Living Wittily

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  • Prayer Before a Nativity Play.

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    God of Light and Life

    In the buzz of this place as we get ready to hear the Christmas story,

    And in the quietness of Advent when we are told to wait and see;

    Like Mary, help us to hear your voice speaking to us.

    Like Joseph open our minds to the incredible and our hearts to your truth.

    So that:

    Like the Innkeeper we will find room for Jesus in our lives.

    Like the shepherds we will come to the manger to see for ourselves.

    Like the Wise Kings we will come with our gifts, and kneel in worship.

    Like the angels we will sing and tell the good news;

    That Jesus is born, that God is with us,

    That the light of the world has come,

    And that God’s love for the world is to be found

    In the gift of the Christ child.

  • When Advent Gate-crashes Our Preoccupations

    P1000401It's been snow and frost for nearly a week up here, and likely to stay that way for a while yet. Braemar was more than -17 degrees last night; we were a mere -11 degrees at 7.00 am this morning.

    It stayed below zero all day, and when I came out the door to clear the windscreen and go to the shops, looking down the street there was the most golden sunset. It lasted only a minute or so, but long enough for a photo.

    I know ever square foot of this street, having lived here for 12 years. The small pointed tree is in memory of my neighbour. The wheelie bin is left out because the there has been no bin collection. At the bottom of the street a window is lit up by the reflection from the window across the road, of the golden sunset.

    Sometimes you have to be prepared to be surprised. I know. That sounds like a doesn't-make-sense sentence. How can you be surprised if you're always prepared for it. A surprise takes you unawares. True enough. But life can become so preoccupied that we are unaware as a chronic way of being in the world. Until something heightens our awareness. 

    Advent is a time of heightened awareness for Christians. Oh we know Christ has come. The nativity story stays the same no matter how it's dressed up. Christmas day accelerates towards us and our preparations become the focus, more than the fact, the reality, the truth, that Advent is the time when darkness and light take on deep significance. "The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light…the Light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it."

    IMG_5453Advent gate-crashes our pre-occupations. Advent prepares us to be surprised, again. I sometimes wonder if that's what wonder is – the readiness to be surprised by something we already know is too good to be true. "Arise! Shine! Your light has come, the glory of the Lord has risen on you."

    So I come out the door and turn to lock it, and in the turning I see, I accidentally notice in the turning, a sky ablaze with splendour. It's so cold I'd turned quickly, in a hurry to get on with whatever it was I thought so important. And was ambushed by beauty. Advent does that, surprising us with reminders that God is about, and what God is about.

    Something as banal as a wheelie bin, sits there in the afterglow of sunset. A window facing the opposite direction from the light, glows with borrowed radiance from the window across the street. And a wee pointed shrub, looks for all the world like a Christmas tree lacking only lights. All visible from my doorstep – if I have eyes to see and inclination to look, and longing enough to be prepared to be surprised.    

  • Thought for the Day – Praying Favourite Lines from Favourite Carols.

    Thought for the Day – Praying the Carols.

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    Monday

    2 Corinthians5.19 “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting men’s sins against them.”

    The Christmas story is told in Luke and Matthew. But it reverberates throughout the life of the first Christian communities. Charles Wesley had no difficulty linking angels and shepherds to the deep and eternal truth of God’s love for sinners. “Hark! The herald-angels sing ‘Glory to the new-born king’, Peace on earth and mercy mild, God and sinners reconciled."

    Tuesday

    Galatians 4.4-5 “But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons and daughters.”

    Jesus, born of a woman, in God’s good time. Christmas is about the Holy Family, and God’s invitation to all of us to be adopted into the family of God. “Christ, by highest heaven adored! Christ, the everlasting Lord, late in time behold Him come, offspring of a Virgin's womb: Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, Hail the incarnate Deity! Pleased as man with man to dwell, Jesus, our Emmanuel.”

    Wednesday

    Romans 5. 6-8 “You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.  Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”

    Bethlehem was the beginning, Calvary was the end. Well actually, a garden with an empty tomb was the end. “How silently, how silently, the wondrous gift is given! So God imparts to human hearts the blessings of his heaven…O Holy Child of Bethlehem descend to us we pray. Cast out our sin and enter in, be born in us today.”

    Thursday

    Titus 2.12 and 3.4-5 “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all people…and when the kindness and love of God our Saviour appeared he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done but because of his mercy.”

    This spells out what we love to sing at Christmas: “Love came down at Christmas, love all lovely, love divine; love was born at Christmas, star and angels gave the sign.”

    Friday

    2 Corinthians 4. 6 “For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.”

    No wonder we sing “Shine Jesus shine, fill the land with the Father’s glory.” All the light and lights of Christmas, from Christmas tree to Advent candles to street decorations, they are all reminders and reflections of the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ! “God of God, Light of Light…O Come, let us adore him.”

    Saturday

    Colossians 1.15 “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation…He is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything He might have the supremacy…For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him.”

    The infant of Bethlehem is the Author of Creation. All that is in the heart of God is revealed in the gift of the Christ Child. “Still the night, holy the night! Son of God, O how bright. Love is smiling from thy face, strikes for us now the hour of grace, Saviour since Thou art born – Saviour, since Thou art born.”

    Sunday

    Philippians 2.5-9 “Christ Jesus, who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. And being found in human appearance, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!

    This too is a Christmas text. In the shadow of all our Christmas lights is the shape of a cross. But that shadow is cast by the Light of Life, radiating from the face of God in Christ. “Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain; heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign. In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed the Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.”

  • When the Present Tense is Grammatically and Theologically Correct.

    IMG_5457Taking a bag of clothes and some other no longer needed stuff into the charity shop.

    There's that kind of sleet that falls like wet snowballs and the pavements  are rutted with slush.

    I walk in and say in a not too cheerful voice, with intended irony "Joy to the world,"

    The volunteer lady looks at me calmly and says "The Lord is come."

    I handed over the bag, we both smiled, and off I went.

    Did you notice? She had the quotation exactly as Isaac Watts wrote it.

    The present tense. "The Lord is come."

    Oh, I know Advent is all about waiting, anticipation, expectation.

    That inner tension we all feel when we know something big is going to happen.

    But we celebrate Advent, Christmas and Epiphany because the coming of God is in the present tense. "The Lord is come."

    He has come, and he is here, and yet year after year we re-enact those first longings.

    We wait, anticipate, expect – not because it hasn't happened yet, but because it has.

    "Joy to the world, the Lord is come! Let earth receive her King."

    What started off as an ironic complaint was reset by an answering truth.

    Advent is the season when God's time intersects with human longing; the long wait for justice, the long patience awaiting peace, the long sorrows of hearts that have waited too long for comfort, the long darkness that no matter how long it takes, will give way to dawn.

    The photo was taken from inside a furniture shop in Inverurie. I'm starting to enjoy photos taken through windows, the reflections doubling the lights.

    On a gloomy morning, some of it passed sharing a rather large freshly made pancake, and following my encounter with a charity shop angel, those two lines came together:

    "Joy to the world, the Lord is come." Yes, indeed he has – sorry, is!

      

     

  • Incomprehensible Light.

    P1000361Upper right view from my desk. Advent Tapestry and big books.
     
    "The light shines in the darkness and the darkness comprehendeth it not." (John1,5)
     
    While it would be untrue to say I read Barth and comprehendeth him not, often enough, he does take some comprehending!
     
    But he's worth it.
     
    "[God] gifted to the cosmos His only Son and therefore nothing more or less than Himself. He surrendered Him, He gave him up, He offered him. He sends him into the cosmos, which is actually darkness, as the light which is to shine in the darkness but which cannot be apprehended, or grasped by the darkness. In giving Him — and in giving Himself — he exposes Him — and Himself — to the greatest danger. He sets at stake His own existence as God…In this act God loved the world so much, so profoundly, that it did in fact consist in the venture of His own self-offering, in this hazarding of His own existence as God." (CD IV. 1. p. 71-2)
     
     
     
     
     
     

  • Renaissance Artist and American Poet – a Wordless Conversation.

    Yesterday two beautiful creations came together in my mind.

    The sketch for 'The Head of the Virgin, by Rogier Van Der Weyden is, I think, the most beautiful depiction I know of Mary at the moment of the annunciation.

    I hadn't realised the poem 'Annunciation', by Denise Levertov complements the awe and serenity of the face, by imagining the inner life and mind of Mary at the point of receiving the words "Hail Mary, full of grace."

    Take time to look, to read, and to sense the miracle. I may write a piece later on sketch and poem. Not today. Look, read and wonder – these too are prayer.

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    She had been a child who played, ate, slept

    like any other child — but unlike others

    wept only for pity, laughed

    in joy not triumph.

    Compassion and intelligence 

    fused in her, indivisible.

     

    Called to a destiny more momentous

    than any in all of Time,

    she did not quail,

                              only asked

    a simple 'How can this be?'

    and gravely, courteously,

    took to heart the angel's reply,

    perceiving instantly

    the astounding ministry she was offered:

     

    to bear in her womb

    Infinite weight and lightness; to carry

    in hidden, finite inwardness,

    nine months of Eternity; to contain

    in slender vase of being

    the sum of power —

    in narrow flesh,

    the sum of light.

                             Then bring to birth,

    push out into air, a Man child

    needing like any other,

    milk and love —

     

    but who was God.                       

     

     

  • The Consequences of Buying a New Book Can Last a Very Long Time.

    Apostle-Paul-In-Prison"A painting… which may present the most human St Paul in art…Here then is an old Paul' no halos, no angels no piercing holy genius glare, just an old man surrounded by his books, one shoe kicked off to relieve what looks like a bunioned foot and toes with corns, paper at the ready, pen in hand and that thinking look beyond where he is into the nearness of how to write down what he feels. It is not the look of writer's block, but the struggle to express a reality too large for mere words.
    (John I Durham, The Biblical Rembrandt, 2004. The painting is Rembrandt's "Paul in Prison.")
     
    Paul's Prison epistles remain amongst the core texts in my own spiritual journey, a delight first kindled by G B Caird's brief and elegant commentary in the long defunct Clarendon series. That was in 1976. Caird's book, bought in Stirling University bookshop, is still a favourite. So much has been written on Paul since then, starting with E P Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, and then the several subsequent turns on the long road and many branch roads of Pauline scholarship, guided by such luminaries as J D G Dunn, N T Wright, Richard Hays, J Beker, J L Martyn, Beverly Gaventa, and most recently John G Barclay. 
     
    OColossiansver the years I've preached through all four of Paul's prison letters and revisited key passages often enough. Such engagement cannot but allow those ancient texts to soak into and permeate mind and heart. Some of the passages I know by heart, and have become part of the inner vocabulary both of prayer and contemplative soliloquy.
     
    Several years ago I experimented with tapestry design. I read the Colossian Hymn, (Ch 1.15-20), every day in various translations and the Greek text, often before I picked up the canvas. I used several commentaries throughout the several months the tapestry took to complete, including Caird, J D G Dunn, E Lohse and Marianne Thompson.
     
    The design was worked from the centre outwards, playfully asking the question, What colour is Christology? The result is in the second picture (excuse the camera flash on the glass).
     
    From Philippians has grown one of my long term research interests, kenosis as both pastoral style and theological resource in Christian spirituality. Philippians 2.5-11 has been like and exegetical Rubislaw Quarry for me – it's a place I just keep digging! For those who don't know, Rubislaw Quarry is one of the largest human made holes in Europe, and source of millions of tons of Aberdeen granite.
     
    One of the seminal books in my thinking has been W H Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense, first read over 40 years ago. The book provides a modified process theology as the best way to understand the love of God. Vanstone envisaged kenosis as love refusing to guarantee its own outcomes. He argued with patience and passion that divine love was precarious and vulnerable because love cannot compel the desired response. I thought then, as now, he was on to something essential about the nature of divine love, and indeed the human experience of love as great trust and great risk.
     
    A decade later an encounter with P T Forsyth 's Person and Place of Jesus Christ provided a robust relocation of kenosis in the purposive power and intentional moral decision of God in Christ crucified, the One who tasted death as the great ethical act that effects reconciliation between God and humanity. Kenosis, for Forsyth, is interpreted best through the cross, which is the culmination of the incarnation, the presupposition of the resurrection, and the eternal truth of Holy Love working towards a redeemed Creation. 
     
    All of this from a chance browse in a bookshop one summer late afternoon, and with £2.95 to spend on a new book.      

  • Joy to the World. Eh? You Kidding?

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    Joy to the world! The Lord is come;
    Let Earth receive her King;
    Let every heart prepare him room,
    And heaven and nature sing,
    And heaven and nature sing,
    And heaven, and heaven, and nature sing.

    I know. Once you read it the tune becomes an earworm. But that first word, sung with such faith and hope and, yes, joy! The idea that heaven and nature sing, that the Creation is an orchestra with choir, and that God reigns – that is pure Advent.

    But if we’re honest, joy doesn’t seem to be a dominant note across the world these days. In fact, the world is so lacking in joy that the Tesco Christmas advert is based around a joy shortage. The reassuring voice tells us they can sort it by offering affordable goodies. I don’t think so. Joy isn’t created by buying more stuff. Joy comes from the deep places of love and being loved; joy needs charged batteries of hope; human joy is the response of the heart to good things happening. Which brings us back to Advent

    Advent is when we celebrate the best thing that has ever happened in the history of the world. Every year, an annual reminder. “Joy to the world! The Lord is come!” The birth of Jesus is the hinge point in history, “The Word became flesh and dwelt amongst us.”

    This Advent, our world which is in the midst of a joy recession, hears again the words of the angels, “Fear not, for I bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all people…for to you is born this day, in the city of David, a Saviour…”

    Earth’s deepest joy is that once in human history, on this green planet, on the ground we stand on, God came to us in the fragility of human birth, “Emmanuel, God with us”. Of course Christmas is about celebration, and singing, and parties, and food, and friends and family. And we’ll do our best to share in that and be part of the joy-making. The birth of Jesus is a global event after all.

    “Joy to the world! The Lord is come!” But what about the realities of our world, though?  We don’t need to be told there is a joy shortage, a joy deficit, even a joy recession. You can hear it relentlessly in the tone of voice of news readers, the angry arguments of politicians, the calls for strikes and the denials there’s any money, and behind all this a cultural anxiety that something has changed for the worse.

    When you put it like that, Christians going on about joy seems a bit tone deaf to people who are struggling with the cost of eating and heating. Not to mention that world out there, where there is so much suffering, loss, anxiety about the future. And the fear that maybe the big problems are running beyond our human capacity to control.

    “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.” Isaiah understood that joy is rooted in hope, and grows out of faith in God the Creator and Redeemer. “For unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given, and his name shall be called wonderful Counsellor, mighty God, everlasting Father, prince of Peace.”

    Christian joy is not a denial of darkness; it is an affirmation of the light of God in Christ. Advent joy celebrates the always truth that God is in control, that “the government is upon his shoulders.”

    He rules the world with truth and grace,
    And makes the nations prove
    The glories of His righteousness,
    And wonders of His love,
    And wonders of His love,
    And wonders, wonders, of His love.

    So. “Let every heart prepare him room,”

    Grace, peace… and joy,

  • Photos of Isaiah’s Hopeful Imagination 6: “A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse.”

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    "A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse; from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.

        The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—
        the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
        the Spirit of counsel and of might,
        the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—
         and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.

    He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears;
    but with righteousness he will judge the needy, with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth." (Isaiah 11.1-4)

    P1000354Like the poet-prophet he is, Isaiah sees life in death, newness in the old, positive possibility emerging from negative reality, hope for his people in his people's history. A shoot from a stump, new life from subterranean roots, and fruitfulness eventual and certain. 

    The Advent word in this powerful passage is Jesse. The genealogies of Matthew and Luke go to some lengths to demonstrate the family history of Jesus, a son of the house of David – the son of Jesse. 

    Read as a description of the ministry of Jesus, Isaiah's words resonate deeply with the ministry and words of Jesus. And what we cannot escape, in our politically fractious times, are the implications of the radical manifesto of the Messiah, and the declared intent of whose side Jesus is on. Justice for the needy, and righteousness (the doing of right by) the poor of the earth.

    What has always impressed me about this text is the basis of its politics. Consider again the deliberate contrast between human politics and Divine policy-making:

    The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—
        the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
        the Spirit of counsel and of might,
        the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—
         and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.

    Out of such careful consideration, divine insight, and wise exercise of power come policies that find on behalf of the needy and treat the poor justly. Oh, I know. We would prefer to spiritualise the Kingdom of God. To make it about God's reign in our hearts rather than God moving in the world "to give decisions for the poor of the earth."

    That separation of personal from social, spiritual from secular, faith from ethics, inner devotion from outer politics, is neither biblical nor theologically defensible. Isaiah's vision is for a transformation of all our human relations, – with God, with our neighbour, with the world's poor, with the Earth. Not separation from, but solidarity with. "God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself."

    So I photograph tree stumps – quite often actually. I look at tree stumps, apparently the last visible stage of a tree's life, and Isaiah says, "Forget apparently! What's apparent isn't always the whole story! A shoot will come, from these roots there will be fruit. Just you wait and see!"

    Advent is when we look on the stumps of what used to be, and dare to question what's apparent.

    Advent is waiting for the Coming One who "will not judge by what he sees with his eyes, or decide by what he hears with his ears."

    And yes, Advent is the promise that from the stump will come a new shoot, and there will be restored fruitfulness. Maybe a tree stump should make an appearance somewhere in our Advent liturgical scenery, somewhere off to the left of the nativity crib. 

     

  • Photos of Isaiah’s Hopeful Imagination 5: The Glory of the Lord, as the Waters Cover the Sea.

    P1000169 (2)Living a few miles from the North Sea, it isn't hard to imagine the uncontained power of the sea, from the gentle lapping of a full tide on a still day, to the boiling anger of the sea in a storm.

    For the people of Israel the sea was a ready to hand metaphor for danger, the mysteries of providence, the vast and unknowable, the lurking of monsters, and the preferred invasion methods of their enemies. The sea isd an untamed power – or so it seemed.

    No surprise then, that when it came to finding ways to tell the world, and themselves, that God is in control, Psalmists and Prophets spoke and wrote about the ease and authority with which God navigated the seas, sustained the division between sea and dry land, and as Creator, set the boundaries for the oceans.

    That's why Isaiah quite naturally conjures up a picture of God stilling the storms of historical events, making a way through the roiling politics and power-plays of the nations, reassuring little Israel that however big the waves of Empire, their God was the One who made new things happen – like freedom, justice, renewed hope, and a better future.

    DSC08152"This is what the Lord says—he who made a way through the sea, a path through the mighty waters, “Forget the former things; do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing!"

    Advent is about the advent of newness, the incoming waves of God's purposes, the harnessed powers of redeeming love and creative renewal breaking on the shores of human history, the incoming tide of hope and energy to do new things.

    God is in control. "The government shall be on His shoulders…" Oh I wish!

    But turn that wish into prayer, and let prayer become determined desire, performative words, interventive works and practices of mercy, redemptive gestures of compassion. Forget the former things. Don't dwell on the past. Pray as never before, and as an Advent prayer, "Your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Pray it, and wherever and whenever we can, let God's Advent come through us.

    Let the government of the Christ child, the love of the crucified Jesus, the transforming life of the risen Lord, begin where it must always begin; in hands that bring our gifts in worship of the Christ child, hearts obedient to the radical call of the Crucified, and borne on feet that follow the Risen Lord who goes ahead of us. And in all of this, trust the One who more than once commanded the sea, "Peace. Be still!"