A Second Look at a Christmas Card No 10: Let there be Light

To end my Christmas card musings I have this beautiful one from my alma mater, Spurgeon's College.  Blessed with a hilltop location and what amounts to an English country house as its main building, the College does not have to work hard to prepare an outwardly beautiful card (though when I lived in the building here it was certainly less salubrious on the inside).

The College does not have to work hard to produce a beautiful scene but someone has been working hard on Photoshop here.  Though perhaps not quite hard enough.

Here's what nearby (real) snow looks like on a dark scene:

And here's the mistiness you get at a distance when snow is falling:

That white airbrush layer of card snow just doesn't quite do it, does it?

But who's to complain - I love snow, even fake snow.  

Then there are the room lights.

What is remarkable here is that you can see more clearly through the unlit windows than through the allegedly lit ones!  The latter look like, well, yellow paint. Which they are, in a pixelian sense. Poor old Photoshop.  It works best when you don't really look at it.

But what is all this about?

As we prepare for 2016 this is what it is about - the desire for the picture postcard.  In pursuit of this houses will be expensively bought, vacations expensively taken, divorces expensively executed, medical procedures expensively undergone and children expensively tutored.  We cannot be content with a thin layer of real snow or a real beauty that isn't shining enough.

Yet photoshopping life does not lead to more beauty but fake beauty which can, at a deeper level, yield less beauty.  May God grant us that most elusive of Christian values in the 21st Century West: contentment.

A Second Look at a Christmas Card No 9:

Considering the number of religious buildings that are in the Biblical nativity scene (zero) it is of more than passing interest how many appear on Christmas cards, usually in the snow.  How easily the meaning of God becomes architectural, a misfortune that is almost as old as religion itself.  When Peter saw Christ transfigured on the mountain his immediate reaction was a desire to build.

This card looks a little snowy but this may be a trick of desert light.  It's a great card and full of buildings behind the holy family.  But wait . . . what are those buildings?

Apart from the stable, Bethlehem clearly has an inn and one or two of the buildings could pass for that.  Less understandably the Judean hill town might have acquired a lighthouse over to the left.  Is there a mosque there?  No, that would be a few hundred years early.  There are certainly two churches, judging by the crosses on the towers.

No, hang on.  Churches?  Crosses?  It's like announcing a birth with the babe's obituary!

Thus, inadvertently, this card profoundly reflects the meaning of Christmas as the angel described it - You will call his name Jesus ['God saves'] for he will save his people from their sins.  The nativity has no meaning apart from the cross, and the cross no meaning apart from the body of people - the Church - that it wins for heaven from the darkness of sin.

Out of a card's chronological confusion we see light.

A Second Look at a Christmas Card No 8: Star Child!

Admittedly the babe appears here to be the child of two aliens.

But the truth is more amazing than that . . .

Happy Christmas!!

A Second Look at a Christmas Card No 7: What if?

On Christmas night we are bound to wonder.  Hopefully we can wonder at other things than this card makes us wonder, for perhaps it makes us wonder . . .

1. What if the wise men had ignored the star and Santa had been called in to bring the presents instead - would he have followed the star?
2. What if Jesus had been born in St Freda's church tower - how would the star have appeared?
3. What if we all had the kind of tread that gives Santa's boots such amazing grip on the rooftops?
4. What if all the trees in the town had the same evergreen fertiliser that the ones near Santa seem to have?
5. What if, instead of being created by God, the stars of the universe and their positioning had been left to a wallpaper designer?
6. What if there were no demand for Christmas cards - how would the kind of artist that drew this make a living?

A Second Look at a Christmas Card No 6: In the Woods

As Christmas Day draws near the calendar of events is more back story and less must-be-done.  This offers the chance to take time doing things that one normally has no time to do.  

Like working out what this picture is.

Yes, here we have a card with snow on it.  Plus some trees, an owl, a brace of white rabbits (one caught, one waiting to be) and a man who appears to have gone outside in his mother's winter nightgown carrying a wreath.  It is not an easy card to understand.

Investigation leads to the Facebook page of Liz, the artist, who appears to draw great pictures and craft work sometimes relating to fantasy themes and enjoy drinking in South Dakotan bars.  And eventually the picture is uncovered as:

Arctic Santa in Forest

Yet the sense of discovery that this gave me was quickly lost in a flood of unanswered questions:

• What other kind of Santa is there but an Arctic one?
• Why has the reindeer turned into an owl?
• Why is this dubious Santa wearing his Mum's nightgown?
• Why doesn't he catch the other rabbit to make a decent Christmas meal?
• And why has he stolen someone's Christmas wreath?

A Second Look at a Christmas Card No 5: The Mouth Speaking

The first thing that struck me about these two cards was how beautiful they were, though they are very different paintings and arrived on different days.  On the face of it the Nativity and a rural snow-scene are the least remarkable of pictures on a Christmas card but something about these is special.  

On turning to the back of them it becomes all the more amazing yet also more explicable.  These are both copies of paintings by mouth artists.  The painstaking attention they exhibit derives from the challenge that the artist faces in delivering any painting and the relative care and pride in the work they do.

This is somewhere near the beauty of the painstaking gift of God at Christmas. 

A Second Look at a Christmas Card No 4: The Invisible God

Unsurprisingly I have a leaning toward cards with a text of Scripture.  As this one proudly announces - this is the message that really matters.

And the card has a splendid text too: Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father! [John 14:9 TLB]   There is a disappointment to come however.  For when you turn over and look at the picture . . .

there is merely a manger with a some hay, some sheep and a something resembling some wheat in a white vase.  So the Father remains - at least in terms of this card - as mysterious and unseen as ever!

Perhaps the card company might extend its strap line to when the message really matters the picture does too.

A Second Look at a Christmas Card No. 3: Angel Bird

Starting at the top of this Christmas card it is immediately apparent that this is the standard picture of an angel accompanying the star over Bethlehem.  We don't really know about angel wings but as angels sometimes appear in the sky and move swiftly the wings are a reasonable bet.

So far so good.

But wait - is it an angel?  Is it a plane?  It's a bird!!

It's all about perspective but in this picture that is one BIG bird.  A perfectly decent image biblically - Noah's Ark, various prophets and Psalms, a symbol of the Holy Spirit at Christ's Baptism and so on.  But perhaps the artist who drew this forgot that in the birth narratives of Jesus the only doves are dead ones, offered as a sacrifice when the newborn is taken to the Temple.  That dove needs to be careful . . .

A Second Look at a Christmas Card: No 2 The Donkeys

Today a fairly dreadful report has decided that the UK should officially not be Christian.  This idea seems a sad misreflection on the fact that the UK we live in owes almost everything in its better aspects of identity to the Christian faith.  

Christmas Cards are well ahead of the game on this issue however as can be seen here:

Without question this is a Christmas picture.  There's the Middle Eastern town in the background, the night sky with the great star (albeit in the wrong place) and the stable, the hay and the donkeys.  It reminds me of one of those holiday photographs (though this is a painting) when, in trying to capture the yacht passing the pier you end up with a seagull or a passing steam train is missed and you have a piece of fencing instead.

Dame Butler-Sloss (not for the first time unfortunately) did it, the Christmas card did it, I must remember to keep centred on what it's all really about - because I too might do it and end up, in the long run, looking like an ass.

A Second Look at a Christmas Card: No 1. The Done Deal

It's that time of year when (we hope) many Christmas cards arrive.  And when I try to look at them twice - or more - because they are always more interesting than they first appear.  If only because some are so howlingly mismade!

The very first card we received (yesterday) had a very nice picture of children in the snow and at first and second glance appeared to offer nothing for an eagle-eyed blogger to blog about.  Then I looked at the back.

Maybe I'm naive, but on first reading I took it that the friend who bought this card led, by that purchase, to a small donation being given to Sue Ryder, the wonderful Hospice Charity.  But look again.  Morrisons (who have a very happy and generous relationship with SueRyder it has to be noted) have decided to give £50,000.  That's it.  If they sell a zillion cards or none at all that is the deal.  In fact, as far as I can tell, the best thing to do is to buy a card from a SueRyder Shop as that gives the Charity extra money and they'll get the £50,000 anyway!

A nice view spoiled

Before leaving Malta behind on my blog this year I think that the single most shocking moment for me came when I realised the history of this beautiful bay by which we walked several times.  The bay I expected to remember when I left Malta was the one where Paul was shipwrecked but it proved difficult to set that over against the grotesque story of this bay in the Great Siege (referenced in my previous post).

On one grim day of that siege the headless crucified corpses of some Knights of St John were floated over the bay to terrorise their allies.  In retaliation, the knights, having beheaded many Ottoman prisoners, fired their heads from cannons back across the bay.

As we enter Advent, this is a good time to remember that the coming of the Light of the World has never ceased to be necessary - for however blue the sky, darkness is never far away.

No Island is an Island

Her Majesty the Queen and dozens of Commonwealth leaders have gathered in Malta - and with some relief one imagines.  Threats have been issued (of course) and security strengthened (of course) but in the whole scheme of things a small Mediterranean island looks like a good idea just now.

Yet even a modicum of historical awareness suggests otherwise for, as we were reminded during our  family holiday in Malta, this is an island whose history is bathed in blood.  In living memory it was the heroics of the Second World War when, as effectively the allied mid-Med military base the island was mercilessly, but unsuccessfully, attacked by Axis forces.

But the really bloody story of Malta is that of the Great Siege - a historical epic of mind-numbing proportions when the Knights of St John, representing Christian Europe and based in Malta, held out against an Ottoman siege by four or more times as many men through a whole summer.

Soberingly, given the cheap view of life demonstrated recently in Paris, a historian wrote thus, 'The disregard of human life among the Ottoman Turks at this time was almost incredible: to try to attain their end in war they sacrificed thousands upon thousands of men with callous indifference.'

In five hundred years humanity has not learned very much, for all its apparent learning.

Jonah Lomu et al.

The especially unwelcome death of Jonah Lomu aged 40 is an awesome human moment for followers of sport.  Rugby is a fundamentally physical team sport in which, at its elite level, man mountains clash in frightening contests of strength, power and speed so that you know that to be challenged by two of them would be the downfall of anyone.

What Jonah showed when he burst into elite international rugby was that one man could on occasion make the going tough for eight others - singlehandedly.  He was simply a physical peak of human power, a man among boys when those boys were by normal standards themselves men among boys.

If anyone needs to be reminded of the power of death, Remembrance Week, Paris and Jonah in their three different ways have revealed it.  Many gallant memories are recorded, many tributes paid, in the case of the Paris attack people are sometimes demonstrating astonishing rejection of bitterness against the planners of the evil.  As so often in a large corner of Rock culture the Eagles of Death Metal Band gave an appearance of embracing death with their motifs and titles.  Until they ran from it off stage.

But real death?  There is nothing we can do.  We cannot stop it, we cannot forgive it, we cannot live with it, we cannot deny it, we cannot move on away from it, we cannot win over it, we cannot play with it, we cannot get past it.

We need(ed) help.

Friday 13th

The terrible events on Friday 13th in Paris are all the news just now.

Surprisingly little reference is being made to Friday 13th.  As it happened, earlier in the day I was talking with a receptionist who randomly commented that she hoped I had a nice day even though it was Friday 13th.  As it happened I did.  But then I wasn't in Paris.

I take it that the unwillingness to identify the events that happened with this superstitious date is because of the awkwardness of the idea of bad luck.  Sometimes I find it amazing how the awfulness of the human situation brings people so much nearer the truth.  The awesomeness of evil forbids notions of luck in this case and by wise extension could reveal the same about so much supposed chance.  

Even though the atheist cannot believe in evil but only in fate/luck:  [In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.]  something deep in the human soul will not allow this.  This Friday 13th we can see (though we'd rather be somewhere we couldn't) that humanity is not only part of a system of genetic process but part of a moral and immoral universe.

The real bad luck this Friday 13th was not to be mowed down (that was a result of evil), but to embrace an unbelief that means that those who were mowed down didn't ultimately matter.

It's Missing: 4. The Cenotaph

Last Sunday Her Majesty the Queen and a great many others laid their wreaths at the Big Empty in Whitehall.  Jeremy Corbyn, Leader of Her Majesty's not-so-Loyal Opposition, Republican and Pacifist, was watched by the circling media in case he blew his nose at the wrong time,  His bow was deemed lacking in bendiness and an empty gesture.

The Cenotaph is, in its own stark way, an empty gesture.  Despite the momentarily heart-warming 'THE GLORIOUS DEAD' engraved on it, it is missing the dead.  Indeed, a cenotaph is by definition an empty tomb, associated with death but without a body or from which (in other cases) a body has been removed.  In Whitehall this Cenotaph makes manageable the otherwise unmanageable, for nowhere in Westminster is there room to bury the bodies of those who have died in the wars that Britain has fought.  Instead, a column and a grand description makes the multi-million life carnage seem almost homely.

An empty tomb that cannot accommodate the number of dead is one thing.

An empty tomb where the occupant has defeated death and lives for ever more?  That's Easter.  That's a cenotaph where the missing causes our heads to be lifted up in worship instead of bowed in thoughtful regret.

It's Missing 3. The Lord's Prayercut

Hymns and songs almost invariably have bits missing, and even if the printed version doesn't then the performed version will.

More extraordinarily the central prayer of the Christian Church has a bit missing.

Our Father, which art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy Name.
Thy Kingdom come. 

Thy will be done in earth, 

As it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses,

As we forgive them that trespass against us. 

And lead us not into temptation, 

But deliver us from evil. 

For thine is the kingdom, 

The power, and the glory, 

For ever and ever. 

Amen.

Here's the Roman Catholic version:

Our Father who art in Heaven, 

Hallowed be thy name; 

Thy kingdom come 

Thy will be done 

On earth as it is in heaven. 

Give us this day our daily bread; 

And forgive us our trespasses 

As we forgive those who trespass against us; 

And lead us not into temptation, 

But deliver us from evil.

My attendance at RC services is almost non existent - the last time I was left hanging by this version of the Lord's Prayer was in a fiercely evangelical church and the time before that in a middling cerebral Anglican church.

The rationale for the haircut prayercut seems simple enough - the oldest transcripts of the Gospels (usually but not universally deemed to be the most reliable) don't have the final doxology in.  

To me, the question is: What do we gain by taking it out?

The answer cannot be that it gives a better ending.  Mostly, when I've heard it in its truncated form, the leader adds Amen which is an unconscious admission that the truncated version doesn't feel that it ends right.   

The answer cannot be that the doxology doesn't fit the prayer.  The meaning of the doxology echoes the opening lines of the prayer about the kingdom and divine glory of God.  It reflects the grounds of confidence that we might be delivered from evil.

The answer must be that it is more Biblical.  This seems simple and straightforward enough.  Until we ponder that in the Roman Church being Biblical is hardly a stated priority with its varied forms of  hierarchical authority.  A Church that has in central liturgy a prayer

Blessed be the great Mother of God, Mary most Holy.

Blessed be her Holy and Immaculate Conception.
Blessed be her Glorious Assumption.

Blessed be the name of Mary, Virgin and Mother.

Blessed be St. Joseph, her most chaste spouse.

doesn't really need to exercise itself too much about being exactly Biblical!  Similarly, by his writings I am fairly sure that the Lead Vicar in the cerebral Anglican church I gave as an example doesn't believe the Lord's Prayer was actually uttered by the Lord.  So his problem with it is hard to understand too.

That leaves us with the Biblicist church who may have some grounds for leaving it out because it's not in the Bible (though surely most of our other prayers aren't either?)  But even that isn't straightforward because this doxology IS in the Bible - 1 Chronicles 29:

11 Thine, O Lord is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine; thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and thou art exalted as head above all.

Shall we just keep saying it, eh?

It's Missing 2. On the Brink

The Church has many reasons to be thankful for Matt Redman.  Matt has gone far past many contemporary worship lyricists in incorporating ancient words and biblical truths, some of which sit uncomfortably in the mindset of flashing lights, flashing teeth and flashing sales commercials which can substitute for true worship and togetherness.  I'm especially excited that the worship leader in our church loves this song because it is based on an amazing devotional poem by Robert Murray McCheyne.

McCheyne was younger than Matt Redman when he died and (I'm sure Matt wouldn't mind me remarking) made an even bigger impact in the terms of his day, especially in Dundee.  Like any devotional poem, not every verse should be sung.  In this poem - which is McCheyne's imagining of what he'd be grateful for when he reached glory - the second verse was included in only a few hymnbooks.  Unsurprisingly Matt (if he knew it existed) left it out of his consideration:

1. When this passing world is done,

When has sunk yon glaring sun,

When we stand with Christ in glory,

Looking o’er life’s finished story,

Then, Lord, shall I fully know—

Not till then—how much I owe.

2. When I hear the wicked call,

On the rocks and hills to fall,

When I see them start and shrink

On the fiery deluge brink,

Then, Lord, shall I fully know—

Not till then—how much I owe.

3.When I stand before the throne,

Dressed in beauty not my own,

When I see Thee as Thou art,

Love Thee with unsinning heart,

Then Lord, shall I fully know—

Not till then—how much I owe.

[continues]

There are three possible reasons to leave verse 2 out of hymnic consideration.  

The fact of hell.  That's enough for some, perhaps.  Yet if we only sing about spiritual positives we neuter those positives to an extent - verses 1 & 3 seem more worshipful to me in the light of this verse in between them.

The description of hell.  It is true that this is plucked straight from the church's tradition of horrors, though also from the words of the Lord Jesus . . .  Hell being eternal separation from God means that even the grimmest descriptors - far from exaggerating it - inevitably underplay what hell is really like.

The description of the saved.  This seems to me to be the best reason to leave the verse out.  Much as I admire McCheyne it is hard to see much Biblical justification (there is a little at a stretch) for a heavenly audience thankfully feasting on the spectacle of the lost on the brink of judgment.  I suppose that on the cross Jesus could have said to the repentant thief, referencing the unrepentant one, "You and I will be fine - wait 'til you see what happens to him".  But instead Jesus united the repentant thief to himself in paradise and the other was silently lost (as he shouted his insults) to the eternal salvation story.

If you have a life-saving hospital treatment you do not need to visit the mortuary to be any more knowledgeably grateful.

It's Missing 1. A Lost Peace

Missing things are often interesting.

Take jigsaw puzzles.  If it has a thousand pieces and, on using all that are available, one is missing then that is the one that gains all your attention.

To me this works in other things.  Not least hymns.  How many times, for example, have churchgoers sung the Wesley hymn And can it be and assumed (because it flows) that it is intact?  Well it isn't.

Including a little of the traditional verses four and then the final verse, here is the original verse 5:

. . . My chains fell off, my heart was free,

I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

Still the small inward voice I hear,

That whispers all my sins forgiven;

Still the atoning blood is near,

That quenched the wrath of hostile Heaven.

I feel the life His wounds impart;

I feel the Saviour in my heart.

No condemnation now I dread;

Jesus, and all in Him, is mine . . .

For any worship leader or organist the advantages of removing this verse are obvious.  Its personal, reflective words would rudely interrupt the grand musical transition from the victorious end of verse 4 to the equally victorious beginning of the final verse.  The musician has an ally in many a theologian.  What's all this about hostile Heaven?  How could a cuddly god be hostile toward sin?  If god loves us she/he must at least love in a small way all the stuff we do - she/he could never inhabit a hostility?  Why, we'd have to put her/him on a register if she/he wasn't careful!

But then again.  What if God really hates sin?  What if having rose up and followed thee I begin to share his loathing of it.  Then I do not just need a tuba stop or drum roll of confidence - I need a whisper.  A whisper that God and I can walk together even though he hates sin and I still at times like it rather too much.

A Thought on National Poetry Day

In case you missed this . . .

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p034nv37

Cor! Um, quorum?

Quorum, noun: The minimum number of members of an assembly or society that must be present at any of its meetings to make the proceedings of that meeting valid.

Bishops and Popes probably have many things to think about.  What they probably never think about is a quorum.  The House of Commons (Parliament in the UK) has a quorum but neatly does not demand that it needs to be in attendance.  Or at least only for a vote.

From time to time as a Baptist Pastor quorums have occupied my thoughts because in our congregational way of running church we have to have them for our 'governing body of the church of Christ on earth' to be in existence.

I could occupy webspace with mildly amusing anecdotes about desperate efforts to cross the line over the years, but fortunately last evening our church achieved an evening so bizarre that I now only have to remember this one anecdote to keep any listener in bemused interest.  (Warning: you are unlikely to understand what follows on first reading [you may never understand it])

The story goes like this:

• 8:00pm  Not at all for the first time in my experience I am chairing a meeting that is not quorate at the start time.  We wait.

• 8:10pm  We're (I'm) getting bored.  We start anyway.  This is not the planned meeting [hereafter the Agenda Meeting] but an Informal Meeting that can still listen and talk but can't do the stuff like minutes and decisions.  We are one person short of a quorum.

• 8:20pm  Lady A arrives! We have a quorum!  We start the Agenda Meeting.

• 8:40pm  Man A has to go home.  We no longer have a quorum.  We start another Informal Meeting because we think there is one more latecomer who has said he will try to be there by 9:00pm.

• 9:00pm  Man B arrives!  We have a quorum again.  We resume the Agenda Meeting.

• 9:20pm  Lady B suddenly announces she needs to leave.  The meeting is no longer quorate, never to be quorate again.  We have a third Informal Meeting to round off the evening.

• 9:35pm We end.  Though something meetingy had ended in me long before . . .

Wedding Words

Yesterday we went to a wedding.  Thanks Matt and Martha!!

A friend said to us today, "Was it a Wedding you went to or was it an Anniversary?".  I understood their point: Usually the only time people our age go to weddingy things it is to take part - or for someone on their second or third attempt.  One of the blessings of Christian ministry is having young people who know you!

What strikes me these days is the radical nature of the words of Christian marriage in our society.  In a way I mourn the loss of social Christianity but in another way I love the thought that the simple words that once resounded every Saturday in every Parish Church now seem more Corbynite-radical than the Government's newly invented Same Sex Marriage idea.

Better than that, although the ideas of prayer and blessing, of hymns and Bible readings seem radical because they are, well, quite religious in a secularised culture the really radical bit isn't religious at all:

to have and to hold

from this day forward;

for better, for worse,

for richer, for poorer,

in sickness and in health,

to love and to cherish,

till death us do part.

When I write isn't religious at all I am both right and wrong.  Such promises as above can be made - are made - by rabid atheists or ruminating agnostics.  However they are dying out with the dying interest in Church weddings.  Sometimes they are not replaced by anything much (in my experience) but a flowery insistence of lifelong dotage or mutual self-fulfilment.  Here's an example:

I am proud to take you as my husband/wife. For all the time we have been together, there has always been the kind of mutual understanding which is only shared when there is true love. You have helped me triumph over challenges presented, encouraged my personal growth and boosted my self-esteem.

You have helped me become the person I am today, and with your help, I will be a better person tomorrow than I was yesterday.

Like the arrival of the Humanist funeral there is a refreshing honesty about these vows.  They more accurately reflect what most people mostly mean.  Perhaps they represent the most that can be really expected without the help of the Lord and the example of Calvary.

Staying Safe

However dirty the child might be parents do need to be careful.

Holiday Pics - No 6 Contentment

The weather was good apart from one day.  That's the kind of thing we all say about a British vacation (except the one may be up to seven!).  Cornwall, once a poor faraway mining and fishing area, is now quite a slick kind of place and it doesn't take an expert to work out that much of the money in Cornwall has been gained elsewhere and brought here as to nature's playground for some fun in old age or earlier.

I wonder whether this makes for more contented people though?  Or were the miners that crowded the Methodist chapels to sing their praise to God as happy in their limited expanses as the people popping down in the Porsche to the Michelin starred seafood restaurant?  I cannot say.

I know this cow was content though.  Just some grass will do.  I think I'll try and learn a lesson from the cow.

Holiday Pics - No 5 Beware Pedestrians

So there in the middle of Falmouth is the narrow shopping street which, fortunately, is pedestrian only.  Except than when you walk down it you have to stay on the sidewalk because so many vehicles are flouting the rules.  Or so you'd believe.  There are buses and vans and cars and motorbikes - often in a line.  It is the least pedestrian-friendly pedestrian only street that I know.

At the end of the street is this sign.  When I read the sign I understood my several years of quiet fury at the hoards of drivers invading the pedestrian space.  They aren't.

Access to off-street parking at any time renders the whole point of a pedestrian street meaningless - after all a thousand cars an hour could head down the street to see if there is a space in a quayside car park.  And they do.  So do the motorbikes (with more hope of a space).  The buses are allowed too.  And taxis.  And for all but five hours vehicles to load.  

It struck me, looking at the sign, that this is exactly the way a person, a family, a nation, creeps into the chaos of rebellion against God:  an exception here, another here, some excuses over there and a permissiveness in a few things too.  Before you know it the semblance of God's ways have become obliterated even though there are signs - perhaps a church spire, or a personal self-identity that say there is faith here.

The exceptions we take to God's plan destroy our ability to enjoy God's plan - which was always the best.  

We look forward to the upcoming further deregulation of Sunday trading and the first smatterings of euthanasia.

Holiday Pics - No 4 Open and Closed

Leaving Malta (previous 3 pics) behind, most of our holiday was in Cornwall, England.  We retraced our steps to the picture postcard fishing village of Polperro where we saw this sign.  I thought it was quite an optimistic use of the word daily in the circumstances described.

Like daily devotions for some of us all of the time and all of us (perhaps) some of the time.  "I pray  and read my Bible every day (except when I don't)"!

Holiday Pics - No 3 Thirstless

By inspiration of my wife I offered this chap some water on a hot day in the Grandmaster's Palace in Valetta.  You could hardly have a grander place!  You could hardly have anything more welcoming than some water on what was a very hot day.  But he didn't drink any: there was grandeur,  me, real refreshment but, in his case, no life.

Sometimes when, in the glories of worship we share the life of God in his Word we offer real refreshment in the grandest of spiritual palaces.  But there is not always drinking.

Holiday Pics - No 2 The Old Country

The weather isn't very British; the shrubs aren't very British; but what's that?  Nothing could be more British than a red telephone box!

I saw this one in Malta and there were plenty of others there - here's two . . .

Of course we still see them in Britain.  Occasionally.  They are strategically left for tourists to take pictures of them, or rather of themselves beside them.

Perhaps it is a strange thing that places that in other ways have gladly shed their connections to Britain have kept connections with things that Britain has itself abandoned.  If it isn't the telephone boxes it is a random London red double-decker of a kind almost untraceable in London today.

It illustrates how differently we choose to keep rooted or at least referenced.  In London we don't keep red telephone boxes or open back buses, in former connected countries they don't keep the Queen's head on stamps and currency.

In church worship you are more likely to sing an old evangelical hymn during a High Mass or prior to a liberal Bible-denying sermon in a church that kept the hymnbook but gave up trust in the Bible than you are to sing such a hymn in churches that have kept their simple trust in the Bible but given up the hymnbook.

Holiday Pics - No 1 Peace and War

Friends post lovely holiday pictures on Facebook.  Except that about this time in August it is hard to look at another 32 pictures from wherever having seen 932 already!  I virtuously posted only five.  So far.  On this blog I've decided to post some different ones that I can write about.

This picture comes from Malta.  I think it is fairly idyllic though on the wall to the right is a solemn reminder of one of the many great conflicts that the island has been involved in - in the case of the War Rooms here the Second World War.

With a bit of preacher's squeeze-a-meaning there is a lesson here about the transitory nature of this world's idylls.  But I didn't need that.  The point about this picture is that - like all photographs - it is silent.  As no people, animals or vehicles can be seen it even lacks the implied sound that many photos contain.  This was not, however, a silent scene at all.

It was a very hot afternoon. Mad dogs and Englishmen (let the reader decide which I am) went out in the midday sun, locals stayed indoors - as here.  Stayed indoors but did not stay quiet.  At the moment I took this photo two women were having the most ear-splitting row in the building at the top of the stairs.  I mean the sort of row that one half expected to end in a scream with someone being pushed over a balcony.

 

Sunshine doesn't reach the human heart, though it can greatly affect our skein.

Just Looking

The story is told of a man on his hands and knees under a street light looking for something.

Along came an Officer of the Law who was concerned with the man's behaviour so late at night.

"Have you lost something, sir?"

"My wallet, officer", drawled the man who was evidently somewhat the worse for drink.

"Do you remember when you last had it?", asked the policeman.

"Yes I think so.  I think I dropped it back there round the corner."

"Then if you don't mind me asking", continued the officer,"why are you looking for it on the pavement here?"

"There's a light here," replied the man. "Back there I couldn't see where I was looking".

It may be a joke, but I feel sure that something like this explains several things.  It explains why apparently normalised people go after messengers of disaster or death - into trafficking, into terrorism and the like.  That seems to them to be the light and they head there looking for something.

It also explains the difficulty the church often faces when it is dark even though it holds the answer.  Sometimes the light goes out because people become as in a private club or family and evangelism loses its meaning for them; sometimes the light goes out because people are too preoccupied with things other than light-giving; sometimes the light is lost in a compromised faith that admits immorality, dissension or unbelief; sometimes the doors of the church building are just mostly shut (and the lights literally out!).

If no light is shone on what needs to be found, it is strangely likely that people will head for any light even if what needs to be found is not there.

Stop!

It's that time of year when things stop.  For those who work on Summer Camps, Conferences and Clubs this is farcically not true but in the general sense many things that happen over forty plus weeks of the year don't happen for five or six about now.

Lest this induce the activist Christian guilt (it doesn't take much) let us be heartened by this paragraph from the old Rule of the Society of St John regarding the monastic ministry of hospitality for which they were so famous:

If we let our life as a brotherhood be overwhelmed by the claims of the guests we could endanger the resources by which we serve them . . . there shall be interludes during the year when guests are not normally received.

Hearing

Not too much attention is given by Christians to the meaning of hearing.

Even as I write that, I realise I must immediately disown all reference to Church microphones and induction loops that plague the peaceableness of every congregation's relationships.  (It seems clear to me why angels in heaven use trumpets and God a very loud voice life the sound of many waters - nowhere could be free of sin that had electronic sound reproduction!).

The hearing I refer to is that with which the Lord Jesus ends many parables -  he that hath ears to hear let him hear.  Lest we take that turn of phrase to mean that everyone will hear Jesus also indicates rather the opposite, quoting the old prophet - ears have they but they hear not.

Serving God in a vast city where, nonetheless, many do not hear I have been thinking about this.  Clearly we who know Christ have to be out there and the past year has seen our church do that on many occasions (but nowhere near as many as the Jehovah's Witnesses locally, let's admit).  There is a telling to be done.

But there is also hearing.  

The picture above is a quotation from John Wesley.  It stands by one of his great outdoor theatres of preaching where thousands heard.  We envy him.  Then we beat ourselves up for falling so far short.  But we might miss what he says - to declare unto all that are willing to hear.  Wesley was a great evangelist partly because he had a great hearing audience.  A Christian in Saudi Arabia or North Korea has very few hearers (except perhaps by media).  A Christian in parts of Africa or South America may quickly amass many.  Jesus did both, with Galilean audiences of thousands and disgruntled Jerusalem Temple or Nazareth sceptics who wouldn't accept a word he said.  Hence his point.

The willingness to hear is not the work so much of the evangelist as the community.  Or more properly of the Holy Spirit who graciously unplugs ears sometimes.