Psalm 102

St Andrew's Day (today) is Scotland's national day because of alleged stories of ancient saint's relics being taken to and enshrined there.  Thankfully, Scotland has given the world higher spiritual input than this.  Not least, psalm singing.

So,  

• Is it imaginable that God could ever be praised without a band or an organ?  And if so, how poor would that be? Well, that might work actually always bearing in mind the lack of organs and guitars in first century Galilee.
• Could Psalm 102 possibly be intended for singing? A Psalm perhaps, but all that sense of misery in it - and not even an added chorus bit? But yes, the Psalms are for singing.
• Can groups of people do the singing by themselves?  No choir or lead  vocalist? Apparently so.

1 To this my prayer O listen, LORD!
And let my cry for help reach You.
2 In day of grief hide not Your face.
Your list'ning ear toward me O bend;
The day I call, Your answer send,

3 For all my days go up in smoke,
And like a hearth my bones are burned.
4 Like grass my heart is crushed and dried;
I daily food forgotten leave;
5 My skin and bones together cleave.

With sighs and groans my frame resounds.
6 I'm like a desert pelican,
Or like an owl in ruined wastes.
7 I lie awake, as on the roof
A sparrow stands, alone, aloof.

8 All day my foes their taunts repeat;
Those filled with anger curse my name.
9 I food with tears and ashes mix,
10 For You on me in anger frown;
You raised me up to throw me down.

11 An ev'ning shadow are my days;
Like grass I wither soon away.
12 But You, Jehovah, sit enthroned
Forever; Your memorial
Abides through generations all.

Novemberish

The past day or two have not been heart-warming meteorologically speaking.  November has been in full swing with wind and rain and rain and rain and grey cloud and rain.  The adjectives for November say it all really.  T S Eliot called it sombre November; Robbie Burns wrote of chill November; for Ruskin it is dark; Thomas More labelled it sullen: Walter Scott calls it drear.

Once upon a time, one November day, an event of apparently little relevance happened at Lower Samsell, a place that few people had heard of then and scarcely a soul now either.  That November day was especially drear, dark or whatever other miserable adjective you can think of for one man.  He had been taking a Christian meeting in a farmhouse.  These, however, were times when the government prescribed how each person was to worship and this meeting did not fit the frame.  And so that November Sunday the speaker was arrested and incarcerated in the County gaol.

The gaol, understandably, offered few preaching opportunities.  He might have expected some clemency from the local Justice but his retort whenever asked about whether he had learned his lesson was, "If you release me today, I will preach tomorrow".  So of course he wasn’t released and it was, to all intents and purposes, 12 years that he was inside.

But you and I would never have heard of him if it were not for that dark November day.  For in that gaol, the silenced preacher discovered another ability entirely.  Honing that ability over the long enclosed years eventually gave birth to a book which from that time 450 years ago has never been out of print.  For in that gaol in Bedford, the prisoner preacher John Bunyan wrote Pilgrim’s Progress.  

In his great story, Bunyan’s pilgrim also enters a Novemberish place.  It is called the Valley of the Shadow of Death and the pilgrim is warned by two other men to turn back at its threshold.  But the pilgrim says, this is my way to the desired haven, and launches, sword in hand, into the Valley.  He cannot see its end but he knows that the dark, dreary place is the path to a flowering destiny.  He emerges eventually, and singing,

   

Dangers in darkness, devils, hell, and sin,

Did compass me, while I this vale was in;

Yea, snares, and pits, and traps, and nets did lie

My path about, that worthless, silly I

Might have been catch’d, entangled, and cast down;

But since I live, let Jesus wear the crown."

Big Ben and the Birds

Every Remembrance Sunday at the cenotaph Big Ben is heard.  The remembrancers fall silent as a representation that the guns fell silent on the original Armistice day in 1918.

At the same moment a set of guns are fired by the Royal Horse Artillery and after two minutes the guns fire again to mark its ending.

We do our imitation of this silence (without the guns) in church.  

Silence is quite empty on the face of it.  In church we often imply the value of perhaps praying.  we do not mind that young children can't stay quiet.

There are no children at the cenotaph.  But neither is there quiet (even though David Dimbleby usually says that silence has fallen).

Big Ben is not silent.  After striking the arrival of eleven it faithfully ploughs on eleven times.  Time does not stop for our quietness.  Whether the guns fire on or not time continues to march.  In war human beings seem so big (if they're winning), so small (when they lose).  But time makes every human being small.  For me it is impossible to imagine the cenotaph ceremony without the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh: what I cannot imagine, Time requires me to accept as inevitable.  Even our bloodiest wars are doomed to be dwarfed by the relentless march of Time.

Then there's the birds.  As the artillery gun is fired every year there is the sound of scuttling birds.  Whether anyone notices I do not know.  It reminds us that whatever the immensities of human war, nature in some form, marches on.  Of course war ruins the natural world for a time, but all of us who have stood in normal looking fields or valleys or on normal looking hillsides and tried vainly to imagine that this was once where the battle happened know that Nature, like Time, dwarfs the greatest human conflicts.

How much more true this is of Nature and Time's Creator.

From Mosul with love

London is always full of surprises.

One of our church members was travelling by bus, wearing a Christian symbol.

"Are you a Christian?", a lady asked her.

"Yes I am"

"I am too!  I come from Nineveh, from Mosul, from Iraq.  We must pray.  They have attacked us but we are in London and we are safe now. There are many of us from Iraq and we have a church [in NW London] where we can pray."

You really never know who you may meet in this city.