Living Wittily

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  • Disturb us Lord

    Maggi Dawn quotes part of the prayer of Sir Francis Drake. I like the word disturb even if I usually resent the experience – but now and again, and more often than not, we all need the experience of being disturbed.

    Sw70031 I want to be attracted more to risk than safety, to prefer trust to certainty, to question reality with a little dreaming – and yes, to see if when push comes to shove, I talk a better faith than I live – or live a better faith than I talk. Pentecost is getting nearer – and amongst the ministries of the Holy Spirit is the power to disturb. The great liturgical invocation, "Veni Sanctus Spiritus", is not a prayer for protective peace but for faith to take risks! With aplogies to Latin purists, it could be re-written with one added word

    "Veni Spiritus Sanctus, Disturbus!

    Remove from our souls – complacency – predictability – routine – defensiveness – laziness – ennui – comfort – familiarity – mediocrity – the whole lexicon of undisturbed tedium, from apathy to zonkedness." (by the way this word is in MY lexicon, cos I couldn’t think of another).

    2g1099_preview So the prayer of Sir Francis (not St Francis – whose prayer is also disturbing but in a different way) is one I want to pray for my own life and its next stages, for the faith community to which I belong (Scottish Baptists), and for the Church in our country. Not moribund peace but creative hassle; not the shoreline but the open sea; not the safe strategies of sensible safe religious behaviour, but the disturbing turbulence of following in the slipstream of the Spirit. Do I really mean this – well I’m praying it anyway, in the words of the world’s first circumnavigator, and if God answers it, God help me and us – as He has promised to do!

    Disturb us, Lord,
    when we are too well pleased with ourselves;
    when our dreams have come true because we dreamed too little;
    When we arrive safely because we sailed too close to the shore.

    Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly –
    to venture on wider seas where storms will show your mastery;
    where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars.

  • Politics is for People

    Williamsshirley_2  Years ago Shirley Williams (remember her?) wrote Politics is for People, a carefully reasoned, socially compassionate and morally intelligient plea for political processes and institutions that served rather than exploited, that gave due weight to social justice, that aimed at increasing and sharing more equally, the opportunities that arise from a country’s wealth and work. Some would say she was a failed politician – failed to get elected on two occasions, went into academia in Harvard, and is now Baroness Williams of Crosby, retiring from the House of Lords as leader of the Lib Dems in 2004. But that book was visionary in a reasoned and morally cogent way.

    Politics is for people. Indeed. It seems a long way away – and I don’t just mean a long time ago – over twenty five years. It seems a long way away since politicians could write such a book and find that the public bought and read it as if its contents were genuinely meant. Contemporary political realities are more often junk food standard than organically sound.

    Copy20of20386220big20ben20through_2 The degree of self interest, party self-preservation, power at any price maneouverings, patronising spin, wheeling and dealing with large corporations and global companies,  – oh and the odd military adventure based on balsam wood moral foundations to spread the gospel of democarcy western style in places where democracy has no cultural or religious roots. Politics is for people would now sound like spin, another polystyrene promise, used once and thrown away as disposable.

    Thumbnail6_2 So what keeps us Christians from becoming cynical non participants in the political processes intended to make governments accountable? Why do we as people, bother about politics which seem to be less about people like us, and more about the politician, the party, the bottom line, whatever terminology best describes the dominant public perception of self-interested, not to be trusted politicians?

    Why will I vote in our elections on May 3?

    1. Because I believe in our capacity to do things right, to make fair decisions, to at least want a fairer society, even if it doesn’t always work out that way no matter how hard we argue and try.
    2. Because I don’t believe every politician is in it for themselves, as if good people who want to make a difference were somehow absent from the hustings, and allergic to public life.
    3. Because though a lot of political life is manipulative, unprincipled, power-mongering and at times exploitative – there are people in there who care, who want the voice of ordinary folk to be heard and their life desires given a chance. I’m with them – if I can spot them!
    4. Because I don’t think I can claim to be a follower of Jesus, and ignore the possibility that my ballot paper, along with those of others, can make a difference to who become the decision makers.
    5. Because I will pray for guidance, and I’ll use the commonsense and ethical passion God has given in casting my vote.
    6. Because what I’m looking for is the candidate nearest to the values that underpin human flourishing and social compassion – and if they are good politicians – good as effective operator and good as principled person, then they have my vote, my support, my prayers.

    And the question of which party they belong to will be largely secondary. The party manifesto is less important to me than the personal track record of getting stuck in on behalf of the people – listening to our voice, speaking our case, caring about local outcomes, and displaying unashamed bias towards those pushed to the edges.

    And yes all the above is idealistic, even generalised, and lacking political sophistication – which is ok with me, cos I’m dead unsophisticated so I am.

  • God is the expert on theology

    Sometimes learning is fun. Sometimes learning is boring. Sometimes learning means unlearning. And nearly always unlearning is inconvenient, disruptive, disturbing, scary. And learning theology, which is learning about God, can be all of the above and a blessed lot more.

    Hubble_1_2 Fun because theology deals with a subject area that drives to the core of life’s biggest questions; boring because sometimes we have to do the hard stuff before we experience the benefits, and we are used to instant benefits, as if the work needed to possess knowledge could be put on some intellectual credit card. And theological learning can be inconvenient because it gets in the way of our comfortably familiar take on what we call our faith; disruptive because when you’re dealing with God and who God is you shouldn’t expect life to be a tidy, predictable routine which includes worship, fellowship and the odd bit of witnessing; scary because God is – I mean both God is scary, and God IS.

    As we work to act a little less clumsily, less inhumanely, less thoughtlessly; to speak a little less ignorantly, less dishonestly, less inattentively, there is always much to say and even more to do. Only God speaks one Word which says everything, which makes and heals the world…

    Good learning calls, no less than teaching does, for courtesy, respect, a kind of reverence; for facts and people, evidence and argument, for climates of speech and patterns of behaviour different from our own. Watchfulness is, indeed, in order but endless suspicion and mistrust are not.

    There are affinities between the courtesy, the delicacy of attentiveness, required for friendship; the single-minded passionate disinterestedness without which no good scholarly or scientific work is done; and the contemplativity which strains,- without credulity, – to listen for the voice of God – who does not shout.

    To which I can only say, Amen!

    (The quote is from Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God, London: SCM, 1992, pages 2,10-11).

  • Throw the furniture around

    396274 Last night, at the end of a full day, I sat for a while with Dogmatics II.1 and II.2 and browsed – even browsing Barth is intimidating, but also an invitation. Here is the real thing – a mind delving into mystery and kneeling before transcendence. Time spent with this theologian who loved the church revives faith and hopefulness.

    Not long ago I finished reading Flannery O’Connor’s letters, The Habit of Being. This mildly questioning Catholic, who wrote bizarre stories about the mystery and mastery of grace that invades human lives, had a lot of time for Karl Barth’s big thick volumes. Her copy of Evangelical Theology (lectures given on Barth’s only visit to the US) was heavily marked. In a letter to her best friend she confided: ‘I distrust folks who have ugly things to say about Karl Barth. I like old Barth. He throws the furniture around.’

    Sw70031 Not long to Pentecost. Are you allowed to have favourite doctrines – if so, mine’s the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes I think of the Holy Spirit as the One who throws the furniture around, breaks up the comfortable sofas and routines, rips up the well worn carpets, heaves the telly and the Sky tuner into the corner, even out the window, goes in for some serious Feng Shui to maximise the space in mind and heart and life, for the presence of God to be acknowledged and the worship of God freed from the competing claims of an over cluttered life. As a metaphor of spiritual change, the Holy Spirit doing a makeover of our intellectual and spiritual furniture is worthy of longer consideration – and touches nerves in my own spirit.

  • “NO” is a charistian word

    Thirty years ago in an article called ‘The Nerve of Failure’, published in Theology Today, Leonard Sweet anticipated some of the themes that have captivated his readers in a stream of his recent bestsellers. My favourite quote is the one at the start:

    "The quality that should mark the Christian church is not goodness, but grace, not merit, but mercy, not moralism, but forgiveness, not the enshrinement of success, but the acceptance of failure . . . Lacking the nerve of failure, we have suffered a failure of nerve-to dare to dream dreams, venture visions, and risk getting splinters that come from cutting against the grain."

    And then there’s the wise reminder from John Oman, an unjustly forgotten theologian, "NO is a Christian word". By which Oman meant, not ‘NO’ as negativity and withdrawal, but ‘NO’ as positive engagement against whatever diminishes, demeans or dismisses our humanity – NO as cutting against the cultural grain….and to hang with the splinters. The book from which it comes is called Grace and Personality – now there’s two interesting criteria for a church – a place demonstrating, embodying, performing, the grace and personality of Jesus.

  • Composing, conducting and performing a human life…

    Rost2_161619a_2 The Russian cellist, composer and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich has died age 80. One of the finest cellists of the 20th Century, his playing so accomplished and passionate that major composers were prepared to compose pieces designed for his playing. In his own view, of all that he wrote and composed, the most important was the letter he sent to Pravda in support of Alexander Solhzehnitsyn in 1970. He campaigned on behalf of Andrei Sacharov, and publicly criticised the authorities of the old Soviet regime. He was persecuted and banished for that – but this noble, humane, composer, cellist and conductor embodied the spirit of freedom and resistance to totalitarianism and the abuse of state sponsored power. In 1991 he even joined Boris Yeltsin in facing down the Communist pusch and defending the pro-democracy movement as the old regime crumbled.

    For me there is an almost metaphysical connection between the gifts of composition, conducting and performing music, and the gifts of composing, conducting and performing a beautiful and humanising life. As one young Russian said, ‘may his soul rest in peace and glory.’

  • Going to a Conference on Providence, God willing.

    Andy Goodliff – thanks Andy, has drawn attention to a Systematic Theology Conference in Aberdeen, January 2008, on the theme of Providence. I emailed the organiser to say I intended to come (dv)!(Details here), and would he send me booking details in due course.

    So. Does God guide our lives? Are coincidences just that, the accidental coming together of circumstances, just one of those things that happen, or does God surprise us and challenge us to look again at how blessing and unlooked for pleasure might be God knocking at the door of  lives too busy and self-centred for their own good? Or come at it another way, when someone survives a crisis, sometimes there’s a half-joking but half serious flick of the eyes upward, and the comment, “Someone up there must have been looking after me!”

    20089aviewofthevalleyonthewaytothea Our last Austrian holiday was in Mayrhofen, in the Tyrol where it is hard not to think of God, if only because the mountains demand to be looked at, walked on, and thought about. At six thousand feet, looking at ribbons of water, six feet wide, tumbling a hundred feet down a sheer rock face, millions of water drops refracting sunlight and making rainbows against the background of grey rock and green mountain meadow, it’s hard not to ask, so does all this just happen to be here. Is this the intentional beauty of an artist, or just coincidence, nature doing it’s thing?

    Cinquefoil Then there’s the contrast between hundred ton boulders and tiny symmetrically perfect flowers, in pink, yellow and blue, growing in the sheltering shadow of those same rocks, ages old. Or again, in Alpine sun, climbing towards the Alpenhut where hot soup and a cold drink will both be needed to warm and cool a body working harder than it has for some time, we stop and fill our water bottle at a mini-torrent of crystal clear water, and drink mineral water as nature intended before it got bottled and labelled.

    Enjoyment, wonder and admiration for mountain permanence and floral fragility, experiences of the mind and heart which put the routine worries of life in a different more humbling perspective. So is all this extravagant attention to detail an irrelevant by-product of natural forces, or is beauty one of God’s significant nudges to get the attention of minds too preoccupied with achievement, performance, production, results, profit margins, bottom lines and all the other trivialities we have invested with such undeserved significance.

    So is all this just coincidence? I learned a long time ago that the word ‘just’ is a devaluing word, best avoided. Are there times when ‘coincidence’ is a significant nudge. 4zbahnsmt_jpg That same holiday we were on a walk all morning. On the way back along the valley we stopped to talk to John and Julie, a Yorkshire couple and great company. The steam train passed us on its way to Mayrhofen, we waved to the passengers, and walked on to Mayrhofen ourselves. As we walked past the station, there, deep in conversation about the best way to spend an hour in the town before the train left, were Stewart and Helen, two close friends from our time in Aberdeen. I didn’t even know they were on holiday. If we hadn’t met John and Julie… If Stewart didn’t still have the heart of a boy for steam trains… if we had gone up the cable car instead of to our favourite coffee stop. Coincidence? Yes, but not just coincidence. One of God’s more significant nudges, I believe.

    I hope, God willing, to learn more of what all this means at the conference in January 2008!

  • God’s recreation of the new day

    Ever since my father took me across the fields in Ayrshire, pushing a wheelbarrow and filling it with the soil from molehills, I’ve enjoyed the garden as a therapeutic place. To be amongst things that are growing; to contribute to the process of growth and beauty; to cut and shape the hedge as a way of sticking my tongue out at those parts of life that are harder to control and make tidy!; to exercise stewardship not as dominion but as care, appreciation and willing labour.

    Yes, I can see why Cat Stevens’ rendering of Eleanor Farejeon’s poem, Morning has broken, elbowed its way into our hymn repertoire – it celebrates the wet, lush, freshness of an early morning garden. It’s so popular that I’ve conducted weddings, funerals, worship services and school assemblies where the simple evocative words and tune touch something deeply human (humus), almost regardless of the mood of the occasion – joy, sadness, adoration, endurance.

    All of this because today I did the hedge, and last night scarified the grass. Morning has Broken doesn’t have a verse about weeds, moss and flymos, but no matter, I can live with a song that is uncomplicated in its vision of what makes it worth getting out of bed for. So much of my life is focused on ideas – and yes I do live in my head a lot! So it’s a relief, and a return to a lifelong enjoyment of getting my hands dirty, when I’m let loose to do the labouring in the garden. One of my happiest memories (and best paid jobs!) was when my father paid me to mix his compost – three parts soil, two parts leaf mould, one part each of peat and sand – except for the stuff for his cacti which had two parts sand, two parts soil, and one part peat. And it was riddled using my bare hands – I still remember being fascinated by the texture of riddled compost, the damp smell, the promise of fertility and anchorage for all those cuttings!

    08933 The photo was taken 50 years ago – when dad was lying beside the drystane dyke that was our garden fence – the dog was our working collie, Norah. Taken by mum, with a box camera, it’s a no’ bad photie, eh?

  • The sense of divine things….

    Trinity A long time ago, when I was 40, one of my best friends bought me a print of Rublev’s Icon. Before then it was an attractive piece of Russian medieaval art – since then it has been a source of spiritual and contemplative reflection that has often drawn me into the presence of the Triune God.

    I never tire of looking at it, thinking about the rich interplay of familiar symbol, noting the liturgical colours, listening for unmistakable biblical resonance, joying in (enjoying) the deep mystery it portrays, of the Holy Trinity, the eternal communion of self-giving love, the God who is Father, Son, Spirit. Sixteen years on my icon has faded, it hangs in the College study and is still one of the focal points in my mind and heart when I want lifted beyond all this – whatever ‘all this’ happens to be at the time!

    And then today, Frances brought me a new copy (for which many thanks!) – bright, colourful, unfaded, once again a glimpse into truths too dazzling to see, and into a world beyond any categories I control. The restful gaze of God’s love, the eucharistic cup surrounded by eternal communion, the threefold touch of God from hands shaped in blessing, the hospitality of God laid out in the meticulous generosity of welcome – for once the overused epithet is appropriate – it is a ‘stunning’ achievement of human spiritual creativity.

    The idea that beauty is an important category for theology has become an important recent emphasis in the way Christian theologians think of God. Beauty, along with truth and goodness appeal to that in us which retains the image of God. Jonathan Edwards called this the sense of divine things, which is the gift of grace that enables us to apprehend, appreciate and respond to the beauty of God. This icon draws me into a sense of divine things, and into a sense of the beauty of God’s Holiness.

    Jonathanedwards Christ has brought it to pass, that those that the Father has given him, should be brought into the household of God; that he and his Father and his people, should be as it were one society, one family; that the church should be as it were admitted into the society of the blessed Trinity.

    A week or so ago I promised a blog on Jonathan Edwards and Jurgen Moltmann. Edwards the New England Calvinist would have puzzled at the icon, Moltmann loves it. I’ll post a few excerpts from their writings on the Trinity soon. For now see a characteristically engaged sermon on the Trinity by Moltmann over here.

  • The ministry of women: a rich, indispensable Spirit endowed gift to the church

    Scotmcknight_2_thumbnail I’ve added a new name to the list of blogs I visit regularly. Scott McKnight is a NT scholar, an evangelical who is also a thoughtful enthusiast for the concerns about the mission of the church as expressed in emergent circles. I’ve read his blog almost since it started two years ago. He is passionate about a number of things I care a lot about. When he writes he thinks before he blogs! His track record as a scholar, pastor and thoroughly fair minded evangelical make him educational fun.

    40952 So, I’ve decided to link him here because his blog is a good resource for some of the important debates going on in the church, particularly the evangelical wing. His categories sidebar gives easy acsess to major themes in his posts. For example his comments on recent debates on atonement are rooted in deep study – he’s recently published a major academic study, Jesus and His Death.

    His interactive conversation about Emerging Movement is sympathetic but not uncritical – in fact it’s one of the most balanced responses I know – and because it’s an ongoing conversation, how emergent is that! There’s a whole sidebar on Emerging Movement.

    But for me one of the most important areas where McKnight is required reading is Women in Ministry (57 posts so far, some of them substantial contributions to the debate – see his sidebar). McKnight adopts an egalitarian position – which means he affirms the place of women in all forms of ministry, and sees gender rendered irrelevant by a gospel which affirms equality before God. The reason I think Mcknight is an important voice in any debate about women and ministry is because he argues from biblical evidence, and with a care to understand what the Bible means as well as what it says.

    I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of weary (at times to the point of being rude!) of those who think there are only two positions – those who affirm the ministry of women (egalitarians) and those who adopt the biblical position (complementarians). Excuse me – I’m biblical in my Christian discipleship too! I affirm the ministry of women as a position congruent with Scripture, consistent with the Gospel of Christ and with a life lived following after Him, and as a rich indispensable Spirit endowed gift to the church. The issue isn’t one that divides into those who adopt the "biblical" position and those who don’t. An argument isn’t right because we label it biblical, and label others’ position unbiblical because they disagree with our interpretation. The issue for me, as a Baptist Christian, is one of being obedient to the call of Christ to follow Him, as the decisive, living and personal authority in our lives, and to seek the mind of Christ through Scripture prayed, studied, heard and interpeted within the community which gathers in His name.