Great (Hymn) One Liners 6. To the loveless

 Recently we sang this line at Communion:

Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be

Samuel Crossman's hymn, one of the first written in the English language, is full of poignant phrases of which this is perhaps the most profound.  A threefold use of love which in summary describes the operation of the love of God on lost humanity.

Love is used in many ways in the lives of people and via the media, but never is it so wisely located as it is here.

Thanksgiving Wisdom 3. God's Love

As tens of millions have travelled in the United States to celebrate Thanksgiving with their families, it is a reminder of how much love there is in families.  Isn't it?

Maybe, maybe not.  

The public health officials travelling to gather in mixed ages from different States may just be the most dangerous thing a group can do towards each other mid-pandemic.  Endangering each other is not love.  And here lies an example of the problem with love. 

We define our own love.  And we will not be told what love really is by anyone else.  Including God.

John Robinson, the Pastor of the Pilgrim Fathers, was wise enough to see that self-defining love is true of just one being - God.  He wrote:

God loveth himself first and most as the chiefest good

Jesus made the same point in the prayer to His Father in John chapter 17.  

“Father, I want those you have given me to be with me where I am, and to see my glory, the glory you have given me because you loved me before the creation of the world.  

God lived, love lived, before any human love.  And any human love is to be defined by God, not human beings.  And this offends us very much, but that doesn't change its truth.

Love in the creature ever presupposeth some good, true or apparent, in the thing loved, by which that affection of union is drawn.

Our love is a victim of our unreliable attraction to things and people, sometimes worthy, sometimes pleasant, sometimes dodgy, sometimes criminal. But our love reaches out to what attracts us.  But God?

But the love of God, to the contrary, causeth all good to be produced in the creature.

His love gives the goodness rather than seeking it out.  Jesus came to seek the lost, the sick, the unlovely, the dead, the criminal, the leper.

Like all Western Countries - but bigger and better of course - the United States has a culture of self-defining love. Holywood has helped it along fabulously.  Yet 400 years ago those pilgrims were fed by their Pastor a view of love which would draw out holiness rather than Holywood.  And may that wisdom not disappear from either side of the Atlantic completely.

The day of love

It is terribly bad luck that Lent begins on Valentines Day.  It is the death knell to every abstemious vow that involved chocolate and probably several other things that are perhaps best not speculated about . . .

Ash Wednesday seems a dive of a day by comparison with its romantic counterpart.  Who'd ever give an Ash Wednesday Card?

Try this.

It's not going to revive the flagging High Street retail sector, is it?

Yet of course the two days are linked by more than a calendar coincidence.  They are linked by love.  The Valentine love that overwhelms but can never last and the other a Calvary love that died but can never die.

Barsanuphius

I'm not the greatest authority on Saints Days but today being that of Barsanuphius I thought he deserved some attention. In fact attention was exactly what he didn't have as he disappeared for 50 years as a hermit and communicated by correspondence only. That has a certain appeal as a lifestyle when faced with an unsympathetic culture, but he also wrote many things that offered wisdom to those more engaged with the world than he . . .

Do not demand love from your neighbour, because you will suffer if you don’t receive it; but better still, you indicate your love toward your neighbour and you will settle down. In this way, you will lead your neighbour toward love.

Don’t exchange your love toward your neighbour for some type of object, because in having love toward your neighbour, you acquire within yourself Him who is most precious in the whole world.

Forsake the petty so as to acquire the great; spurn the excessive and everything meaningless so as to acquire the valuable.

Shelter the sinner if it brings you no harm. Through this you will encourage him toward repentance and reform — and attract the Lord’s mercy to yourself. With a kind word and all possible means, fortify the infirm and the sorrowful and that Right Arm that controls everything, will also support you. With prayers and sorrow of your heart, share your lot with the aggrieved and the source of God’s mercy will open to your entreaties.

Do not distinguish the worthy from the unworthy. Let everyone be equal to you for good deeds, so that you may be able to also attract the unworthy toward goodness, because through outside acts, the soul quickly learns to be reverent before God.

Do not annoy or hate anyone – neither for faith, nor for his evil deeds… If you want to convert someone to truth, then grieve over him, with tears and love say a word or two to him, but do not burst out in anger, and may he not see any sign of hatred on your part, because love is not able to hate, or become irritated, or reproach anyone with passion…

Tallulah

This week we read the great story of the missing tortoise, a story with a good deal more to teach about life.

Tallulah the tortoise went on a six month journey - amounting to 350 yards - from her Oxford home to a nearby school.  On Homelessness Sunday we ask - when was she homeless?

One answer is never - she carries her home with her!  But this wasn't quite as good as it seemed because she had become less than fully fit without the care of her owners.

Another answer is that she became homeless the moment she left the garden via a fox hole.  Though it is difficult to argue that if she had returned through the hole the next day.  It would have been a day trip rather than homelessness.

A third answer is that she became homeless at the point when her owners gave up looking for her.  This seems close to the truth though the microchip they had given her meant that even after they had stopped looking, she was capable of being returned home as she shortly will be.

Homelessness seems to me to be something about having no-one looking out for you - and no microchip.  You may have a very nice house and car and fine life or none of these things.  But you do not have a home.

It is the inestimable privilege of the child of God that, whether they have gone through an unfortunate fox hole or not, they always have a home.  Someone always has them on His heart.

The Abode of Love

Valentine's Day brings us to but one subject - love. 

London has an endless supply of weirdness for those who have a mind for such things. On Valentine's Day I can think of no more deserving place to ponder than the Georgian Orthodox Cathedral whose vast steeple overlooks Clapton Common, these days surrounded by synagogues of the Stamford Hill Jewish community.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, this was not always a Georgian Orthodox Cathedral.  Just one look at it tells you it was formerly a Church of England parish church (or just possibly a Presbyterian, Congregational, Methodist or less likely Baptist imitation of one).

Wrong.

Notwithstanding its appearance, this building has never been any of those kind of churches and has written into its former trust that it can never be used by the Church of England or the Salvation Army.  In the early 21st Century it passes for just another old religious building, but at the end of the 19th century it was, to put it mildly, the centre of attention.

This 'Ark of the Covenant' as it was called, was the London location of the Agapemonites.  Together with a vast communal estate in Somerset and various minor outposts in Britain and Europe it represented the influence of an End-Time preacher who centred his followers on the Song of Solomon.  Mr Prince's followers included several wealthy Victorian merchants and several more Victorian single and separated women. 

Like countless before, contemporary with and following his day, Mr Prince gathered a following of those who knew they would not die for they were the last generation.  As it was to turn out they did die and so did he, but that was just the start: into his shoes had stepped the ample figure of Mr Smyth-Pigott, formerly of the Anglicans and Salvation Army (note above) under whose charismatic auspices this phenomenal building was erected.  And later besieged by rioters.

The Abode of Love (the community) and this building (the Ark of the Covenant) gave the Victorian press plenty of juicy speculative material of preachers with multiple wives (spiritual brides) and various goings on imagined.  Well, not entirely imagined because a spiritual bride fell pregnant . . .

As the Church of England worries itself sick about same sex marriage it might look a little closely at a building from which it is banned in Upper Clapton and figure that even a church with a high steeple is not enough to give spiritual dignity to an entity that has misunderstood the kind of love the church should really be talking about to the world.

Good Friday

Thursdays with Jesus

A common tradition for Maundy Thursday in several parts of the world is to visit seven or fourteen churches on a pilgrimage, perhaps with fasting.

Even more (and increasingly) common is the practice of foot-washing.  This follows the mandate of our Lord to Love one another and his washing of his disciples' feet (recorded in John chapter 13).

In our Church we share Communion, our best symbolic expression of fellowship-love.

The day called Thursday has two Christian celebrations.  Some years of course it might be Christmas Day too but never mind that.  These two are about as opposite as can be imagined and every bit the equal of Good Friday and Easter Day in contrast.

This first Thursday - Maundy - is about intimacy; and the ominous shadow of descending into death.  The other Thursday is Ascension Day.  It is about parting; and about glorious ascension into heaven.

Yet things are, typically, not what they seem.

The ascension is about greater intimacy.  In heaven the glorified Christ intercedes for us. In the young Michael Bruce's memorable lines,

Though now ascended up on high,
he bends on earth a brother's eye;
partaker of the human name,
he knows the frailty of our frame.

Our fellow-sufferer yet retains
a fellow feeling of our pains;
and still remembers in the skies
his tears, his agonies and cries.

In every pang that rends the heart
the Man of Sorrows had a part;
he sympathises with our grief,
and to the sufferer sends relief.

The gift of the Holy Spirit, the fruit of Jesus's ascension, makes the intimacy of Maundy look decidedly minor - for God inhabits us now!  Those feet are part of His temple, not just his cleaning schedule.

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.

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.

In Circles

There is on ancient Celtic poem which reads;

He drew a ring which shut me out

Heretic, rebel, things to flout.

But Love and I had wit to win.

We drew a circle that took him in.

I might be misinterpreting the signs of the times here, but I think that as we move further into the 21st Century and the Information Age we are developing a new taste for drawing circles that shut people out.  It is true that in this country at present we cannot publicly lynch people but we can rapidly turn people into Public Enemy Number One.

That's been difficult in the past week with Jimmy Savile and Jihadi John who cannot both have top/bottom spot at once.  The one being dead and the other distant attention has turned to anybody who may have been in their 'circle'.  So cameras are camped outside a random kind of house in London where Jihadi John once lived and Stoke Mandeville Hospital as if to capture the entrails of guilt that might not have been gathered up with their departure.

To understand Jesus we have to understand that he became as despised and rejected as this.  The circle was drawn with him outside, and by the super-righteous authorities and, eventually, the democratic shout of the crowd.  It is not comfortable.

Yet what is more amazing is the way that God draws circles.  Without any touch of irony or hypocrisy God could comfortably and justifiably draw a circle of holiness that leaves not just Mr Savile and JJ outside but their fellow-humans one and all too.  Heaven had never had a human in it, let alone a former sinful being, and had been rocking along fine.

The story of Easter is that He drew a Circle of Love that included humans - sinful ones - in.

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.

Cats and Dogs

A king can see a cat but a cat can never see a king.

This famous saying refers to the issue of perception: the cat sees a king but not as a king, the king sees the cat as a cat.

Dogs don't see kings either though they have no proverbial saying to say so.  I heard a preacher refer to his dog as a ministering angel.  He had been in a time of quite deep despair in which nobody he felt understood him.  Except his dog.  It, he said, looked at him and ministered to him as others couldn't.

Preachers think too hard sometimes.  Instead of seeing the proverb in the dog he saw an angel there.  The despairer saw the dog but the dog did not see the despairer. 

But this is not the good news.  The good news is that the One who loves us best sees us the most clearly!  God demonstrates his love for us in this, that while we were sinners Christ died for us.  He knows me and he loves me.

Father

Last Weekend it was sunshine, seaside and reflecting on the Love of God.  I guess any made-for-Christian-TV commercially put-together set of Bible texts has its limitations but I think this video captures something important about the nature of God which religion often misrepresents.