Living Wittily

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  • When is a sermon past its use by date?

    Friday afternoon I spent a while sifting through an impressive pile of my previous sermons stretching back at least 20 years. Fascinating how what I preached then doesn’t seem to cut it now; and the contemporary engagement with political, historical and ecclesial events now dates them, in the negative sense of out of date, but also in the positive sense that when they were preached, they were taking the life and events of the world seriously.

    Sermons referring to Piper Alpha (when I was in Aberdeen), the invasion of Kuwait, Nelson Mandela’s release and the overturning of apartheid laws, the Berlin Wall, numerous Balkan conflicts (appearing in several remembrance Sunday sermons), the crushing of student protests in Tianneman Square by the Chinese military, the Omagh bombing when on the Saturday afternoon I went into the study and did an entirely different sermon;

    numerous harvest sermons asking increasingly serious questions about ecological concerns, globalisation and non-accountable economics; the Ethiopian famines, the Lockerbie bombing, the Dunblane and Hungerford massacres;

    various attempts to think Christianly about consumerism, the lottery, genetic science developments; affirmations and questionings about changing views of church, mission, faith and work;

    regular explorations of the meaning of the Lord’s Supper, the blessings, the challenge, the frustrations and the guilt trips associated with praying or not praying; the nature of the church as community, agonising about inter-faith dialogue and the uniqueness of Christ…..and so on….and on….and on.

    Domeafter_lg A quick scan of the texts preached caused no surprise – the Gospels are well ahead of Paul, some of the OT narratives are well represented including Moses, Jacob, Joseph, Elijah and Samuel and David. Ruth and Jonah I’ve preached through twice! But the thick pile of sermon notes in one bundle shows Isaiah has been a key text in my ministry and in my life ever since as a 19 year old I sat in a car, beside the River Tay in Perth, and prayed really hard that I’d manage not to make a fool of myself when I preached for the first time in a ‘real’ Baptist church. I opened my Bible at Isaiah 43 and the first words I read were ‘Fear not I have redeemed you; I have called you by name….’ I’ve never doubted that random anxious flicking through Scripture was whatever the divine equivalent is to a reassuring arm round my shoulder. I still have the handwritten sermon, in a brown paper covered notebook – it was on Philippians and the AV text "I press on towards the mark of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus". I’ll never chuck that one out – it’s one of those holy relics that remind me of grace that takes our ordinariness and makes it sing. If forced to have only one book in the Bible other than the Gospels it would be Isaiah then, a book I’ve learned to call the fifth gospel.

    Anyway and anyhow, I’ve been preaching for over thirty years so there’s a lot of this stuff despite previous clear outs. James Denney claimed to have burned all his sermons when he left Broughty Ferry in 1897, but fortunately there’s still a few hundred of them so he must only have burned the ones he thought unpreachable elsewhere. Whatever, it’s time to engage in some discriminating sifting to see how many might be worth keeping. Having made a start I’ve got one carrier bag full of sermons now well past their use by date.

    Question 1. What criteria should be used to decide if a sermon preached in the past is worth keeping now?

    Question 2. Should an old sermon ever be re-cycled?

  • Darkness is My Only Companion 1. Questions that arise from the circle of doubt

    Darkness is My Only Companion, Kathryn Greene-McCreight, (Grand Rapids: Brazos press), 176 pages, (Currently £7.91 from Amazon) – review copy courtesy of Brazos Press, for which thanks.

    4176kd4r47l__aa240__2 When Martin Luther said ‘Affliction is the best book in my library’, he wasn’t suggesting it was the most enjoyable book to read, but that it was the one from which he learned most. The word ‘affliction’ is now a bit old fashioned, and perhaps not even politically correct as a description of the conditions many people have to learn to live with. That Kathryn Greene-McCreight begins her story with Psalm 88, a Psalm of Lament, she acknowledges, that the condition with which she struggles, bipolar disorder, is an affliction. The title of her book is directly taken from Psalm 88, Darkness is My Only Companion. Throughout the book these words are a recurring motif as she reflects theologically and courageously on the kaleidoscope of dark and glittering colours that have made up her inner life and determined the quality and direction of her outer life.

    Bipolar affective disorder, formerly called manic depressive syndrome, is not simply the swing between chronic sadness and temporary elation. It is a profoundly complex mental illness in which several factors are implicated, including neurobiology, chemical imbalance and genetic considerations. Those who live with this condition and those who care for them are aware of how far this condition reaches into the deepest places of human personality, often with disruptive and anguished consequences. That is what makes this book such an important contribution to pastoral theology. This is an honest report from someone whose illness has taken them to those darker more distant corners of human experience, when the impact of the condition seriously challenges those powerful instincts for life, security and the daylight of ‘normality’. And it is written by an Episcopal priest who is a scholar theologian with a PhD from Yale, married, a theological educator, a mother, and thus self-evidently able to include in her life much that would be expected in those without such a serious illness.

    But the book is written as a Christian response to mental illness, and as a description of the realities and consequences of such a potentially disruptive condition. She takes on the glib irresponsible (and pastorally insensitive) affirmation of the perennially cheery Christian. And when various well meaning studies on how spirituality reduces the incidence of depression are published by a church seizing on apologetic ammunition because ‘religious people are less depressed, less anxious, and less suicidal than nonreligious people’, she becomes rightly angry and impatient. But her annoyance is channelled again and again in this book into constructive reflection on what it is like to have a mental illness, and also be a person of faith. Here is her own starting point for going public on what it is like to cling to faith in the loving reality of God when her inner world is filled with emotional forces that threaten her very sense of being?

    Often those Christians who are  depressed or otherwise mentally ill…feel guilty on top of being depressed, because they understand their depression, their lack of thankfulness, their desperation, to be a betrayal of God. For mentally ill Christians belief in God is no longer objective but becomes subjective, interiorised, and thereby drawn  into the circle of doubt.

    And the questions that arise from that circle of doubt are theological, personal, pastoral, and above all crucial, because in seeking to answer them, she is seeking an understanding of God, her faith, her illness and herself that will be to the benefit of the Body of Christ – within which all sorts and conditions of people are to be held, in a love that holds on even when we feel ourselves falling.

  • Each to their own preferred weakness…..

    Walking across the Paisley Campus with my latte and fresh baked scone with Blackcurrant jam (no butter), I pass one of the cafe staff outside having a smoke. Our eyes meet and she looks at my plate, smiles and says,

    "Aye but what you’ve got makes you fat; what ah’ve got makes me thin".

    Oh, well that’s ok then!

  • Embarrassment

    How embarrassing for man

    to be the greatest miracle on earth

    and not to understand it!

    How embarrassing for man

    to live in the shadow of greatness

    and to ignore it,

    to be a contemporary of God

    and not to sense it.

    Religion depends upon what man does

    with his ultimate embarrassment.

    Abraham Joshua Heschel, peace be upon him.

    I wonder if this was a gentle play on the more serious suggestion of Tillich’s ‘ultimate concern’. A reminder that God is ultimate,and the ultimate response of human beings is attentive, adoring wonder that is content to be embarrassed by knowledge too wonderful for us.

  • Silencing the Song of the Ruthless

    Long, long ago, during the latter days of the biblical theology movement, when massive tomes of biblical theology built on synthesised and sophisticated learning were becoming a species as endangered as dinosaurs, and perhaps for similar reasons of mismatch between evolution and environment, a young Lutheran biblical scholar began to write about the Old Testament. What made him different, interesting, provocative, was that he was….different, interesting and provocative!

    Brueggemann I’ve read Walter Brueggemann for over 30 years, from one of his earliest books on Hosea, till his latest books on the theology of Jeremiah. I’m not always comfortable with how loosely he hangs to biblical history and how free he is in imposing canons of narrative criticism on the biblical narratives; at times I think he is plain wrong, but often, very often, I think he is plain right. Or if not ‘right’, then his interpretation of biblical text feels the most persuasive, sounds plausible, is relevantly contemporary and applicable; and because Brueggemann respects the angularity of the text, and the right of the text not to fit easily into our modern presuppositions, I don’t sense, as I often do in other commentators, an anxiety that domesticates the biblical text to make it sound more safely ‘biblical’. Brueggemann is uncomfortable with the imposition of ‘right’, ‘correct’, ‘true’ interpretations, if by that we think we can establish beyond dispute what a biblical text must mean for us now, or what it must have meant, or how it must have been received, by the original audience. He is far too open to the work of the Spirit in the interpretive process to think that our puny words can finalise the meaning of the Word. Speaking of words, words like stimulating, insightful, provocative, imaginative are now cliches as reviewers search for adjectives to describe his writing on the Bible. But they remain true.

    There are a number of recurring concerns for Brueggemann. He is a brilliant diagnostic analyst of the psychology of power; he understands as few biblical scholars do, the anatomy of the body politic; he rages with outrage against the empire of global consumerism, and the hegemony of monetary power. And from the other side he has a genius for discerning the strands of hope woven through human experience; he is an enthusiast, in fact he seems at time obsessed with, the liberating energy that drives and informs the divine justice. He understands the complicated unorthodoxies of the prophetic mind that refuses to be conned by the comfort songs of the prevailing culture, and becomes a translator not only of prophetic texts, but of the prophetic intent of the One who says, Thus says the Lord.

    Nm_pakistan_071103_ms_2  So as Remembrance Sunday approaches, and I reflect on Isaiah 25 to find important words to say into a service that for many older people is always encumbered by powerful emotions surging up from deep memories; and a service for all of us who live in a world where oppressive systemic violence and random ad hoc violence fuel conflict, I wonder what Brueggemann makes of these remarkable words. And I pray and think and read. Much of the sermon is ready – The title, "Silencing the Song of the Ruthless" comes from the text – and in a world where monks in Burma are imprisoned and disappear, and in Pakistan where lawyers are beaten up and arrested, the song of the ruthless is being heartily sung, and needs to be silenced.

    I’ve learned to stay away from Brueggemann till much of my own thinking is done – his ideas are far too borrowable. But as usual, I find in a few of his phrases, important things I wouldn’t know where else to find – and my sermon is the better for this Lutheran scholar, this prophet’s prophet. I thank God for one whose piety drives his scholarship, and whose scholarship critiques his piety, and one who is the enemy of that defensive timid piety that will not question its own assumptions! May this uncomfortable, discomforting prophet, go on writing for a Church called to sing the song of the Lamb, which will silence the song of the ruthless.

  • send thy roots deep down…….

    Cross O Tree of Calvary,

    send thy roots deep down

    into my heart.

    Gather together the soil of my heart,

    the sands of my fickleness,

    the stones of my stubbornness,

    the mud of my desires,

    bind them all together.

    O Tree of calvary,

    interlace them with thy strong roots,

    entwine them with the network

    of thy love.

    Chandran Devanesen.

  • Hit and run, arson and the failure of moral imagination

    Each human life is unique and precious. Every human being embodies an entire universe of possibility, potential and value.

    Storyf6175c2403007068ff160188db1142 Catherine Corbett, a young police woman is run down in a hit and run incident as she was trying to arrest people suspected of fraud. Fraud is about dishonest gain, cheating others for something that could never balance the loss of a human life, or the crushing of human possibility.

    Fsc_logo_top_2 One fire fighter is dead and three others missing in the aftermath of a huge fire almost certainly an act of arson. The act of fire-raising is intentionally destructive, whether from stupidity or malice, but either way it endangers human life unnecessarily, at times with tragic consequences.

    There is a bleak nihilism laced through the substance of our society. It manifests itself in a failure of moral imagination, that capacity to envisage the human consequences of actions, so that restraint, accountability, compassionate responsibility, the essential public duty of valuing and protecting life, simply do not register on the moral radar. The tragic irony is that those people who serve the public, like our police force and the fire service, who put themselves in the way of harm to protect the public and preserve human life, by doing so demonstrate precisely those qualities of moral imagination – holding themselves accountable, showing compassionate responsibility for others, acting out of public duty. They are too little valued in a society too easily taken in by the superfluous, the trivial, the transitory, the self serving, the greedy grabbing for advantage – and a society too neglectful of those who, while also part of that same society, have made a vocation of caring about precisely those human consequences of other people’s actions.

    Tonight I pray for those whose sense of pride in the courage and conduct of their loved ones, only slightly lessens the leaden weight of loss. May they know the comfort of God, whatever that might mean for each of them

    300pxchrist_of_saint_john_of_the_cr Tonight I pray for those whose actions have led to the loss of lives, and the breaking of human bodies. May they recover that moral imagination essential to personal moral responsibility; and then may their remorse open them to the possibility of restorative justice and a future in which one of the consequences of their past actions might be future acts of recreative hope.

  • Autism and Religion.

    Sbanner_left In December 2007 and March 2008 I will be taking part in two inter-disciplinary symposia on ‘Religion and Autism’. It is sponsored by the Centre for Spirituality, Health and Disability at the University of Aberdeen. You can find out about it here. I have been invited to take part and am offering a paper entitled, ‘Is a Sense of "Self" essential to Spirituality?’

    I am interested in the subject of these symposia for several reasons, personal and pastoral. My wife Sheila has many years of wide experience in areas of disability and additional support needs, including in the past 5 years working with pre-school children with autism, and with their parents as part of an early intervention and support programme, which includes EarlyBird training. On my own part, I served for many years as Chaplain in a school for children and young people with a range of learning  difficulties including autism. In pastoral charges we have accompanied families which include people with autism and have explored ways of providing appropriate support and inclusion within a local church setting. Some of these families we have known and accompanied for over 17 years and have shared the challenges of the growth and development of several children with autism – now teenagers.

    At a more theological level I have for some time taken an interest in the theological, pastoral and human implications of those conditions which often mean a person has an impaired sense of self. Any condition which diminishes a person’s sense of self, and which impairs their capacity to relate in a self-conscious, appropriate and socially interactive way with others, raises questions about what the reality of God, religious experience and religious practices might mean for such people. Autism is one such condition of which I have close experience. As a Christian theologian I am thus compelled to examine my own tradition to explore the theological possibilities that enable such working concepts as spirituality, humanity, identity, self-awareness and Other awareness, to be defined in ways that include and affirm the place of the autistic person within a faith community. For me a first step in this would be a head on facing of the question that is the title of my proposed paper:

    Is a Sense of ‘Self’ Essential for Spirituality?

    On all of this I will keep those of you who read this blog posted. Maybe even set up one or two areas for exploration, suggestion and shared insight.

  • Be considerate to the neighbours when you pray

    Smile3t Early in the morning, before the sun was risen, I went out for a slow jog in the drizzle…which like God’s love falls on the righteous, and thankfully, on the unrighteous

    Early in the morning, before the sun was risen, they came to the place where Jesus lay…He is not here, He is risen. Indeed!

    Early in the morning O Lord you hear my voice, in the morning I lay my requests before you, and wait in expectation. (Ps.5.3)

    His compassions never fail  they are new every morning. (Lam 3.23)

    Slowly jogging past the neighbours’ houses, not a prayer jog, not a hint of  ‘claiming the territory’, but as the drizzle slowly seeps into the sweatshirt, and cools both my face and the shiny dome above it, so may God’s blessing fall as drizzle on the roofs of these houses, and seep into the lives of those still sleeping, or just waking.

    And I jog quietly, because as Proverbs 27.14 says

    If a man loudly blesses his neighbour early in the morning,

    it will be taken for a curse.

    So I’m learning to jog quietly and pray inwardly!

  • Cyclones of power, consuming glory fire

    Within Reformed Christianity of almost all flavours, there is an entire spectrum of corporate and individual devotional practice. Within Evangelicalism prayer tends to be a combination of pragmatism and mysticism, extempore vernacular and inspired corporate worship, brash intercessory claiming of God’s blessings as if God were a bank and we were demanding, as of right, an increased overdraft; and on the other hand, those for whom prayer is humble patient waiting on God, whose depths of mercy and mystery, require silent wonder, wordless adoration, and only then ecstatic praise.

    Hvg_oval_2  Frances Ridley Havergal could write of both. Her most famous hymn, ‘Take my life and let it be’ is a personal inventory of all the dimensions of human life and experience that have to be handed over to God. But it is one of her less known poems that demonstrates this woman’s sweep of intellect and mystical depth. Havergal’s vision of God inspires breathless, adoring wonder, and places her amongst the genuinely mystical poets.

    In ‘Thoughts of God’, Havergal offers, not her own faltering thoughts, but a bold description of the inner mind of the Almighty. She knew she was treading on holy ground and her imagination hesitates before being drawn inwards and upwards by the beauty of her vision. The poem ends in serenity, repose and the contemplative joy of those who know they are loved:

    They say there is a hollow, safe and still,

         A point of coolness and repose

    Within the centre of a flame, where life might dwell

    Unharmed and unconsumed, as in a luminous shell,

         Which the bright walls of fire enclose

    In breachless splendour, barrier that no foes

         Could pass at will .. .

    So in the centre of these thoughts of God,

    Cyclones of power, consuming glory fire –

         As we fall o’erawed

    Upon our faces, and are lifted higher

    By His great gentleness, and carried nigher

    Than unredeemed angels, till we stand

         Even in the hollow of His hand –

    Nay, more! we lean upon His breast-

    There, there we find a point of perfect rest

         And glorious safety. There we see

         His thoughts to usward, thoughts of peace

    That stoop to tenderest love; that still increase

    With increase of our need; that never change,

    That never fail, or falter, or forget …

    Gentleness, intimacy, perfect rest, tenderest love, grace that increases with increase of need, and a thoughtful God who never fails or falters or forgets, are ideas which provide the secure emotional substructure of her theology of consecration.