Living Wittily

Blog

  • Grateful remembering and proper sadness

    You know how it is when you can’t be in two places at once? The prayer meeting or the football? Work or Starbucks? Family or friends? There are two places you want to be, two people or groups of people you want to spend time with, but it’s the same time, and they are different places. Such choices are balancing acts, and the degree of difficulty depends on the occasion, and who else matters in the decision.

    05_08_2_web Next week I’ll attend the funeral of a woman who, with her husband, share with us decades of friendship, both generous and graceful. At precisely the same time, on the same day next week, a close friend has invited me to his mother’s funeral thirty miles away. I’ve known them for ages too. Can’t do both – so I’ll stay with the one that already had a promise around it, and explain why to my other freind, even when I know such explanation isn’t needed.

    A clash of funerals is a deeply felt reminder that life isn’t to be taken for granted, nor the happiness that comes from our deepest relationships squandered. Three weeks after my own mother’s funeral I’ll again be celebrating a life well lived, giving thanks for the gift that is a person’s presence, and doing so while acknowledging now the sadness and loss that is their absence. There are few human gestures more significant than honouring life, remembering gratefully, offering back to God praise with proper sadness. 

  • The circular argument of consolation

    Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our afflictions so that we might be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort by which we ourselves are comforted by God.

    It is difficult to improve on Paul’s circular argument of consolation. In the community of Christ we are comforted comforters, consoled ministers of consolation. Following in the way of Christ isn’t always a serene saunter; the places of affliction become hard schools of learning, in which the lessons learned, are transmuted by grace, to become a source of strengthening for others. So any help we can be is as conduits of God’s comfort, making real and present to those struggling with the hard times in life, the faithful compassion of a God who also carries our sorrows. Hard to improve on this – and maybe even harder to live it – but living the love of God, and the grace of Christ, and the fellowship of the Spirit, is the essence of the obedience that is faith.

    Over the past six weeks, a number of those close to me, in our family, the College, personal friends and colleagues in ministry, have been living through the kinds of suffering and anxiety that fill the heart with sorrow and fearfulness. The last week has brought several pieces of what we ominously call ‘bad news’. Recent bereavement, life-threatening illness, major surgery, worry about those we love as part of ourselves- for any one of us such experience tests our faith at the sore places. My own trust in God has seldom been of that anxiety free variety that gives outward shows of serenity. I suppose the urge to live, and to live fully, the need to love and to be loved, the joy and preciousness of all that makes this existence of ours both human and yet precarious, makes it hard to be prepared for those scary interruptions to our well-being; hard not to panic and be afraid; making trust a big ask. It’s then we need the faith and faithfulness of each other, the trust and love of others holding and supporting us, because most of our usual handles on life are broken.

    Years ago, Joseph Parker, on the sudden death of his wife, preached on ‘When life crashes in – what then? It was a brave protest sermon against catastrophe – and it was made from the standpoint of faith. Asking hard questions of God – refusing simply to acquiesce as if God was beyond the reach of his most passionate complaints – owning both his sorrow and fearfulness for the future, admitting the need for God’s love and mercy to be translated into the kindness and companionship of others. So that life could go on.

    So today Paul’s circular argument of consolation becomes for me a focus of activity and reflection and prayer. Intercession is to love others in the presence of God – it is to comfort with the comfort by which we ourselves have been comforted, it is to look on others from the perspective of the Crucified and Risen Saviour – who has been, and is, where they now are.

  • Whyte_slavery_1 As promised – only 100 words on why I want to buy and read this:

    Scotland’s role in the slave trade has two contradictory sides. Glasgow streets, commemorating tobacco lords (Glassford, Ingram, Buchanan) highlight the vast commercial benefits derived from tobacco. Likewise West Indies islands such as Virginia, Jamaica and Tobago. 

    I am ashamed of this history of complicity.

    But there’s another side, represented by campaigners and protesters like Zachary Macaulay. Tireless fighters confronting powerful vested interests, excoriating politically expedient rationales, lambasting their ethical emptiness, exposing the theological scandal of a so-called Christian nation founding prosperity on oppression. 

    I am proud of this history of dissent.

    Ashamed – proud – I need to understand both sides.

  • What beauty is for

      Just finished reading this collected volume of Mary Oliver’s poetry. I’ll leave the details on the sidebar for a wee while in case you want to go looking for yourself.

    The detailed and affectionate observation of God’s creation is a bit like Annie Dillard’s prose, shaped to verse – but she is gentler than Dillard, her tone more like the appreciative and endlessly wondering David Attenborough. But her guided tour in the natural world often brings her to a different kind of reverie, about key questions we all ask, or are asked, in our more receptive moments. I found this volume reassuring bedside reading – not because her poems didn’t ask searching questions, but because when they did, it came as an invitation to enter the experience of her own questioning, and that deeper conversation .

    The Swan is one of my favourites.

    The Swan

    Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
    Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
    An armful of white blossoms,
    A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
    into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
    Biting the air with its black beak?
    Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
    A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
    knifing down the black ledges?
    And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
    A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
    like black leaves, its wings like the stretching light of the river?
    And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
    And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
    And have you changed your life?

  • “Durty Watter” (trans: dirty water)

    Yesterday was normalish at both ends and stressful in a thought provoking way in the middle. I’m working mainly from home this week so the morning was lecture preparation for the coming Semester, (Galatians), the occasional phone call. The late afternoon I read and revised a paper I’m doing on Baptist hermeneutics at ICC Post-grad research seminar, ‘Under the rule of the Word as Christ and Scripture’. The evening, after our meal, was a jaunt to Borders where Sheila bought a book and I didn’t!

    Dy_yamaha_622_01 But around mid-day I was walking down Paisley High Street on the way to the bank, and heard the oddly familiar strains of Hey Jude being played by a tromboning busker. The incongruity of the instrument and a favourite tune I’ve enjoyed for decades both as Beatles original and Shadows instrumental, and the crisp frosty sunshine, raised the feel good factor. Going to give the guy some money when I get back from the bank – because he was quite good on the trombone, it was cold to be standing there entertaining the shoppers (and I was entertained!), and if he was doing it, he needed the money.

    I got to the bank and went to do the business and discovered my Switch card wasn’t in my wallet. I know all about the gospel sayings about not being anxious about money and material things, but that slim piece of plastic is invested with considerable anxiety potential when it aint there! I took every other card shaped thing out of my wallet, fled home to check other possible locations, and was back at the bank pdq to ask about the only remaining possibility – did I leave it the day before?

    It isn’t just the possible loss of money – it’s the identity thing, the threat that someone has a hold over some part of who you are and what you are about. Then it’s the annoyance at yourself for misplacing it, losing it, being careless when you should know better. I’m quite good at beating myself up given the right scenario – and standing at the bank missing a plastic debit card is as good a reason for self-recrimination as I can think of.

    Och well not to worry – doesn’t life consist of more than the abundance of things, like debit and credit cards? Hauerwas has been drumming that home every chance he gets in his treatment of the Sermon on the Mount. I don’t live by bread alone; daily bread is enough anyway. Aye right! But I needed to get the card or cancel it with all the hassle that was going to cause.

    The sun shines on the righteous and the unrighteous. My card was indeed left at the bank- unfortunately it was in the safe and couldn’t be available for at least half an hour. Nae problem, said I. Walking to the Piazza I heard the trombone in the distance playing the Trumpet Voluntary – in January, Paisley, 1.30pm, on the trombone – I fair floated to the Post Office grinning at the oddity and grace of it all.

    On the way back to the bank a man in a shell suit was standing looking suspiciously at a paving stone. Our eyes met and he said in phonetic Scottish slang

    Y’ve goat tae watch thae yins. The durty watter splashes yur legs!

    He pushed his foot down slowly and sure enough it was one of those paving stones that rocked, and gathered water under it. He winked, stepped to the side of it, and went on his way. I got my card at the bank, decided to walk the longer way back to the car, and only when i got home did I remember the trombone player.M_cfbcbd0df6f97bc744de0c9653e457de  I’m genuinely scunnered at myself because that young guy was making, for me anyway, a contribution to what Sirach meant when all the trades and crafts are praised

    By their work they maintain the fabric of the world, and their prayers are in the works of their hands (Sirach 38.34, NEB)

    So I’ll go looking for him again – and when I do I will be acknowledging one of the ways in which God intimates the goodness and mercy that follows us.

  • “a world that believes we have no time to be just…”

    The devil is but another name for our impatience. We want bread, we want to force God’s hand to rescue us, we want peace – and we want all this now. But Jesus is our bead, he is our salvation, and he is our peace. That he is so requires that we learn to wait with him in a world of hunger, idolatry, and war to witness to the kingdom that is God’s patience. P_hauerwas0014 The Father will have the kingdom present one small act at a time. That is what it means for us to be an apocalyptic people, that is, a people who believe that Jesus’ refusal to accept the devil’s terms for the world’s salvation has made it possible  for a people to exist that offers an alternative time to a world that believes we have no time to be just.

    The devil’s temptations are meant to force Jesus to acknowledge that our world is determined by death. Death creates w world of scarcity – a world without enough food, power or life itself. But Jesus resists the devil because he is God’s abundance. Jesus brings a kingdom that is not a zero-sum game. There is enough food, power and life because the kingdom has come, making possible a people who have time to feed their neighbours. Fear creates scarcity, but Jesus has made it possible for us to live in trust….By resisting the devil’s temptations Jesus has made it possible for us to live without fear.

    (Hauerwas, Matthew,pages 55-6.)

  • Abraham Joshua Heschel

    We live in the universe of His knowing, in the glory of attachment. "before I formed you in the womb I knew you" (Jer.1.5). This is the task: to sense or to discover our being known. We approach Him, not by making Him the object of our thinking, but by discovering ourselves as the objects of His thinking.      A. J Heschel, The Prophets, (New York: The Burning Bush Press, 1962). First Edition.

    Long before Christmas I ordered this volume of Heschel’s magnum opus. It arrived today. It’s a 1962 first edition, handsomely bound, read but cared for, with a gold leafed postage stamp label indicating the seller was Kieffer’s Jewish Bookstore, Chicago. The publisher, The Burning Bush Press only printed quality Jewish publications. It’s a booklover’s book and I’m glad it found me!

    0824505425_01__ss500_sclzzzzzzz_v1130205 I hope some time to write a personal appreciation of this profound and revered Jewish thinker who has taught me so much about prayer, about God’s holiness, and about the lovingkindness that called creation into being and has not abandoned it. His influence was decisive on Christians of such varied backgrounds and such similar calibre as Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, Jurgen Moltmann and Walter Brueggemann. He was a substantial presence in the civil rights movement, and as a critic of Vatican II’s caginess about acknowledging the incipient, at times overtly hostile, anti-semitism in much of Christian history. His exposition of the pathos of God in this volume on the prophets was deeply influenced by the Holocaust, and is one of the most telling contributions to religious thinking in the 20th century.

  • Hauewas 4: When the devil quotes scripture

    Hauerwas Hauerwas is an interesting and disconcerting companion to walk with through a text. He has his own approach, and clearly loves the liberty the remit of this commentary series gives him to indulge in theologically disciplined eisegesis. His treatment of Jesus’ temptations is informed by Augustine and Dostoevsky, two penetrating commentators on the subtle, persuasive, sweetly reasonable psychology of evil. Here’s his authority for not troubling to ‘go behind the text’. When the devil quotes scripture at Jesus, Hauerwas comments:

    Jesus teaches us how to read scripture by refusing to go behind the text to discover what God must have "really meant". When you are in a struggle with the devil it is unwise to look for "the meaning" of the text. (page 53-4)

    I must confess to being in considerable sympathy with Hauerwas’ determination to read the Gospel, and in reading the story, enter into it as the drama of Christian discipleship, made real for each disciple and each community, in the encounter with the living Lord. So Hauerwas is able to approach the temptation of Jesus, without reducing the latent menace of the story to a generic pietism in which any half struggling believer finds some clues for spiritual warfare. When Jesus is shown the kingdoms, and invited to bow down in order to possess them, Hauerwas is at his acid best, and sees clearly the political consequences, the cosmic stakes, of Jesus’ responses: "Give the devil his due. He understands, as is seldom acknowledged particularly in our day, that politics is about worship and sacrifice. Jesus refuses to worship the devil and thus becomes the alternative to the world’s politics based on sacrifice to false gods".

    Bxp66428 All Hauerwas’ reading of Bonhoeffer especially over the past several years,and his interaction with and indebtedness to Yoder, are evident here. So are his own well known strictures on any individual piety that ignores the political edge of ethics and the ethical core of worthwhile politics. And likewise those who have been reading him recognise the justice yearning message he hears loud and clear in the Gospel. These and other strands of Hauerwas’ theology mean he does not come innocently to the text, nor does he want to; he has, and will not surrender, his presuppositions rooted in a Christological hermeneutic of the Gospel, and of the reading of each gospel as the story of the Kingdom of God revealed and realised in Jesus. That this might take him beyond safe exegetical territory probably won’t bother him. So long as Hauerwas is convinced he is following after Christ, seeking the truth of His life and teaching, His death and His living, he clearly doesn’t mind the exegetical risk. Next hauerwas post will be a long quote, without comment from me – it is, I think, spiritual reading of the highest order.

  • Tax collectors and sinners

    Inlandrev_1 In the NT tax collectors and sinners were more or less the same category – outsiders who had no place amongst the pious. That was before self-assessment, January 31 deadlines, advertising campaigns by Inland Revenue about the likely judgement to fall on those late with their tax return. There is this large slowly pouring hour-glass, with a wee taxpayer getting dangerously near the core that will suck him down into fiscal oblivion. Nowadays it seems the tax collectors are no longer in solidarity with the sinners; they are authorised to decide who the sinners are, and to exact penalties that echo the ominous phrase of not getting out till we pay the last penny.

    I have no problem at all about being a tax-payer. Many of the best things in our community, our culture, our country, are possible because we contribute some of what we have to make sure everyone gets something of what they need. While taxes are often the instruments of injustice – used properly they can also be effective ways of restoring justice. Health care for all at the point of need, inclusive non discriminatory opportunities for education, social security as a humane system still retaining the ethos of compassionate help for the vulnerable, offering service and support to sustain dignity and purpose in life.

    So it’s not the principle, it’s the process – I just hate the figures, the calculations, reducing a year’s work to time consuming feats of amateur book balancing.

  • Hauerwas 3 :Anti-Imperial practice

    Caesar_images How could Rome know that this man [Jesus] would be the most decisive political challenge it would face? …The movement that Jesus begins is constituted by people who believe that they have all the time in the world, made possible by God’s patience, to challenge the world’s impatient violence by cross and resurrection (Page 37)

    Hauerwas’ reading of the early chapters of Matthew is guided not so much by exegetical heavies such as Allison & Davies, and Luz, but by Bonhoeffer, Barth and John Howard Yoder. Intertwined with the nativity themes of promise, mystery, virgin birth and human hopes, Matthew weaves the darker strands of kingship, nationalism, state security, herodian politics, refugees on the move and massacres in the home village – the structures of power guarded by the machinery of terror.

    Hauerwas is committed to the idea of the kingdom as an alternative community which embodies anti-imperial praxis.The Kingdom of God is an ‘alternative world, an alternative people, an alternative politics’. As I read Hauerwas’ commentary, unmistakable Hauerwasian themes, like peaceable kingdom, community of character, and against the grain of the universe, emerge in his exposition through a process of eisegesis. Paradoxically, his kind of theological eisegesis seems to expose and articulate the radical political critique and spiritual power of the text, in a way often less accessible to stringent traditional exegesis.

    That’s my feeling anyway – there is for me a felt congruence between Hauerwas’ finger-pointing prose as he tells the truth he finds in this trext, and Matthew’s message of cruciform discipleship. His main conversation partners, Bonhoeffer and Yoder, also took Scripture with utmost seriousness. Together they and Hauerwas offer another essential approach to the interpretation of the Bible text – askingthe life disrupting questions, ‘what does this text say to us about following Jesus, about carrying a cross, about who we are, and what that might mean for our own political allegiances’  The kingdom of God and the kingdoms of this world – these are stark Matthean alternatives, presented in black and white terms in this gospel from start to finish – and with the call "Follow me" about to be uttered.

    Which is a longish way of saying this is one of the most refreshing, disturbing and (overused word coming) challenging readings of a gospel I’ve read since Ched Myers, Binding the Strong Man (on Mark).