the reach of human reason, even the sanctified reason of the theologically timid.

    Come, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,

      Whom one all-perfect God we own,

    Restorer of thine image lost,

      Thy various offices make known;

    Display, our fallen souls to raise,

    The whole economy of grace.

    .

    O that we now, in love renewed,

      Might blameless in thy sight appear;

    Wake we in thy similitude,

      Stamped with the Triune character;

    Flesh, spirit, soul to thee resign

    And live and die entirely thine!

  • What we owe the old is reverence 3 De-marginalising our old people

    To reduce all aspects of life to a valuation indexed to usefulness, profitability, functionality, is to fall into the utilitarian nightmare. Such valuations see everything as a means to an end; now most things are, in fact, a means to an end; but a human being can never be reduced to such valuations based on usefulness, functionality, the status of means to other people’s ends, or an organisation’s ends, or a State’s ends. What sets a human being apart in moral and theological terms is that a human being is an end in herself, or himself. Yet at the same time the first question of the catechism immediately provides an important qualifying perspective. A human being not only is an end in herself, but has a chief end – to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.

    It is because we are given our essential value, our enduring identity, our unique calling as gifts bestowed by God that we can never be ultimately reduced to mere means. We are created as those whose end is to love, serve and worship God. Heschel’s theology of human existence, draws nourishment from a root system plunged deep into the Hebrew Bible, which is why he is so resistant to any view of the old person as burden on society, or as one whose provision should in any sense depend on ongoing usefulness and economic contribution to society. Here is a word whose prophetic note reverberates through four decades with compelling relevance:

    There are alleys in the soul where man walks alone, ways that do not lead to society, a world of privacy that shrinks from the public eye. Life comprises not only arable, productive land, but also mountains of dreams, an underground of sorrow, towers of yearning, which can hardly be utilised to the last for the good  of society, unless man be converted into a machine in which every screw must serve a function or be removed.

    Ci_jet_header All of which leaves me wondering about the level of provision made for the elderly in our own society; the refusal to benchmark the Old Age Pension to a reasonable subsistence level and then index it; the recognised epidemic of loneliness amongst the oldest members of the population; the relatively small amount of money invested in research into some of the ailments of human ageing; the impatience of motorists at traffic lights which are already set with the green man at such a short time frame that it takes levels of agility to get across in time that some of the motorists would themselves struggle to beat; the sheer complexity of applications for benefit, rebate, relief from all kinds of costs – not least Council Tax; the bewilderment and sense of being left behind by rapid technological changes that in any case presuppose significant funds to access them – broadband, mobile phones, digital TV. And just to avoid stereotyping, I know a nonogenarian who recently took delivery of the new laptop so that it could download quicker!

    No society can do everything; and the Scottish Government intends well towards our older people, even if local government expressions of policy and commitment to fulfilling free care vary wildly. But I still think that within the Church that is the Body of Christ, there is a need for outspoken alertness on behalf of those older members of our community and society, who remain valuable, wanted, needed – not for what they do or did, but for who they uniquely, preciously, and at times expensively, are.

    There are few more important ways of wasting time, than visiting old people – I use the word deliberately, in the way Dr Sheila Cassidy uses it – to waste time with people is to give them non-productive time in order to give your self, to gift them presence as a sign of their worth. I know about strategic planning, dynamic leadership, anointed preaching, every person ministry, purpose driven this and that. But I have a feeling Jesus would have found time to spend, waste, give, and in so doing would de-marginalise one of the pushed to the fringe groups of our cost/benefit analysis culture. In fact I rather like the term – de-marginalise.

  • Let justice roll and righteousness flow: “Was there nothing to fight for?”

    For years now I’ve been a contributor to the Aberdeen Press and Journal, one of the few papers I know that has a God slot – a Saturday Ssermon, no less. Here’s the one the good people of Aberdeen will be reading today.

    .

    “There’s an epidemic of apathy, and I don’t care.”

    “When people complain about a culture becoming complacent, I shrug my shoulders.”

    These aren’t humorous remarks, they’re more like the resigned cynicism of a society so unsure of its future it’s hard to know what to care for. They’re the language used by paid up members of NMP – Not My Problem.

    .

    41h5kteerzl__aa240_ In Alan Paton’s novel of South Africa, Ah ! But your Land is Beautiful, there is a conversation between a white school headmaster, and Emmanuel Nene, a local leader of the black community. Following the ban on white and black children playing cricket together the headmaster resigned his job, because he said, “ I think it is time to go out and fight everything that separates people from one another”. Both of them, white and black together, accept they will be wounded and hurt, that such passionate caring for what happens in their society will be dangerous. Their conversation ends like this:

    .

    “Yes, and I’m going to get wounded, too. Not only by the government, but also by my own people as well.”
    “Aren’t you worried about the wounds, Mr. Nene?”
    “I don’t worry about the wounds. When I go up there, which is my intention, the Big Judge will say to me, Where are your wounds? and if I say I haven’t any, he will say, Was there nothing to fight for? I couldn’t face that question.”

    .

    It’s hard to see how, by acting faithfully and living obediently to the words of Jesus, we can avoid those moments when we have to fight. They’re fair questions – where are your wounds? Was there nothing to fight for? Fair and just questions, because justice and righteousness are core values of a Christian worldview. And there’s plenty to fight for, and against.

    For truthfulness, and against the pervasive dishonesty of much in public life;

    for friendship, and against bullying that only thrives where it isn’t confronted;

    for open trust, and against the creeping backstabbing nastiness that invades office space;

    for commonsense, and against irresponsible front door promotions of buy one get one free multi-packs of booze in supermarkets;

    for human dignity and diversity, and against racism, latent and blatant; against, well against whatever diminishes and devalues human beings and human life. ‘Let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever rolling stream’ – not mere aspiration, but worldview, lifestyle, prayer that leads to practice.

    .

    It’s Lent. Maybe complacency would be harder to give up than chocolate, wine, TV. It might be worth deciding what to fight for….and against. If we can be bothered!

  • Scottish Baptist College Blog

    The Scottish Baptist College now has its own blog, set up by Stuart and a place where we will post news, articles, reviews and open up discussion on areas of theology and ministry, both in a Baptist context and with openness to wider views and experience. We will also do book reviews in areas in which we teach, or have an interest, and for those who engage in a preaching ministry some suggested reading, shared experience, ideas.

    The link is on my sidebar amongst the Blogs I Regularly Read. I posted there yesterday and you can find it here. The post asks whether we are entirely right to say the raison d’etre of the Church is mission. One witness who sees the Church’s role from a different perpsective is P T Forsyth who prefers the word mediatorial to missional.