A Son's Tribute - Peace

The last hymn in my dad's Thanksgiving Service was amazingly opposite in origin to In heavenly Love Abiding, with which his service began.  Far from being written as calm poetry, this hymn was penned in the midst of almost unspeakable tragedy.

It stands as a beacon to all of us who pass through vales of suffering that a confident faith in Jesus is utterly transformational and offers the brightest of hope in the most overwhelming sadness.  Let us be clear - my dad knew little such deep personal sadness as Spafford's but he shared in that of others and did not enjoy the experience of a month dying in hospital in accelerating weakness.

But hey, where, indeed, O death is your sting?  All death has done when it has done all is usher a soul to his previously purchased-by-Jesus home.

 

 

 

A Son's Tribute - Holding Hands

My Mum and Dad often held hands.  Not just at the beginning of their courtship but right through to their Golden Wedding Anniversary and several years beyond.  People sometimes remarked about it, for plenty of married couples don't hold hands much anymore.

 

Perhaps the most significant thing is this though: they were holding hands at the end of their marriage.

 

Just about everyone holds hands at the beginning.  As the old Prayer Book has it -

 

Then shall they give their troth to each other in this manner. The Minister, receiving the Woman at her father's or friend's hands, shall cause the Man with his right hand to take the Woman by her right hand, and to say after him as followeth.

 

Even a humanist celebrant in the Registry Office will instruct similarly.

 

There are no such instructions for the end of a Marriage though.  Many marriages in my parents' lifetimes have ended with a shout, an angry letter, a slammed door or at the very best a formal handshake as the solicitors finish their mediation of a tolerable settlement.

 

As my Dad lay dying, thus ending his marriage as he vowed he would - 'til death do us part - my Mum was kindly brought to his bedside and there, at the moment of his death (and the death of the marriage) she was holing his hand.

 

Of course it is fanciful to imagine that such a beautiful ending can always be secured in a world of sudden accidents and striking illnesses.  But for all of us who have made those vows as we held hands on our Wedding Day it is far less fanciful to hold to the determination that at least we should want to hold hands when our marriage ends. That was what the vow meant, wasn't it?



A Son's Tribute - Speaking the Truth in Love

The motto of the Wickliffe preachers was 'Speaking the truth in love' (Ephesians 4:15)

 

This was the text taken as the theme of my Dad's thanksgiving service.  It's appropriateness was not simply that of the motto itself, it was that he lived out this text.  My Dad's gift to all who knew him was to demonstrate that Love does not have to be diminished by standing for the Truth and that the Truth does not have to be compromised by living a gracious life of Love, including (perhaps especially) in our speaking.

 

This is a combination that seems to elude almost everyone, including very many followers of Christ (who alone is the Truth and the greatest expression of Love).  And the first place it eludes people is in their speaking by which the Truth is doubted or denied or it is asserted without the kind of gracious humility that Love demands.

 

A Son's Tribute - Last Gasp

We chose this hymn for my Dad's service.

On my Birth Certificate he described his occupation as evangelist.

It fell to me of course to describe his occupation on his Death Certificate.  Evangelist, I said to the Registrar.

She looked at his age in his mid-eighties.  "That's retired?", she suggested.

I hesitated.  He had been in hospital only once in his life really, those last weeks.  He had told the doctor that he was not afraid to die because he was a Christian and trusting in the Lord, one of the nurses who passed his Bible over to him to read each day had been given it to read for themselves.  Perhaps he was an evangelist still.

 

Then again, I thought, this is a Death Certificate.  He may have been evangelising until his final breath but there was a final breath.  There are no evangelists in the presence of Jesus.  Only retired ones.  Evangelist (retired) then.

A Son's Tribute - Open air preaching

 

 

My Dad was blessed with an amazingly clear voice.  He was also blessed with a Merseyside sense of humour.

 

God used these qualities to useful effect when he preached in the open air.  I have done this very rarely and that is something I will probably always regret as preaching to the converted or nearly converted is significantly removed from New Testament preaching.  I think I heard my Dad preach in the open air at least as often as I heard him in religious meetings.  But the open air was more fun and more frightening.

 

Certainly this was where I first encountered hecklers.  But of course to an open air preacher hecklers are the equivalent (only more entertaining) of a church preacher's Powerpoint slides.  They punctuate the monologue and make it more interesting.  Open air preachers love hecklers and even drunken ones are useful - Southend seafront was especially good for that sort!
 

I suppose that being around open air preaching was one of my first experiences of the way that all things work together for good.  On the face of it there was a problem of contentious opposition, in reality the problem was a blessing. So many of Jesus's greatest stories were the result of awkward questions.

Open air preaching started to lose its value as the nation became more politely apathetic.  The gift of the New Atheists and all those antagonists that attack the Bible for moral reasons is a gift to be treasured, though with grace - which my Dad always exhibited.

A Son's Tribute - Enduring

As my Dad lay in hospital for the last month of his life the only book he had with him was his Bible.  He was very sensible.  It was the Word that would outlast him in the most emphatic of ways - for ever.  So at his Thanksgiving Service we read . . .

 

¹Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.

² Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the Lord's hand double for all her sins.

³ The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

⁴ Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain:

⁵ And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.

⁶ The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field:

⁷ The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.

⁸ The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.

 

This Old Testament reading appears, at casual reading, to be a strange combination of comfort and brutal truth.  After all, what real comfort is their that God has forgiven us (2) when we are all on the way out anyway (7)?  All that lasts is the echoing voice of the Divine (8).

 

It all hinges on what the Word of the Lord actually says.

 

If the enduring Word of the Lord had said, "Good Riddance" we could hardly blame him.  But the Word that outlasts our little earthly life-slot speaks instead of eternal salvation.  We also read . . .

 

¹And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

² And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

³ And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.

 

The Word that lasts is the Word that brings the greatest comfort of all.

 

 

 

 

 

A Son's Tribute - Caravans

Although this picture comes from a generation earlier, it depicts the kind of setting in which my Dad began Christian ministry as a Wickliffe Preacher.  Three young men, a caravan plastered with big texts and a drive from village to village and including market towns and occasionally urban centres with missions to teach the children about the Gospel.

Today's children see many more words than these.  Why, as I write this they are busy tweeting them to one another, looking at them on endless websites and generally being bombarded by the messengers of the global village.

 

We smile at the change.

 

The quality of the media is vastly different but the message carried is vastly inferior.  Windows 8 has introduced no new input that improves on THIS IS A FAITHFUL SAYING THAT CHRIST JESUS CAME INTO THE WORLD TO SAVE SINNERS.

 

Sure, we can save documents, blogs, digital images, spreadsheets and the like.  But is there a new, improved way to save sinners?

 

One way to look at this in the 21st century is to say that we no longer interpret behaviours as sin.  That is to miss the point.  Sin is not the human way of looking at human behaviour, it is the revealed divine way.  Like the arrested bloke's, "Get yer 'ands off me. I ain't done nuthin' wrong." this self-described innocence needs some higher corroboration.  The Bible makes it clear enough that we cannot change the way God looks at our sin.  The Gospel declares that God has.  He has sent a saving Messiah - Christ Jesus came to save.

 

Throughout his life my dad lived with people gently observing him as pleasantly quaint and earnestly unnecessary.   It is the evangelist's lot.  But they were wrong.  He was witnessing to the only solution to the only long term problem we humans face.

 

 

 



A Son's Tribute - War

This picture comes in the BBC history section with the heading 'When Ken Dodd learned Welsh'.

 

We do not choose the when and where of our birth and my Dad was born in a most unfortunate situation from the point of view of Secondary education.  At about the age that we were exercised about 'which school is best', Ken Dodd, my Dad and thousands of others were evacuated from Merseyside to the perceived safety of Wales.

 

This may or may not have been a good idea by the Government though it had the obvious difficulty of breaking up the family.  Families still break up today of course for different reasons.  I was very blessed to be part of a family that was not broken up and this is another reason to be grateful to God for my Dad.  I have met plenty of people whose lives can recover the sense of stability that I enjoyed as a normality.

 

Governments do affect us.  The death of Margaret Thatcher has brought this starkly to light.  The wartime Government is regarded as heroic (presumably, as in the manner of a successful football manager, because it won).

 

It wasn't so heroic for my Dad though.  Having sent him to Wales away from danger but also family it decided it was safe to return after all.  So back he came to his home round the corner from a great shipyard - just in time for the actual blitz.  His teenage equivalent of my football on Saturdays was climbing around bomb craters in the middle of Merseyside.

 

We do well to trust in another Power than that of the State.

A Son's Tribute - In Heavenly Love Abiding

This hymn has figured in our family's life events over the years and my Dad's Thanksgiving Service begins with it.

 

It is tempting to think of this as an old person's hymn -

 

In heavenly love abiding,
No change my heart shall fear;
And safe is such confiding,
For nothing changes here.
The storm may roar without me,
My heart may low be laid;
But God is round about me,
And can I be dismayed?

 

When Anna Waring wrote it she was, in fact, 27 years old.

 

What awful circumstances had led her to write this poetry of devotion?  What hurts and harms had given her such depth of consciousness about God's providential love?  None actually.  Or at least as far as we can know from her story.  She learned what she learned not by the University of Experience but by the glory of Scripture.

 

Our family - and not least my Dad who spent but four weeks in hospital (his last four weeks) - has not been visited by the unending tragedies that afflict some.  To get depth we must get it from our knowledge of God.  Yet in this way, my Dad was able to enter on his last days as if a veteran of hospitalisation, for although he was unfamiliar with the environment he was very familiar with the abiding love of God.  And he found that there.

A Son's Tribute - Introduction

It was at this time that my Dad passed into glory.

In his honour my blogs this month will be about him.  His walk with God, his service of Christ and His church and his evident fullness of the Holy Spirit qualify him for more blog pages than my life can ever deserve but for this day on which he died to this world it is enough to say that I am proud to have been his son both by blood and by his spiritual example.  The former may last me a few more years of earthly life, the latter will benefit me eternally.