Whimsical Haiku
The long journey from
Bethlehem to Calvary:
the Light of the World.
Blog
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“Adeste Fideles” – Miracle, Mystery and Meaning.
The first Latin I ever learned by heart was in primary 5. Our music teacher taught us to sing ‘O Come All ye faithful’, in Latin
Adeste fideles, laeti triumphantes,
venite, venite in Bethlehem;
natum videte regem angelorum:
[Refrain:]
venite, adoremus, venite, adoremus,
venite, adoremus Dominum.The feeling of achievement, speaking in an ancient language, and the sense of power in knowing something so odd; it was satisfyingly mysterious.
More than sixty years later I can still repeat it verbatim. I also remember the school choir singing this at the carol service in our wee rural school, feeling we were the last and the first word in educated diction and tamed mischief.
And that second verse, which we sing with so much sincerity, joy and wonder, quotes key phrases in the Nicene Creed. Who would have thought that seventeen centuries later, folk like us, living in 21st Century Montrose, would be singing words that have shaped and preserved our understanding of Jesus as Son of God and Son of Man. “God of God, Light of Light, Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb; Very God, begotten not created. O come let us adore him!
Why does all this matter? Because we make the long journey from Advent to Christmas for reasons more important than the presents and the cards, the food and the carols. Christmas is the day when as Christians we are given the chance to begin to wonder once more.
Bethlehem was no big deal, other than the birthplace of David. Mary was in her middle teens, and struggling to understand all the changes of a woman’s body bringing a child to birth. Joseph had his own thoughts, but he stuck by Mary, then and later. Rome wasn’t interested in a Jewish couple eloping to Bethlehem, just so long as their names were captured by the tax census. Herod, like all small minded tyrants, could only hold on to power through fear, violence and deceit. And those journeying Magi were the kind of exotic star-gazing travellers you were likely to meet where the trade routes crossed. From outside the story everything was ordinary. But from inside the story everything was about to become extraordinary.
Thinking of that outside animal pen we may well sing of the little Lord Jesus, and accept the carol is mistaken, because like all babies, quite a lot of crying he makes! If you’re like me you can manage the first few verses of ‘The First Noel’, but the refrain seems to go on forever, and even singing the shorter version, you’ll sing Nowell 20 times! And yes, some of the carols say exactly what we want to say – “Hush the noise you men of strife and hear the angels sing.” But always, always, the best carols bring us back to the miracle and the mystery.
This howling infant, leaving the warm security of the womb, was the long promised Messiah. Wrapped in blankets against the chill of the night, being fed by an exhausted mother, is the one whose name is Immanuel, God with us. The naming of the baby is much more than keeping a family tradition and identity, “You shall call his name Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.”
So there we have it. The utterly normal, billions of times repeated event, of the birth of a new human being, a baby. And in that same event, God comes amongst us in human form as promised Saviour, as redeeming Love, as the desire of the nations, as the hope of the ages. As “God of God, Light of Light…very God, begotten not created.”
“Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span,
Summer in winter, day in night,
Heaven in earth, and God in man!
Great little One, whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to Heaven, stoops Heaven to earth.”O Come, let us adore him. Or as my amazing music teacher would say, “Adeste fideles…venite adoremus!”
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Wisdom for the Journey: Hospitality.
"Hospitality always places us in the position of having to receive rather than being able to be in control…hospitality is not simply something that I offer rather hospitality means that I receive.
Hospitality in this sense is quite 'defenceless' – it lets its guard down and stands unprotected. Perhaps that is why hospitality is so difficult, because we are so fearful.
The Greek word for stranger is 'xenos'. Our English word xenophobia means fear of the stranger. If we turn this word around, we get the New Testament word for hospitality: philoexenia, love of the stranger.
Pure hospitality, like perfect love, casts out fear (iJohn 4.18)."
(Practical Theology. On Earth as It Is In Heaven, T Velling, Orbis, Pages 232-3)
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Wisdom for the Journey 1: "To avoid the anxieties which may be caused by either regret for the past or fear of the future, here in a few words is the rule to follow:the past must be left with God's measureless mercy, the future to his loving providence; and the present must be given wholly to his love through fidelity to his grace."Jean Pierre De Caussade, Letters, Book VIII, 1/433.
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Tidying Up the Reading Desk Before New year.
I usually have two or three books on the go – in this case four. I also like to finish whatever I'm reading by the end of the year. I'm well through two of these, the Advent one is a daily read but will get there, and the heavier one on Glory and Longing is the heavy lifting one.
Many of my reading habits go back to three books. One by a largely forgotten Christian philosopher, Nels F S Ferre, Making Religion Real – there is a chapter on reading as an intellectual and spiritual discipline. Read widely, read difficult texts, know one writer thoroughly, read novels and poetry, and don't worry about the number of books read. What we do with a book is far less significant than what that book does to us.The second The Selected Letters of Baron Friedrich Von Hugel – repeatedly Von Hugel advised reading those authors who keep the mind supple, responsive, curious, patient, and unwilling to settle down on the well shaped comfort of our favourite intellectual easy chair. From Von Hugel I learned to value the spiritual experience of others, and to stop using my own experience as some of validity check on how others related to and thought about God.Then there's the biography of Alexander Whyte, who remains for me an exemplar of that older Scottish tradition of education in the humanities before education in divinity. Whyte read with wide ecumenical sympathy across the theological traditions, in literature and biography, and in a spirit of both enquiry and prayer as he sat at the feet of those from whom he wished to learn. Read, pray, think were three imperatives he drummed into students at New College Edinburgh.As to reading several books at a time, that's just how it works for me.Anyway, these four will complete this year's agenda / menu / list. -
A Wing and a Prayer
The juxtaposition of huge wind turbines,
a ship standing off,
and a lone cormorant drying its wings,
for reasons I can't properly explain,
left me feeling hopeful,
that human technology and earth's creatures
can still fit into the same picture,
and that our capacity for creative innovation
will find ways for life to flourish
beyond the limited horizons of our present experience.
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For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him.” (Isaiah 30.18)
At the pharmacy there’s a queue, because only two people are allowed into the shop at any one time. At Greggs the queue is even longer from 8.00am till around 9.30 am, because it’s the favourite breakfast takeaway for folk going to work or school. The coffee and bacon rolls are very good, and very good value – I’m able to confirm this from personal experience!
If it’s worth waiting for, people don’t mind waiting. Patience isn’t a problem if you know that, when your turn comes, you’ll get what you hope for. But there’s another kind of waiting. It goes on and on and on, until it seems there’s no end to the waiting.
Advent is when we rediscover the importance of waiting for God. “They that wait for the Lord will renew their strength,” said Isaiah the prophet. True enough. But sometimes waiting can be frustrating. Maybe that’s because we’ve become used to getting things done quickly. We value immediacy, right now – from making coffee, to ordering online with delivery today or tomorrow, to binge-watching a TV box set so we don’t have to wait for weekly episodes. Take the waiting out of wanting is one of today’s most powerful marketing promises.
So we need Advent to slow us down, to train us in patience, to recover the wonder of waiting. Here is Isaiah again, this verse is not so well known, but an important word from the Lord to hearts becoming impatient with long term promises.
“Yet the Lord longs to be gracious to you: he rises to show you compassion. For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed are all who wait for him.” (Isaiah 30.18)
The story of Jesus, from Advent to Second Coming is a story punctuated by waiting, allowing God’s purposes to be worked out in God’s time, at God’s pace, and to our blessing. Mary receives the annunciation that she will have a child named Jesus, the Messiah, the Saviour, Emmanuel. Nine months later we are in Bethlehem, and not long after the baby is a refugee. Please don’t overlook that dark corner of the Christmas story. Joseph, Mary and their baby were fleeing from the violence and terror of murdering soldiers. Christians of all people should understand the importance of welcome and protection for those fleeing for their lives.
The Bethlehem refugees waited in Egypt till Herod died and the threat was past. They re-settled in Nazareth and Jesus waited 30 years, “growing in favour with God and all who knew him.” For three years Jesus healed, taught and lived the life of one utterly obedient to the Father. There was a lot of waiting, because as John regularly says throughout his Gospel, “His time had not yet come.”
But come it did, and Jesus was crucified and buried. That three day wait was too much for the disciples. Rather than wait for the promise of Jesus rising from the dead, they panicked, ran away, hid themselves, kept busy, and gave up – anything but wait for something that was never going to happen. But happen it did. What started with angels and celebration at Bethlehem, came to an earth-juddering halt on Calvary. Until early on the third day! Just as the sun was rising, the Son was rising, and indeed as angels once announced his birth, now angels announced “He is risen!”
But still the waiting continues. “Wait in the city,” Jesus says, “till you are clothed with power from on high.” Pentecost comes and the Gospel overflows from the hearts of disciples now filled with the Holy Spirit, flowing out to the ends of the world and to the end of the ages. And the waiting continues, as we await the second coming of Jesus, the One to whom every knee shall bow in heaven and on earth.
This Advent, we will try to learn again that God’s purposes don’t work out to our timetable, nor to our agendas. As Isaiah said, “The Lord is a God of justice.” He will make things right. Why? “The Lord longs to be gracious to you: he rises to show you compassion…” No wonder Isaiah goes on to say, “Blessed are all who wait for him.”
Those queues outside Gregg’s are their own testimony. Experience has shown those folk that it’s worth the waiting. You can almost hear those words of Jesus in his favourite teaching style. If waiting at Gregg’s is worth it, “How much more” is it worth waiting before God, in quiet trust, in patient faith, and with hearts open to the coming of Jesus into our world, into our community life, and into our hearts. Live this week with Isaiah 30.18, and discover again the Lord who longs to be gracious to you, who rises to show you compassion, and who blesses you as you wait before him,
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Book Review: The Breadth of Salvation. Rediscovering the Fullness of God’s Saving Work, Tom Greggs.
Every other month a small group of us meet, ostensibly to discuss a book, but just as much to keep in touch and sustain long friendships that have brought us much laughter, support and the enjoyment of learning. We call ourselves The Eejits, for reasons rooted in a daft conversation at one of our first meetings!
Well, we had our meeting yesterday by Zoom, spanning Nova Scotia, Alabama, Glasgow, Inverbervie and Aberdeen. As always it was fun, stimulating, satisfying and a great exchange between friends who have known each other since….well I met Jack in 1971! All of us on the group have been friends for over 30 years, and some of us even longer with one or two. So the book we choose (which we take it in turns to do) is only one part of the conversation. But here are a few comments which I noted, and which can double as a positive and appreciative view of Tom Greggs' recent book, The Breadth of Salvation, (Baker, 2020) All of us were positive about this slim but substantial book.Full disclaimer, Tom Greggs is a colleague here in the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy, and a personal friend. Unlike many other disclaimers, I confess that knowing him means I hear his voice in much of the writing, and I happen to be sympathetic to the major theological emphases of this book. Even the title raises an important affirmation about the scope, scale and eternal intentions of God's salvific purposes in the work of Christ and the Holy Spirit in creation, redemption and reconciliation.It's a book that is generous, ecclesial and corrective, by which I also mean it eschews narrowness, individualism and exclusion. A review of the various 'models' of atonement shows the diversity and contextual origins of several theories of the atonement. Gregg's Methodist convictions have their theological grounding in scriptural, patristic, reformation and evangelical expositions of the work of Christ. "The work of Christ is the work of the whole Godhead (Father, Son and Holy Spirit), who desires the salvation of the creation. Grace is the source of the salvation of humanity, and it is because God already loves humanity that Christ comes." (15)There is a recurring theme of what I might call pneumatic ecclesiology. The new humanity in Christ is created by the Holy Spirit who draws all who have faith in the faithfulness of Christ into the community that is the Church, the embodiment of God's promised new creation, redemption and reconciliation. "The Spirit drenched community" consists of those who are being turned from the inward curve of self and sin, to the outward move to the other in self-giving and Christ-like love. Throughout, the emphasis on the Spirit, and the church in the power of the Spirit, is a welcome and well explored theme -deeply congenial to a group of Moltmann fans!A long last chapter on repentance, which is a perceptive tour of the encounters with Jesus in the Gospel of Mark, shows that repentance is a multi-faceted experience of turning to Jesus and Jesus turning to the penitent. Our group warmed to this Jesus- centric view of God's compassion welcoming whoever came to Jesus, and for whatever reason. Salvation is broad enough, and the shoulders of Jesus broad enough, to carry all the mixed motives and confused searchings of all humanity – after all, they were broad enough to carry the cross.The insistence throughout on the sociality of redemption, and the humanity of each believer being continuously restored in our relationship to the humanity of Jesus, shows Greggs' concern to insist on the real humanity of Christ, and the believer's incorporation into the Body of Christ as those being made more, not less human, through the work of the Spirit. There are echoes of Thomas and James Torrance's theology of the vicarious humanity of Christ in a number of key passages.The use throughout of fresh metaphors, or biblical metaphors repristinated are helpful in rendering more established models of atonement, and therefore salvation, as less absolute and more mutually enriching.Throughout the argument of this book, the cantus firmus of salvation is creation, redemption and reconciliation. The whole creation groans awaiting it's redemption and reconciliation, a process set in motion by God's coming in the person of his Son, the perfect humanity of Jesus, crucified, risen and ascended. For Greggs, the New Testament, rooted and grounded in the narrative of Israel and Jesus of Nazareth, is a more generous and social understanding of the whole work of Christ.
One area we explored was whether the treatment of sin was too focused on the individual, and the need for forgiveness. This is not to say that the social, structural and human institutional expressions of self-interested power are ignored. But at times one feels that the wider vision of economic, political and racial justice, needed at least some further acknowledgement and comment. Part of this disquiet was because sin and its concomitant guilt and oppression means something very different to those whose living context is powerlessness, oppression and people broken by social forces and systems over which they have little control, and minimal choices.For such people, guilt isn't the problem, bondage and oppression is. In which case liberation and restorative justice would more equate to salvation. It's not that such peoples do not need individual salvation; more that for the powerless deprived of justice it is the brokenness of the social systems and economies that require to be redeemed, and reconciliation to take place between the oppressor and the oppressed. That too is part of reach of the Cross, through which God has brought about the reconciliation of "all things."But this is a theologically thought provoking and affirmative book, on that all seven of us agreed. Reading and discussing it we were happy to have our ideas refreshed on things we thought we knew, but now need to re-remember. The book deserves wide reading, perhaps especially as a refresher course for pastor-preachers; refreshing both the preacher's heart, and their intellectual grasp of the breadth of salvation, and the Gospel they are charged to preach.Tomorrow I'll post some of the best quotations from my reading of the book. -
Walking in the Woods in the Last of the Sunlight.
Late sunset, those last minutes when, filtered through a forest, the sun can be looked at as what the mystics might have called a dazzling darkness, the interplay when shadows are illumined and light is shaded.
Combined with silence, interrupted by our own footsteps and the friction of sleeve on winter jacket, those 40 minutes of walking at dusk are a form of invisible mending, frayed strands gathered back into the weft, and the garment of our days good to go, for another day.
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Hope Is the Settled Confidence that God Can Be Trusted
I was at one of the Glasgow Baptist Churches on a pulpit exchange Sunday. I had chosen what I thought were well known hymns. We would finish with “How Firm a Foundation You Saints of the Lord.” Problem. The organist didn’t like playing the usual tune. I tried to be persuasive, diplomatic, and patient. He wasn’t interested, and said he would choose the tune and play it and it would be fine.
So I preached, and we came to the last hymn. The first verse goes like this:
How firm a foundation, you saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith in his excellent word.
What more can he say than to you he hath said,
You who unto Jesus for refuge have fled.
On a June summer evening, in a wee Baptist church, we sang this rousing, faith-building hymn to the tune for “O Come All Ye Faithful”, a tune forever embedded in winter snow and Christmas trees. Try it for yourself! The last line was sung by a startled then near hysterical congregation, trying to sing with devout seriousness:
You who unto Jesus / You who unto Jesus
You who unto Jesus for refuge have fled.
I can no longer sing this verse without praying for inner calm. But the truth at the heart of that first verse is as true now as it was when it was written. The foundations of the church of Jesus Christ are firm, rooted and anchored in the promises of God.
All of this came back to me when I was reading Psalm 33 in preparation for Service this Sunday. Not only is it Remembrance Sunday, which brings its own solemnity and time for reflection on the costs of human conflict. But looking ahead following COP 26 the world faces major challenges on climate change, the COVID pandemic continues to have a global impact, major refugee movements and famine threats in Afghanistan, Yemen and other parts of our world. Many of the firm foundations we have relied on are beginning to feel decidedly shaky.
So these words from Psalm 33 are precisely the promises and prayers which still provide a firm foundation for our own lives, the life of the Church, and indeed the future of God’s good creation.
“We wait in hope for the Lord; he is our strength and shield. In him our hearts rejoice, for we trust in his holy name. May your unfailing love rest upon us, O Lord, even as we put our hope in you.
To wait in hope isn’t the same as giving in. Another great hymn we don’t sing often enough has the lines,
Save us from weak resignation, to the evils we deplore…
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, serving Thee whom we adore.
We wait in hope before God because we have learned that God is our strength and shield, and we trust in his holy name. Hope is the opposite of shoulder-shrugging, I can’t help it resignation. Hope is when faith is at its most defiant. Hope is when we stand beneath the cross with broken-hearted disciples, and head with the women for the tomb with its immovable rock, and find that the immovable stone has been moved, and the crucified is glorified. And our hearts rejoice in hope.
We wait in hope because God isn’t finished with the church, and the church isn’t finished. How firm a foundation! What more can he say than to you he has said? Our wee church in Montrose (like every other Christian congregation) is built on the firm foundation of God’s promises:
“You are fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.” Ephesians 2.19-20.
So as Psalm 33 says, “We wait in hope…” Not wild unrealistic hope, but the settled confidence that God can be trusted. Not passive let’s do nothing hope, but hopeful living, hope-filled praying, acts of hopefulness and hope-building. Not fingers crossed and hope for the best hope, but an inner assurance that God keeps his word, and we can trust his holy name.
We are in a time of flux, unpredictability, and multiple crises. Anxiety and uncertainty can easily slide into despair. But our faith has a firm foundation, and so does our hope. What more can he say than to you he has said…”He who did not spare his own Son, but freely gave him up for us all, will he not, with him, freely give us all things.”
May your unfailing love rest upon us, O Lord, even as we put our hope in you.