Blog

This postcard sits where it can be seen from my desk. 'The Sermon on the Mount III (after Claude)', by David Hockney. It was brought back by a friend fortunate enough to get a ticket for one of Hockney's exhibitions in London, over a decade ago.

For Christians, perhaps two of the most pay attention words we can hear is, "Jesus said…" And the distilled essence of Jesus' teaching begins with, "And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying…"

Jesus Said…

Monday

Jesus said:  “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” (Matthew 25.31-46)

To see the presence of Jesus in the face of those who are vulnerable, powerless and in need of support, is a fundamental principle in following and serving Jesus.Full stop.

Tuesday

Jesus said: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22.37-38)

We don’t need detailed rules. Just two barcodes of discipleship – Love God with everything we are and have, and love our neighbour no less than we love ourselves. Simple. But not cheap. Costly love never is. “Love so amazing, so divine, demands…”

Wednesday

Jesus said: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.” (Luke 9.23-24)

Daily. Luke is the Evangelist who remembers that word. Discipleship is an everyday commitment. That’s good news for when we fail, make mistakes, or want to start again. Life isn’t something we cling to, but something we give ourselves to – the best deal in town is to give ourselves in service to God and neighbour.

Thursday

Jesus said: “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.”

Mercy. That mixture of compassion, generosity, welcome and inconvenience that makes one human being help another. For Christians, to love others as God loves us, for Jesus’ sake. Jesus told a story about that. It involved a Samaritan, “the one who showed mercy” – same word in both texts. So, go and do likewise!

Friday

Jesus said: “Not just seven times, but as many as seventy-seven times.”

Yes, he’s talking about forgiveness, answering Peter’s question about how many times a person should be forgiven by us. If you’re still counting then you’re not forgiving. The benchmark for comparisons isn’t a number, but the vast incalculable debt God has forgiven us. There’s no comparison between what any of us have to forgive, and what we have been forgiven. Just remember the Cross which makes forgiveness possible as gift and grace. Lord give us a forgiving disposition.

Saturday

Jesus said: “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that belong to God.” (Mark 12.17)

You can’t be a Christian who doesn’t do politics. All the other things Jesus said about following him, taking up the cross, loving our neighbour, showing mercy, living out our forgiveness – they don’t stop at the front door of our personal private lives. Every time we walk out that door we go into a world where what Jesus says still has, and must have, a decisive influence on our public life. Of course Governments and politics don’t work on the basis of who Jesus is and what Jesus said – but we do. And that must shape and guide what we think, do and say about the issues of the day.

Sunday

Jesus said: “Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.  But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what they have done has been done in the sight of God.” (John 3.20-21)

What we do when no one sees us is a good clue to who we really are. When someone is caught out doing something shameful or hurtful or dishonest these days, the ready-made excuse is an apology and statement, “That’s not who I am.” Well, yes it is. Truth is fundamental to good character. Transparency is like a window; light shines through it, and we can see through it. Everything we do is in the sight of God; live, said Jesus, in such a way that people can see through you, and see a life of love for God and neighbour.

Eternal God and Father, you create us by your power, and redeem us by your love; guide and strengthen us, by your Spirit, that we may give ourselves in love and service to one another, and to you,

Through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'A Bird's Prayer'

A bird's prayer is its song,

addressed to nobody

but the unknown listener 

to its feathered vernacular.

 

Man's prayer is a trickle

of language gathering to a reservoir

to be drawn on by the thirsting

mind in its need for meaning.¹

Poets' Meeting. George Herbert, R. S. Thomas and the Argument with God, is an intriguingly rich acknowledgement of Thomas's critical appreciation of Herbert's poetry. One of Herbert's most effective sonnets is 'Prayer II', a sustained catena of descriptive clauses that nowhere uses the verb 'to be', and therefore a poem which offers a long menu of options as to what prayer may be at any given time, in the mind and heart of any given human being. The poem ends with a phrase of almost playful profundity: "something understood."

That phrase stirs in the memory when I read the last words of this short poem by Thomas: "the thirsting / mind in its need for meaning." When a poet like Thomas reads and rereads the work of another poet, (and Thomas edited a Choice of Herbert's verse for Faber), it's highly likely that much of the language and content is retained, consciously or unconsciously, and later reminted in different form and words.

To Herbert's 14 lines of non-argument and non-definitions of what prayer is, Thomas does provide a definition of what prayer is. And it reads like a further outworking of that spiritually reticent and modest claim that prayer is, at least, or at most, 'something understood'. Not everything. Nothing final. But something. On full show throughout the prayer, but especially its closing clause, Herbert's genius in reining in the spiritual arrogance that thinks communion with God can be exhaustively, or even sufficiently reduced to the controlling definitions of human language. Such linguistic precision and theological control, Thomas scorned. But the urge to understand, the desire to know, the irresistible frustration of the mystery, that inner drive to understanding, that he recognised within himself.

The last stanza is one unpunctuated sentence defining what prayer is, but without clarifying beyond the thirsting mind with its confessed need for meaning. In contrast the first stanza pauses at the first line, the comma alerting the reader to the simplicity of what is said, and at first a feeling that enough is said.

"A bird's prayer is its song." I could almost live with that as a lovely fusion of ornithology and creation spirituality!

But the stanza continues, raising a question that has long exercised philosophical theologians, 'To whom is prayer addressed? The answer Thomas provides has its own ambiguities, "the unknown listener.' The bird sings regardless of being heard; the beauty and lyrical sound have their own meaning. But that won't do. The poet is sure enough that the prayer is addressed, but only to the most limited of audiences, 'the unknown listener', and one who understands the 'feathered vernacular', the common speech of the bird. Who is the unknown listener? Does it matter if they are known, recognised, even there? Who better understands the 'feathered vernacular' than the unknown listener, the originating impulse of the singer of the song? 

Compared to the song of the bird, human prayer is not music but speech, not song but language. The 'trickle of language', is likened to the stream that replenishes the reservoir. But a reservoir of what? Not the mind, the thirsting mind is what draws from the reservoir. Each of us create, find and borrow the words we use as we develop our own style of speech, and prayer. Liturgical repetition is a regular trickle of language which forms us in a tradition, and slowly leaves its deposits that nurture the spiritual life. What we read and sing, countless conversations which are the fabric of friendships and relation building, the words of intimacy with those closest to us, our inner responses to goodness, beauty and truth, the whole inner life becomes the reservoir of what and who we are becoming.

It is from this continual trickle of the gathered experience of relationships, language, people, place, memory and self-awareness, that the inner reservoir of identity and unique individuality of who we are is continually being formed, "to be drawn on by the thirsting / mind in its need for meaning."

"Drawn on" can, of course, mean either drawn as in attracted and pulled towards, or drawn as in water from a well or reservoir. Here, however, the poet intends the verb 'draw' to relate particularly to the image of the reservoir as resource to be drawn on – to construct meaning, to formulate thought, and only then to seek the translation of thought and meaning back into the trickle of language. 

Such a short poem, but the singing bird unselfconsciously making music for whoever happens to hear, and the thirsting mind's restless search for meaning, contrasts with some poignancy with the deeply human longing to know, to understand, to discover who it is that may, or may not, hear the song. There is, I think a wistfulness in the contrast, the poet producing an elegant comparison of bird and man, song and language, the unknown listener and the human search for meaning, and the longing for some tangible sign that what the mind draws on and ponders and gives language to, may eventually be spoken, and then heard by the unknown listener.

Here as in so many poems, spiritual autobiography is woven through the poem. What we are reading and therefore hearing, is the voice of experience, a theology of longing. Thomas sees and hears a bird sing its prayer for the sake of singing to its unknown listener, while for him prayer is much more complicated. As if he is looking at his own reflection, gazing into his own reservoir of language, his prayer a search for meaning, purpose, and the unknown listener who will hear his song, and shape from the reservoir of his language, 'something understood.' ²

1. R. S. Thomas. Uncollected Poems. (Eds.) Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies, Bloodaxe, 2013, page 175.
2. All the photos on this post are my own, and my personal intellectual property. Please ask permission to reproduce them on another platform. Thank you. 

 

 

When the sky is blue in a way that seems to make the word blue a redundant adjective,

and you're walking amongst buildings centuries old and recently constructed,

and you spend an hour sharing coffee and back and forth conversation with a colleague about all things theological,

and you come out and look at a world busy with the work of the human community who make all of this a living space,

then saying 'thank you' is a way of saying yes to the good things highlighted by a sun intending to shine all day!

In January and February I posted a number of studies and reflections on the prophet Jonah. I've gathered the links together for those who may want to keep them for reference, revisit them or have them to hand in one handy place.

1 Reading Jonah and All at Sea

https://livingwittily.typepad.com/my_weblog/2023/01/jonah-and-the-whale-1.html

2 Jonah as a Revision Class in Theology.

https://livingwittily.typepad.com/my_weblog/2023/01/sometime-around-1978-i-came-across-this-book-on-jonah-in-the-now-long-gone-free-church-book-shop-on-the-mound-in-edinburgh.html

3 Review of Fretheim's Message of Jonah, 47 Years Late!

https://livingwittily.typepad.com/my_weblog/2023/01/a-review-47-years-late-but-first-an-explanation-for-doing-this-i-had-an-email-exchange-with-terry-fretheim-just-a-few-mont.html

4 Jonah. A Brilliant Sermon Preached by God

https://livingwittily.typepad.com/my_weblog/2023/01/jonah-and-the-whale-4-a-brilliant-sermon-preached-by-god-to-closed-minds.html

5 Jonah: Three Commentaries for the Journey with Jonah

https://livingwittily.typepad.com/my_weblog/2023/01/the-short-story-of-jonah-has-provoked-volumes-of-research-and-exegetical-study-two-thousand-years-of-preaching.html

6 Jonah. Customer Service Complaints about God's Compassion

https://livingwittily.typepad.com/my_weblog/2023/01/jonah-and-the-whale-6-customer-service-complaints-about-gods-compassion.html

7 Review of John Goldingay's Commentary on Jonah

https://livingwittily.typepad.com/my_weblog/2023/01/six-prophets-in-just-under-500-pages-forty-of-them-on-jonah-but-this-is-vintage-goldingay-it-may-be-history-told-as-a-par.html

8 Jonah. Women Interpreters and Commentators

https://livingwittily.typepad.com/my_weblog/2023/01/jonah-and-the-whale-7-women-commentators.html

9 Jonah and Abraham Joshua Heschel – Some Extracts from Heschel's The Prophets. 

https://livingwittily.typepad.com/my_weblog/2023/02/in-his-classic-study-of-the-hebrew-prophets-abraham-joshua-heschel-deals-with-jonah-in-less-than-two-pages-but-they-are-a-c.html

Way back in the archives of my blog, there lies this piece of whimsical spirituality!

Praying the titles of Jurgen Moltmann's 8 volumes of Contributions to Theology

Farm Hand

There was something you couldn’t find

An answer to. The question perhaps

Was ill-phrased. Day by day

You went out into the same fields

Expecting – what?

                                      Millions of seeds,

Exploding in the usual way,

Greened your world. All about you

Life, that was too big to be lived

By the one flower, the one bird,

Put on its innumerable forms

That silenced you, even as they prompted

The huge query.

                                      You kept hoping

Perhaps, for some trick of the light

To fix in an eternal moment

Of meaningfulness the separate shapes

That teemed there? I have seen you kneeling

In the wet furrows, as though you prayed,

Through the long silences, to the earth mother

For testimony. I have seen you raising

Your brute face as to a presence

In the bleak sky…

                                       Is it from without

The answer is to come? I get no nearer

Seeking with as much patience within.¹

For most of his working life my dad worked as a farm hand. Actually he took considerable pride in claiming his real job title – he was a dairyman, in charge of the cows, the milk production and supplemented that with work in the fields as required.

I have an early memory of sitting at the side of the field² watching him plough with one of the two magnificent Clydesdale horses on the farm, and later memories of tractors and the advent of the very machinery R. S. Thomas viewed with incurable suspicion.

This poem resonates at a quite personal level for me. When Thomas describes the daily rounds in the same fields, surrounded by teeming life, I know quite exactly what he means about agriculture in the 50's and 60's. There were birds everywhere; roadsides and hedges riotous with colour, and wildflower seeds exploding in their millions to colour and green the world.

As a boy growing up on a farm, living in a tied cottage, my dad a farm hand who had one weekend off a month, and who rose early enough to have the cows brought from field or byre and the milk ready for collection by 8.00 am, I recognise the heroism of such faithfulness to the rhythms of his life. As an older lad I knelt in furrows with him, thinning turnips, planting potatoes, jute sacks tied around our knees to make the kneeling less painful.

So this poem by Thomas, written about a farm worker by a clergyman, is now being read by a Baptist minister whose dad was a farm worker. Day by day dad "went out into the same fields expecting — what?"

My love of our Scottish countryside, knowledge of birds and flowers and trees took seed and grew from an entire childhood with "Life all around me that was too big to be lived by the one flower, the one bird" – or for that matter, too big to be lived by this one growing mind and body of the person I was to become, and am still becoming.

Which raises the questions Thomas himself raises. What is the meaning of all this teeming life? Why does life "in all its innumerable forms" prompt the "huge query" of the meaning, purpose and end of existence? It takes a particular poetic genius to raise the core question of existentialism through the medium of a farm hand observed kneeling in wet furrows and "raising your brute face as to a presence in the bleak sky."

The primal urgency of the question of life's meaning is transposed to the lower key of apparent drudgery in the same fields, the recurring cycle of seasons, the weathered face, an "as though" kind of prayer, and a labourer's hunger for all of this to make more sense than the labour itself.

                                   You kept hoping

Perhaps, for some trick of the light

To fix in an eternal moment

Of meaningfulness the separate shapes

That teemed there?

The nightmare of the existentialist is life that is absurd, an existence that has no meaningful end. Every moment is a moment of decision, and to live any kind of life demands authentic presence to what is. To live a life that is human, and therefore, "perhaps", of worth in itself, requires personal commitment to authentic being, an engagement with our own existence, both seeking and making meaning by who we are and the way we live. The poignant question of the country western singer has its own quaint existentialist slant, "Is this all there is?"

There are clues to the poet's compassion and fellow feeling for this farm hand, all the way through the poem. He knows the question may be "ill-phrased," but lack of sophisticated vocabulary isn't needed to feel the "huge query" and feel after its answer. The farm hand "kept hoping", the perseverance of the agricultural saint. "I have seen you kneeling in the wet furrows, as though you prayed," – it isn't difficult to imagine a priest's pastoral sympathy, and imagination in those words. And refusing to foist a false spirituality on a farm hand at his job, hence the qualification "as though" he prayed.

Yet again, the characteristic presence of the question mark, strategically placed to guide the direction of thought towards the interrogative mood – both of the sentence itself, and within the reader's own thought forms. "Is it from without the answer is to come?"

                                  "I get no nearer,

Seeking with as much patience within.  

The priest's concession in the last sentence is an example of both pastoral realism and ruthless personal honesty, both of them essential dispositions towards a mature spirituality that makes possible that other kind of perseverance of the saints – "ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened…" (Matthew 7.7) 

"There was something you couldn't find an answer to."

The words are as true of the priest as of the farm hand. And the 'something' that eludes every attempted answer arises in the poem from a lyrical picture of fecundity and colour and energy emanating from the surrounding life in its innumerable forms. Such mystery silences, even as it prompts the "huge query" of life's meaning, purpose and end. As often in Thomas, the poem finishes with implied longing, and perhaps the acknowledgement that patient seeking is its own form of prayer, as is kneeling in the wet furrows where seeds are sown and eventually harvest gathered. 

1. R. S. Thomas, Uncollected Poems.(Eds.) Tony Brown and Jason Walford Davies, Bloodaxe, 2013, page 79.
2.  I'm sitting on mum's knee, over at the hedge behind the horse!

Many a year ago, when I was a young Baptist pastor in my first church, from the very start I read widely. The Principal of our Baptist College urged us to occasionally read books with which we fully expected to disagree – and to do so prepared to change our minds by allowing the evidence and argument to be heard, therefore reading each book fairly and intelligently.

By fair and intelligent he meant be aware of your own presuppositions and prejudices, be open to new information, and allow the same weight to the strong points of the argument as you do to perceived weaknesses. By the time I was in R E O White's classes I had already completed a degree majoring in Moral Philosophy and Comparative Religion. Those years at University and College levered open the mind's doors and windows which can easily be locked from the inside by prejudice, intellectual insecurity, spiritual timidity and assumed theological correctness.

I still have a note of the books I read over those first decades of ministry. I followed a programme which I never departed from except for my later years in theological education when reading and writing were necessarily focused on subject areas I taught. Briefly I planned a year's reading around 10 key areas of knowledge and ensured I read one or two of the more important books in these areas. And yes, some of these were books with which I had fully expected to disagree. 

Amongst the books I read, and have since re-read, and am currently more than half way through for the third time is The Question of God. Protestant Theology in the Twentieth Century, by Heinz Zahrnt. Why read it 45 years later? Why even hang on to a book that was summarising contemporary theology that is no longer contemporary? I blame R E O White!

1. Along with John McQuarrie's Twentieth Century Religious Thought, this book excels as a critical and appreciative introduction to the giants of those days – Barth, Brunner, Gollwitzer, Bonhoeffer, Heidegger, Thielicke, Bultmann, Tillich. Zahrnt was writing as their near contemporary, and as a theologian soaked in the theology of the times.
2. The writing is lucid, and engaged sympathetically and fairly with the various figures whose thought is examined, explained and placed against the cultural and intellectual backgrounds out of which people like Barth, Bonhoeffer, Bultmann and Tillic wrote. 
3. The index is superb. Most key subjects can be traced and chased throughout the volume using an index that is full enough without being guilty of the modern sins of either no index, or one that software compiles indiscriminately. This is an index intended to direct the reader to the significant mentions of the subject throughout. A well constructed index beats Google every time, because it doesn't make the searcher's decisions for them!
4.   The book is an intellectual history that traces the last 150 years of European theological thought from Schleiermacher and Harnack, through Barth and on into the beginnings of secular Christianity, and theological upheaval in the 1960's and early 70's. Zahrnt is like a commentator and reporter right in the mix of theological events as they happen. The result is reportage of enduring value as we have moved from modernity to post modernity and whatever else we name this other side of modernity now well into the 21st Century.
5. There is much within this book with which I disagree. This isn't safe theology from my favourite restaurant that is always to my taste. I have come to Barth late in my life, and still with many questions and at times inner dissent. Bonhoeffer I admire and have learned from repeatedly and deeply. Bultmann's great project of demythologisation was a storm centre throughout mid to late 20th Century New Testament scholarship. I never bought into Bultmann's approach, but I know of no more critically appreciative account of what Bultmann aimed to achieve than Zahrnt's relatively brief but sympathetic and corrective explanations of Bultmann's methodology and motivation as a man of profound faith and evangelical loyalty to the gospel of Jesus as he understood it.
6. All of this, and much more, makes Zahrnt's volume well worth paying the time for another guided tour through a period of theology that, if it is now consigned to a museum, it's a museum of contemporary theologians whose influential reach continues to challenge, influence and question our own contemporary attempts at theo-logos, God-talk.

Ascribe Greatness to our God the Rock.

Monday

Genesis 49.22-24 “Joseph is a fruitful vine, a fruitful vine near a spring, whose branches climb over a wall. With bitterness archers attacked him; they shot at him with hostility. But his bow remained steady, his strong arms stayed limber, because of the hand of the Mighty One of Jacob, because of the Shepherd, the Rock of Israel.”

Jacob is blessing all his sons. In blessing Joseph he describes God as “the Rock of Israel.” God is Rock-like – solid, a permanent and reliable foundation, a refuge place, a shelter and a shade. Rocks last forever; so does God, and God’s promises.

Tuesday

Exodus 17.5-6 “The Lord answered Moses, “Go out in front of the people. Take with you some of the elders of Israel and take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go.  I will stand there before you by the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it for the people to drink.”

God’s people were tired, thirsty and full of complaints. You can’t survive the wilderness without water. It is in the hardest places, the rock places, that we need God most. This story is a reminder that out of our hardest experiences God’s mercy pours out. The rock at Horeb was a place of salvation, the place where God promised, against all the odds, life-giving water.

Wednesday

 1 Corinthians 10.1-4 “Our ancestors were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea.  They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.”

Centuries later, Paul told the story of the rock at Horeb to converted Gentiles in Corinth. This was no static, fixed landmark. The rock Moses struck pointed forward to Jesus, the source of living water. “That Rock was Christ.” So the rock of salvation, the source of living water, the well of water springing up to eternal life – is Christ – and whoever drinks it, Jesus said, will never thirst again!

Thursday

Psalm 18.2 “The Lord is my Rock, my Fortress and Deliverer; my God is my Rock in whom I take Refuge. He is my Shield and the Horn of my salvation, my Stronghold.”

Every word is about strength, safety, reliability, protection/ No wonder Luther wrote, “A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.” The Psalms have always been the favourite texts of those under pressure, just the right words when we are feeling pursued by chance or circumstance. Just look at those 9 capital letters, the descriptive names of God. A good verse to have handy when things get on top of us.

Friday

Isaiah 51.1 “Listen to me you who pursue righteousness, and who seek the Lord. Look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn.”

A chip off the old block, we are each chiselled from the rock from which we were cut. Look back over the years of your life, and the life of the saints before us. We are all cut from the same rock, and that Rock is Christ. Isaiah is encouraging folk who are struggling in faith, telling them “you’re part of a people called, guided and provided for by God. You are rock, the same Rock on whom the whole church is founded.

Saturday

Matthew 16.18. “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”  

Peter, petros, rock. The rock on which the church is built is the confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God. Not the sometimes volatile Peter who fails just like the rest of us. But faith in Christ, the confession Jesus is Lord. That’s the name the church lives by, the rock-bed of truth on which the church stands. And not even hell can undermine that foundation deeply embedded in the eternal truth of redeeming love. Facing the cross, looking at these uncertain disciples who would surely sometimes fail, Jesus said, “On this rock – I will build my church.” He looks at us the same way.

Sunday

Deuteronomy 32.3-4 “I will proclaim the name of the Lord. Oh, praise the greatness of our God! He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he.”

Of all the things you would choose to say about God, how many of us would say this? A Rock whose works are perfect. A God who can do no wrong. Faithfulness is the word we use for love and care that is rock solid. Justice is the word we use when wrong is made right, and good overcomes evil, based on the rock-solid righteousness of God. That’s who God is. That’s what God is about in our lives, and in our world.

Faithful one, so unchanging; ageless one, you're my rock of peace;
Lord of all I depend on You, I call out to You again and again.

You are my rock in times of trouble, you lift me up when I fall down.
All through the storm, your love is the anchor, my hope is in You alone.

Ascribe Greatness to our God the Rock.

Monday

Genesis 49.22-24 “Joseph is a fruitful vine, a fruitful vine near a spring, whose branches climb over a wall. With bitterness archers attacked him; they shot at him with hostility. But his bow remained steady, his strong arms stayed limber, because of the hand of the Mighty One of Jacob, because of the Shepherd, the Rock of Israel.”

Jacob is blessing all his sons. In blessing Joseph he describes God as “the Rock of Israel.” God is Rock-like – solid, a permanent and reliable foundation, a refuge place, a shelter and a shade. Rocks last forever; so does God, and God’s promises.

Tuesday

Exodus 17.5-6 “The Lord answered Moses, “Go out in front of the people. Take with you some of the elders of Israel and take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go.  I will stand there before you by the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it for the people to drink.”

God’s people were tired, thirsty and full of complaints. You can’t survive the wilderness without water. It is in the hardest places, the rock places, that we need God most. This story is a reminder that out of our hardest experiences God’s mercy pours out. The rock at Horeb was a place of salvation, the place where God promised, against all the odds, life-giving water.

Wednesday

 1 Corinthians 10.1-4 “Our ancestors were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea.  They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.”

Centuries later, Paul told the story of the rock at Horeb to converted Gentiles in Corinth. This was no static, fixed landmark. The rock Moses struck pointed forward to Jesus, the source of living water. “That Rock was Christ.” So the rock of salvation, the source of living water, the well of water springing up to eternal life – is Christ – and whoever drinks it, Jesus said, will never thirst again!

Thursday

Psalm 18.2 “The Lord is my Rock, my Fortress and Deliverer; my God is my Rock in whom I take Refuge. He is my Shield and the Horn of my salvation, my Stronghold.”

Every word is about strength, safety, reliability, protection/ No wonder Luther wrote, “A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.” The Psalms have always been the favourite texts of those under pressure, just the right words when we are feeling pursued by chance or circumstance. Just look at those 9 capital letters, the descriptive names of God. A good verse to have handy when things get on top of us.

Friday

Isaiah 51.1 “Listen to me you who pursue righteousness, and who seek the Lord. Look to the rock from which you were cut and to the quarry from which you were hewn.”

A chip off the old block, we are each chiselled from the rock from which we were cut. Look back over the years of your life, and the life of the saints before us. We are all cut from the same rock, and that Rock is Christ. Isaiah is encouraging folk who are struggling in faith, telling them “you’re part of a people called, guided and provided for by God. You are rock, the same Rock on whom the whole church is founded.

Saturday

Matthew 16.18. “And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”  

Peter, petros, rock. The rock on which the church is built is the confession of Jesus as the Christ, the Son of God. Not the sometimes volatile Peter who fails just like the rest of us. But faith in Christ, the confession Jesus is Lord. That’s the name the church lives by, the rock-bed of truth on which the church stands. And not even hell can undermine that foundation deeply embedded in the eternal truth of redeeming love. Facing the cross, looking at these uncertain disciples who would surely sometimes fail, Jesus said, “On this rock – I will build my church.” He looks at us the same way.

Sunday

Deuteronomy 32.3-4 “I will proclaim the name of the Lord. Oh, praise the greatness of our God! He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he.”

Of all the things you would choose to say about God, how many of us would say this? A Rock whose works are perfect. A God who can do no wrong. Faithfulness is the word we use for love and care that is rock solid. Justice is the word we use when wrong is made right, and good overcomes evil, based on the rock-solid righteousness of God. That’s who God is. That’s what God is about in our lives, and in our world.

Faithful one, so unchanging; ageless one, You're my rock of peace
Lord of all I depend on You, I call out to You again and again
You are my rock in times of trouble, you lift me up when I fall down
All through the storm, your love is the anchor, my hope is in You alone

Perhaps no other experience exposes the illusions and pretensions of the relatively new and fashionable academic discipline of practical theology more effectively, than those called to pastoral care, priestly prayer, and the self-giving of vocational life in the service of those all too human communities we call the church.

Thus, I think, R. S. Thomas, who might have been a very difficult student if asked to regard his pastoral encounters as qualitative research using the hermeneutic phenomenology a la Habermas! For, despite all his metaphysical hesitations and theological complaints, his disillusions with ecclesial institution and his disappointments with his own fittingness to be a priest, Thomas the priest-poet sometimes nailed it.

Nailed it! Now that's a contemporary term I dislike on semantic and aesthetic lines, especially in a culture more used to mass produced plastic disposables than hand made steel pitons. But in this case I think even Thomas would approve the image – perhaps because when a Christian uses the verb 'to nail', we unwittingly give ourselves a painful mnemonic nudge to look towards the Cross. And Thomas was, whatever else we might call him, a theologian of the cross and a despiser therefore of all theologians of glory. 

His prose-poem account of how he spent his earlier days as a priest in remote and hard to find corners of Wales is enlightening for those who wonder about the relevance of theology, the worthwhileness of thinking, the value of study, and the struggle to read, think and pray, that is the soil out of which pastoral care grows to human fruitfulness.

"A priest's work is not all stewardship, pastoralia. In a rural parish the time for that is the evening, when the farmer nods over the fire. In the morning, the mind fresh, there is the study, that puzzle to the farm mind. The books stood in rows, sentinels at the entrance to truth's castle. He did not take it by storm. He was as often repulsed as he pretended to have gained ground. And yet…" ¹

I'm not sure I know a better apologia for a discipleship of the intellect, the summons to love God with the mind, the determined duty of thinking as a way of obedience to the God who nevertheless will not be discovered by our cleverness, uncovered by our investigations and interrogations, reduced or categorised by our constructed concepts, or held captive by semantic precision.

"And yet…" Those last two words represent hope pointing beyond ellipsis to the promise that truth is its own value. And the One who calls us to curiosity and contemplation, to reverent thought and humble study, is the One who meets us time and again at the brook Jabbok and wrestles with us until we are again exhausted and only partially enlightened; "And yet…", we go limping towards the dawn.

"There is the study, that puzzle to the farm mind." This is in no way intended as a slight to the farmer. Rather it is an explanation to the priest, and a warning, not to expect farmers to understand that time in the study is also a time of ploughing, of seed sowing, of fruitfulness and harvest, a time for ideas to germinate, take root and grow.

"The books stood in rows, sentinels at the entrance to truth's castle." Irony? Apologia? I think neither. More an acknowledgement that though working different fields, priest and farmer labour towards a shared goal of sustained human life in the daily round. And there is in this prose poem a hint that the farmer's struggling with the elements of rain and wind, frost and sunshine, and the uncertainties of harvest and the worry about making ends meet, these have their equivalent in the study, and in the ploughing and harrowing of ideas. "And yet…"; yes, there is too, in study as in field, the hope of fruitfulness come autumn.

1. The Echoes Return Slow, MacMillan, 1988, page 32; and in Collected Later Poems, Bloodaxe, page 27. The Echoes Return Slow is one of my favourite volumes, and the first one I read and re-read 35 years ago now. This was the collection that drew me in.