Highlights

This week we had the second televised debate between the leaders of the three largest parties contesting the UK General Election on May 6.

Adam Boulton of Sky News who moderated the debate unintentionally damned it with this faint praise.  He wrote afterwards,  .... For me personally this really was fantastic and two moments stand out in particular...

First, talking to the audience before the debate and realising there were people from all walks of life who were pleased to be there.

Then there was the moment when the three leaders came on and took their places behind the podiums.  You could hear the countdown and you realised this really was going to happen.

Oh dear.  The two stand out moments both happened without any of the three of them opening their mouths!

This offered me some consolation this weekend when, beset by a stomach bug, I failed to finish a service for the first time in many hundreds of starts.  Disappearing from the platform in haste I ended up in a crumpled vomiting humiliation in the room behind the platform, the message largely as undelivered as the lunch was undigested.

The singular experience was not so bad for the congregants whom the wall spared from knowing any more than my disappearance.  They were able to continue their celebration largely undiminished, aided by my ever-competent wife who finished the service element in my absence.  Whatever the stand out part of the day was for those attending, I can be 100% sure it was not my message.  On another day I, like those party leaders, might have been fooled into believing it could have been! 

Grounded

"You cannot leave the ground where you are", declared the Controller.

The people crowded toward the place where they would set off up into the clouds.

Beyond them, however, smoke and ash billowed forth.  It was going to be a long wait.  Just as well not to try and go up, though.  Health and safety.

Then Moses led the people out of the camp to meet with God, and they stood at the foot of the mountain. Mount Sinai was covered with smoke, because Yahweh descended on it in fire. The smoke billowed up from it like smoke from a furnace, the whole mountain trembled violently . . . Yahweh descended to the top of Mount Sinai and called Moses to the top of the mountain. So Moses went up and Yahweh said to him, "Go down and warn the people so they do not force their way through to see Yahweh and many of them perish."

What a hardship people have suffered in the past week trying to get home with a flying ban because of airborne ash from an unprounouncable Icelandic volcano.

But theirs has been a short wait compared to how long we'd have to wait to get up into God's presence.  It's never going to happen, really.  Good that he came down. 

Professor Antony Flew

Professor Antony Flew died a week ago. His story is fascinating not because it ends in a glorious conversion to faith in Jesus (it apparently didn't, though I am not his judge) but because it debunks the idea that it is especially rational to disbelieve in God.

Though the son of a President of the Methodist Conference, no greater philosophical mind stood in the imaginary atheistic pulpit in the 20th century than Flew. None of the current crop of atheistic militants approaches his philosophical standing.  And then, after a lifetime of reflection, Flew threw atheism out without a parachute.

Worse for your friendly local atheist, it can scarcely be argued that Antony Flew embraced the idea of god as a kind of pre-death insurance because a saving god was not the kind of deity that he came to postulate. His imagined god was creation's source and little else.

LESSON 1: Believing there is Someone Out There makes a whole lot more sense than being an atheist.

LESSON 2: But knowing that Someone caused you to be and squandering the chance to know him is a kind of rational irrationality.

Church

Ironed

Overheard at the Sports Centre on this morning after the Resurrection Day before:

Mildred: "Did you have a nice day yesterday?"

Mavis: "It was alright.  Just did some washing and ironing really."

This seemed a bizarre behaviour for the day that the only human being who has ever conquered death by taking his life back from the grave.  Or was it?

Looking into the empty tomb (John 20:6) Peter and John are stunned - so it appears - to see the graveclothes lying there.  Why?  Because if the body had been stolen the clothes would have gone with it.  If the thieves had left the outer burial wrappings they would have been unwound all over the floor.  But for sure in the pitch dark they would not have been reconstituted like a banana peel restored without the banana inside.

Then the headcloth.  It was entetuligmenon.  Sometimes translated folded this rather misses the point.  Like as if it had been ironed on Easter Day!  No, this  is how Lazarus's head wrapping (John 11:44) is described when Jesus resurrected him.  The headcloth, somewhat in the manner of a turban, was where it would have been and how it would have but without the head in it!

In a nutshell, John saw and believed.  He hadn't seen Jesus at all yet.  He just knew that there was no way that the body had done other then rise back to life, and in a manner that meant at once that it was the same body (the tomb was empty) but a different set of properties (the wrapping had been passed through).

Mavis seems to have missed the point about Easter Day quite disastrously.  Yet strangely, in spending the day with clothing, she was closer to the glorious reality than she could have imagined!

Uncomplicated

You may, of course, not believe it.

Just stay sitting down then.  Because if human beings haven't a way of getting past death successfully they certainly don't have anything to stand up and sing about.