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Monday

Matthew 12.36 “But I tell you that everyone will have to give account on the day of judgement for every empty word they have spoken.”

A tree is known by its fruit, and followers of Jesus will be known by their works and words. What we say matters. This is more than a warning against lies, though that’s included. Empty words includes careless words, wounding words, and words that aid what is bad by minimising or excusing what is wrong. The follower of Jesus uses words carefully, caringly and as an audible witness of what is good, true and genuinely careful of the consequences of what we say. It would be easy to reduce the warning in Jesus’ words, but what Jesus is saying to each of us is that we will have to explain to God those words that did nothing to make our world better.

Tuesday

Matthew 12.37 “For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned.”

A few verses earlier Jesus described where words come from – they only reach the mouth by way of the heart. Our words have moral significance, and like mirrors they reflect the kind of person we are. When someone apologises for using insulting and derogatory words by saying, “That isn’t me”, they are avoiding the deeper truth that no one else said them – they did. “Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.” (v34) Perhaps what Jesus means about us being responsible for empty and careless words is all those words that erupt without thinking from our heart, and that tell everyone who hears them who we really are.

Wednesday

James 1.26 “If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless.”

In the world of Jesus and James, words were not merely communication sounds. Words do things, change things. Words make or break relationships, build or break trust. Hate speech is a thing. Prejudice does poison communities. James is echoing Jesus about uncontrolled speech that damages the social fabric and reveals who we truly are. Our devotion to Jesus, our Christian piety, the genuineness of all we say and sing in prayer and worship, is daily tested by how we speak and what we say.

Thursday

James 1.27 “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”

James is the most practical of people, and again he echoes Jesus – we are recognisable by our fruits. What we do backs up how we speak. When we show compassion and care for orphans, widows and anyone else who needs support, we reveal what is going on in our heart and mind. A compassionate inner life spontaneously speaks carefully and caringly, “for out of the heart the mouth speaks”. In a world of too much rough speaking and aggressive language, what we say and how we say it as Christians, speaks volumes!

Friday

James 3.9-10 “With the tongue we praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings, who have been made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come praise and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this should not be.”

The default setting of the tongue is to praise the Creator. To denigrate, insult or wound those made in God’s image contradicts our every prayer of praise. In our word soaked culture, we seem less and less able to understand the lethal nature of weaponised words. James is encouraging Christians who have to mix and live within a surrounding culture to allow their speech to be governed, moderated and guided by their primary calling – which is to worship and serve a righteous God.

Saturday

James 3.17-18 “The wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.”

“Lord, give me wisdom before I open my big mouth!” I know, it’s not the most elegant of liturgical creations, but how many times have we wished we had prayed such sentiments more often? Here is James at his most pastoral and constructive. May God give us that gift and discipline of wise speaking, so that in our words we are peacemakers whose words are seeds sown in peace that will reap a harvest of righteousness. The New Testament takes seriously the potential of well spoken words to weave the ways of peace into the patterned fabric of healthy community relationships.

Sunday

Psalm 19.16 “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.”

What a prayer with which to start each day! Or before a difficult conversation; or a meeting where there are clashing agendas. Does what I say please God? Could I say this knowing that God is present in the room? Speech is God’s gift, an instrument of praise. Our words are to be gifts that enrich, encourage, bring peace, restrain anger, and show love. Let God be the Rock that gives grace and stability to our speaking.

Monday

Philippians 2.14-15 “Do everything without grumbling or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation. Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky as you hold firmly to the word of life.”

The mission of the church is to glow in the darkness as examples of light. In a dark world, if you want to know what light looks like, look at the church. The ministry of the church and its mission in the world is to be like stars in the night sky, lights that help travellers to navigate and are constant points of reference. That criterion helps us set our priorities in worship, mission, witness, prayer, social justice and services of compassion in and to God’s world. 

Tuesday

Matthew 28.18-20 “Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

The Great Commission starts with a statement of power and ends with a promise of presence. Not power to coerce, but power to commission, giving authority to act as the risen Jesus’ representatives, now authorised to act and speak in his name. We do this, not on our own, but accompanied by that same risen Lord, at all times and in all places. When we talk of the mission of the church, we are simply referring to the mission of God in Christ. We are bearers of the good news, couriers of the grace of God, conduits of a love that has come into the world to redeem and to reconcile.   

Wednesday

Matthew 28.18-20 “Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

The core commission is to go, make disciples, baptise and teach, and all of this done in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The Gospel is news to be passed on, broadcast and demonstrated, lived and sung, embodied and enacted. Mission is to be so soaked in the teaching and truth of Jesus that it gives colour and flavour to the whole of our life, as individual followers of Jesus, as children of the Father, as a community of the Spirit. Whatever our strategies and programmes, our hopes and our prayers, they start and end with His words – go, make, baptise, teach.

Thursday

Thou, whose almighty word

chaos and darkness heard,
and took their flight;
hear us, we humbly pray,
and where the gospel-day
sheds not its glorious ray,
let there be light.

Interesting that one of the first missionary hymns starts at Genesis 1.1. The Creator God pushes back chaos and darkness to bring conditions for life. Likewise the Church looks for where there is the chaos and darkness of human life gone wrong and seeks to be the light God brings. All around us are places where there is no gospel daylight, or in Paul’s words there are people and communities looking for stars in a dark universe who give light and are trusted guides. This verse could easily be our start of day prayer, lifting our eyes to God whose almighty Word gives power to light the darkest places; and by that same grace powering us up to be the light of God there!  

Friday

Thou, who didst come to bring
on thy redeeming wing
healing and sight,
health to the sick in mind,
sight to the inly blind,
O now to all mankind
let there be light.

“God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.” Into a world fallen again into chaos and darkness, came Christ the Light of the world. All four Gospels tell of the healing miracles of Jesus, those pointers to the deeper healing of the fractured relationship between God and His broken creation. Sin is a disease deeply rooted in human life and affecting all of creation. Sin blinds the will, the mind and the conscience of every human being. We recognise it in hearts easily deceived, wills made plastic by wanting the wrong things, a conscience skilled in explaining away our guilt. All of this is in full show on the Cross, where sin is borne, its power defeated, and where the light shone in the darkness and the darkness did not win. There, once again God said, “Let there be light.” That light blazed with life-giving power across a dark universe on Easter morning – and it shines still.

Saturday

Spirit of truth and love,
life-giving, holy Dove,
speed forth thy flight;
move on the water's face,
bearing the lamp of grace,
and in earth's darkest place
let there be light.

Like the best hymns, there’s a whole tapestry of biblical allusions here. But it is the dove sent from the ark, then linked to the brooding of the Spirit of God over the waters in the Creation story that drives this verse. The prayer is made explicit: “May the Spirit of life move across the whole creation, shining the light of grace that illumines, and restores, and makes life possible.” This is a mission hymn-prayer that longs for a dark world to be illumined, a broken world to be healed, and a disordered world to learn once more the shalom of God. The church at the urging of the Spirit has its own role in all of this – go into the world, make disciples from all peoples, baptise in the name of the Triune God, and teach and live all that Jesus commands.

Sunday

Holy and blessèd Three,
glorious Trinity,
Wisdom, Love, Might;
boundless as ocean's tide
rolling in fullest pride,
through the earth far and wide
let there be light.

The Trinity is no mere abstraction. Jesus came to reconcile a world at enmity with God, in obedience to the will of the Father, in the power of the Spirit. The wisdom, love and might of God are all revealed in the birth, ministry, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus. “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself – He who knew no sin was made to be sin for us – God has given to us the ministry of reconciliation.” (2 Cor. 5) What is revealed on the Cross is the Almighty Word of God spoken to the chaos and darkness of our world, and that word was love, blazing out in light, bearing with it the promise of new life and new creation in Christ.

It may well be that the Church, and that must mean each one of us, will become much more certain of the how of mission, when we immerse ourselves again in the why of mission. Then like Paul we will confess, “The love of Christ constrains us”, grace leaves us no choice, Christ has become our life’s imperative.

Not entirely true that wee ditty about Dostoevsky – but, for the avoidance of doubt, I've never read a Dostoevsky novel twice, and there are several I haven't read at all  I have, however, read more than one biography of Dostoevsky which explored the world of the novels. Often enough I've enjoyed a literary biography about someone as much as anything they may have written.

Currently I'm reading Anne Thwaite's biography of Philip Henry Gosse. I remember reading his son Edmund Gosse's memoir, 'Father and Son.' Thwaite's biography is a firm corrective to Edmund's distorted portrayal of his father Henry, the subject of Thwaite's book. Well researched biography is one of the more enjoyable ways of understanding historical context and what it is that makes a writer write, why they think as they do, what life was like for them.

Diarmid McCulloch's biography of Thomas Cranmer is essential reading to understand the life and times, and the mind, of the man behind The Book of Common Prayer. Roger Lipsey opened up the visionary but pragmatic mind, and the interrogative but persistently searching spirituality of Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary General of the United Nations and author of 'Markings'. Bruce Gordon's biography of John Calvin puts paid to the wide of the mark caricatures of the Geneva reformer and presents a far more accurate portrait of Calvin's achievements and ongoing significance as a major constructive thinker and influential presence in western thought.

Denise Levertov, was a poet of protest and prayer and humane observation of human life, whose father was Jewish and became a Church of England priest, and who herself emigrated to America and later converted to the Catholic church. She has been the subject of three major biographies in recent years – together they help us understand her response to the Vietnam war, militarism and racism, environmental crisis and our capacity as a species for both cruelty and compassion. She is a good example of a poet best read with awareness of her life story. I read and learned from her for years before a good biography appeared. But until I read those biographies I had no idea of the personal impact of her American context of unrest about Vietnam, Civil Rights movements, and her own evolving political critique of late 20th Century western culture. Her conversion was slowly signalled in her later works before becoming quite explicit, though always with occasional and residual doubt about her own spiritual security.

Over a lifetime of preaching, countless thoughts and insights have percolated up from such reading. Not all theological reflection begins in theology books, and often enough our deepest insights into God, ourselves and the world around us, comes from those who know how to tell a good story, whether novel or biography. And for that matter, it is often the poet who enables us to see what otherwise we would miss, and to understand something of the mystery of who we are, or wish we were

Monday

1 Corinthians 13. 13 “And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

I’ve often wondered about that singling out of love as the greatest. Life without hope, without the capacity to trust, would be pretty bleak. But for Paul what enables trust, what fills with hope, is the love of God in Christ. That’s the start and finish of all hope, and the final foundation of our deepest trust – “God commends his love towards us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” When Paul writes about love in 1 Cor. 13 he is writing first and foremost about the love of God in Christ – it is THAT love that is poured into our hearts, and that we then live out in practice.

Tuesday

1 Corinthians 13.1 “If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”

What’s more annoying than the loudest voice in the coffee shop, oblivious of the rest of us, clanging on about the holiday, or banging on about their latest grump about the boss? A Christian who makes it known they are Christian, who ‘witnesses’ to others about what they believe about Jesus, or ‘takes a stand’ on moral issues that are ‘traditionally Christian’ – can be just as annoying as that clanging cymbal at the next table, and just as hollow. Any careful, even cursory reading of the New Testament leaves us in no doubt – love is the criterion of Christian authenticity.

Wednesday

1 Corinthians 13.4-8 “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails.”

Read that again, and think of how Jesus lived his life, treated and responded to others. Is there a better check-list on which to measure our own relational, emotional and spiritual health? Precisely because that description of love is way beyond any one of us, without enabling grace, each day we seek once more the renewal of the reality of the indwelling Christ – “God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.” (Romans 5.5)

Thursday

1 John 4.7 “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.”

Love is more than emotional affection – it is practical kindness, enacted goodness towards others, readiness to forgive, patience to understand, sharing the burdens and the laughter. When God’s love pours into the heart it issues in newness of life and becomes a spring of renewal irrigating the relationships around us. Knowing and experiencing the love of God brings about the deepest transformations of the ways we think, feel and act – God calls us to be the love of Christ personified, to be the Body of Christ. “I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me…”

Friday

1 John 4.8 “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.”

There it is. As succinct and to the point as we could possibly want. God is love! Our love for God, love for others, love as the energising fuel of life, love of enemies, love for God’s creation, love for our church and every community of Christ; all are made possible by being drawn into the love of God, the grace of Christ, the communion of the Spirit. No wonder Paul said a loveless Christian is a clanging contradiction and a discordant embarrassment. Love is both gift and imperative, choice and ommand. 

Saturday

1 John 4.10 “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”

A Christian understanding of love comes from experience. We love because He first loved us. We entrust ourselves to that love which reaches out from the cross in mercy and forgiveness; then our whole inner self is renewed by the inpouring of the great grace of God, which is uncontainable and so it naturally finds outflow as we in turn become conduits of the grace of God in Christ. “Love so amazing, so divine demands my soul, my life, my all.” Once again, love is both gift and demand, visible evidence of an inner reality, proof positive of a life in living connection with Christ.

Sunday

1 John 4.11 “Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”

We forgive because we have been forgiven; we love because we have been loved; we show mercy because mercy has been shown to us. There is an inescapably reciprocal movement of gift and response in our spiritual lives. We are blessed to become a blessing, and in blessing others we are further blessed. That phrase “Since God SO loved us” is an irresistible argument. God loved us so much, beyond what we could ever deserve or expect, without holding back and without prior conditions – God loves like that. And our love for God, others, neighbours, enemies, whoever and whenever? Every day grateful obedience demonstrates our answering love.

Yes, I’m old enough to remember Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’ first time round! I’ve always loved bridges – their architecture, their usefulness, the way they help us on our journey.

One of my favourites is ‘the clatterin’ brig’ at the foot of Cairn o’ Mount. Last year I took a photo of the bridge, while standing on stones in the middle of the burn. It’s framed in gorse, and looking upstream through the arch it’s easy to imagine the importance of the bridge, and to be grateful for all bridge-builders.

Our world now urgently needs bridge-builders, those carefully constructive people Jesus called peacemakers. There are priority vacancies for bridge-builders between communities who work at healing divisions, for recruits who are willing to be conduits of goodwill, for imaginative creators and curators of trust, skilled craftsmen in the work of bringing people together in friendship.

A bridge is made of walls, but walls of friendship which enable each other to journey, to go from one side to another, passing or waiting for each other to pass, a long-term gift to each traveller, a place where multiple paths intersect.

A bridge is a monument to goodwill, a deposit paid towards journeys others will make. Bridges are reasons to be grateful to those who build such sturdy walls which carry the road we travel, and which carry us, from here to there, and back again.

Some of the most important words in the thesaurus of human relations are shown by experience to be the most durable stones for building bridges – listening, understanding, empathy, forgiveness, reconciliation, compassion, co-operation, generosity, laughter and yes, humanity.