Great (Hymn) One Liners 8. In man for Man

A vast array of memorable lines are on offer for Good Friday.  I am going for a line that, frankly, most people singing it probably do not grasp (here I am judging others by my own weaknesses, it is true).

The double agony in man, for Man. should undergo.

The line comes from 'Praise to the holiest in the height' by the Victorian Anglican-turned-Roman Catholic John Henry Newman.  The line describes the extent of the generous love of God in Jesus who died for us.  

The whole hymn is deep and dense, but here Newman uses the simplest of words - in man for Man - to describe the humiliation of God becoming human (Agony Number One) in order to save humans by his death (Agony Number Two).

Did you see what happened there? I took a long and complex sentence - Newman took four words totaling eleven letters. 

These agonies are the agonies of this day, and our good salvation.

(To see the whole series click on the hymnline tag)

Good News in a Pandemic 4. Creation

There is no doubt that Genesis reveals human beings as the crown of creation. 'So God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.' [Genesis 1:27]

Time and again, though, the Bible demonstrates that they are not the totality of creation.  Take, for example, these verses from Psalm 104:

8 

The mountains rose, the valleys sank down

    to the place that you appointed for them.

9 

You set a boundary that they may not pass,

    so that they might not again cover the earth.

10 

You make springs gush forth in the valleys;

    they flow between the hills;

11 

they give drink to every beast of the field;

    the wild donkeys quench their thirst.

12 

Beside them the birds of the heavens dwell;

    they sing among the branches.

13 

From your lofty abode you water the mountains;

    the earth is satisfied with the fruit of your work.

14 

You cause the grass to grow for the livestock

    and plants for man to cultivate,

that he may bring forth food from the earth 

and wine to gladden the heart of man,

15 

    

oil to make his face shine

    and bread to strengthen man's heart.

16 

The trees of the Lord are watered abundantly,

    the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.

17 

In them the birds build their nests;

    the stork has her home in the fir trees.

18 

The high mountains are for the wild goats;

    the rocks are a refuge for the rock badgers.

The Lord Jesus references creation many times; most starkly on Palm Sunday when he tells the critics of praising children in Jerusalem that if they silence the children the very stones on the hillsides will begin praising instead.

So, a pandemic certainly appears to mute human praise on earth.  Literally, because we cannot meet to sing and speak our praise - but perhaps also psychologically because we are emotionally and mentally reduced by the whole experience of lockdown and its attendant life inputs.

Yet we are but a part of creation.  

And the rest of it seems to be having a much better time!

The Lord may weep with us but He has plenty of reason to smile with many of the creatures and plants he has also made as the streets clear, the air clears and nature finds her voice.

Glorious Ruins

I've been sorting through my ridiculously large collection of photographs, a product of the digital age's invitation to wastefulness.  Though I have a moderate interest in history it is hardly my obsession and so I am amazed to find how many photographs I have that look something like this . . .

It is a picture among many pictures that I have of ruins. 

In my defence, I have rarely found myself alone as I have stood seeking to get the corner of the broken buttress or the top of the long-empty window frame in my composition.  Ruins, and Britain has a seemingly biased love for them, are somehow glorious.  So much so that, for example, I am not as sure I would have taken this picture of the significant but unpretentious abbey if it were still complete.

Glorious ruins was the picturesque phrase coined by Francis Schaeffer to describe humanity in this fallen world.  I think that is very good.  The vestiges of greatness are there.  Yet history cruelly draws our gaze to horrific wonders; isolated or even systemic stories of infanticide, a fate only narrowly escaped by the infant Lord of Glory in Herod's jurisdiction.  There is no human aspect that does not show brokenness as well as beauty, where the glory is the glory of ruins.

It is the peculiar work of God that makes humanity's ugly story somehow glorious.  Not so that we will see our belonging in the ruins but that we may see a portent of our undeserved glory there. 

I thank Thee, Lord, that here our souls

Though amply blessed,

Can never find, although they seek

A perfect rest;

Nor ever shall, until they lean

On Jesus’ breast.

Known unto God

Earlier this year I stood thoughtfully and thankfully by this grave in Belgium - of a First World War soldier from the county in which, historically speaking, I now live.

Today we reflected on the large number of World War 1 soldiers whose memorial is either a name on a vast monument (because their body was never found in an identifiable form) or who, in the form of human remains, were buried without their name being discovered.

Walking around the battlefield cemeteries this sight is not a rare thing.  At Tyne Cot, the largest (but certainly not the only) British Empire cemetery for the Ypres Salient there are far in excess of 10,000 graves and over 35,000 names on the monument.

Yet on every anonymous grave - 'An Unknown Soldier of the Great War' - there is added at the bottom - KNOWN UNTO GOD.  No life, whether snatched in the womb, pulverised on the battlefield or expended in recklessly vain attempts to migrate to a better world is unknown to God.

Remembrance Day demands that we seek to afford human lives the dignity that they are owed as creatures of a Creator rather than as accidents of nature.

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.

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.

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.

Too Late

London has many leftovers from World War II and only this year more than one unexploded bombs have been discovered in the course of building work.  

London is also full of mysteries and many books have been written about them.  These include tunnels nobody has ever used, an underground station that was built but never opened, a railway station only for funeral trains and so on.

Here's a picture of Putney Bridge Station.  Unremarkable one may think, as a southbound train heads off across the Thames.

But wait a minute.

Isn't that a bunker to defend the station?

This seems doomed to remain a permanent mystery.  A cursory glance at a London map will confirm that if the storm-troopers of the Third Reich had reached Putney Bridge there was not a lot of London left to defend (and certainly the District line might as well have been written off).

We live in a culture that has many defences like this.  We jealously protect little children having surrendered any serious attempt to similarly defend teenagers who are left to go in whatever direction things take them.  We protect those teenagers from the worst abuses only to leave them from the age of 18 to live life with every vice and no guidance at all.  We provide universal healthcare to bring us safely to old age whereupon we become unwanted, unloved and very expendable.

Most of all, we have human rights but no idea why it matters that we are human.

All in all, it is not only Putney Bridge Station that has inexplicably strong defences in the wrong place.

Holocaust

I was struck by the crafted words of a journalist reporting on today's commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz:  Those who survived Auschwitz lived through one of the 20th Century's worst acts of hatred and inhumanity.

 

In a world where hype so often hides the truth here is the truth: one of one century's worst.

 

In fact the importance of marking today in our thoughts is not because it was unthinkably bad but because the inhumanity of the Nazis toward the Jews and others is repeatable.  The industrial, secret and targeted scale of it sets it apart, but only in degree.  I witnessed the fears that surround this still in one of my earlier blogs.

Protection for Frankfurt's Synagogue - today

We call it inhumanity because we do not want to think of it as human.  But it is absolutely human.  What other created species sets about its own in such a way?  Certainly none with any moderately developed intelligence.

I like the optimism in the word inhumanity.  I like it but I'm not sure I entirely believe it.  Humanity's best hope lies, I think, in the Man from Heaven.

Trebah

As August comes to its end its most pleasantly memorable day for us was certainly the one spent at Trebah Gardens.  It was one of those perfect days at a perfect place that it is quite possible to get through years - or the whole - of life and never have (especially taking holidays in England!).

 

 

Bathed in glorious summer sunshine, visitors end their walk through the gardens at a private beach area, complete with ice cream of course.  It was almost too hot to sit there but we managed it  . . .

 

 

If only.

If only we could hold these moments as our constant way of life.

 

Poignantly, however, Trebah bears its own testimony to the simple reality that life is not a bed of hydrangeas.  There by the beach is a picture of another year - 70 years ago - at the same spot.

 

 

On our summer idyll came the reminder that as needs must on D-Day this spot had been found to be very suited to launching part of a military invasion.  The walk that we had just done had been the last peaceful walk that many of those soldiers did before losing their lives in Northern France.  It is the stark story of human life amidst creation's beauty.

Mandela

It is a rare thing for quite so many people to be honouring one human being in his death as are now lining up to pay tribute to Nelson Mandela.  It is easy to be cynical about this when no politician can afford to be other than fulsome in their tribute of the man.  If anything resembling this honour had been afforded him in his imprisonment he would have been released far more quickly.  In other political times equally heroic people have passed unnoticed into oblivion.

 

On the other hand, his story of forgiveness and reconciliation (not tolerance, as some have tried to suggest - don't western politicians love that word?) is a heart-warming and affirming one to celebrate and to imitate.  This is humanity at its better end.  When we see it cheered it cheers us all.

 

Humanity at its most humane is an awesome creation.  It is easy to focus on the times when the animal world seems to hold higher virtues and standards - and frankly in South Africa that has probably been sometimes true.  However, the image of God has vestiges enough in the human frame that we see glimpsed many lights in a dark landscape and, like the Christmas lights in December, they warm our hearts.  We pray for our leaders and so now we thank God for what he showed us in Nelson Mandella who will remain a lasting hero for so many of us.  Admittedly that is partly because he was outstanding for doing so often the right thing after suffering the wrong thing.  How nice it would be if that was normal instead of shockingly good.

 

I thought I'd wait until the third day to write about Nelson Mandela.

I think he is a true hero of humanity.  But on this third day as we await his funeral and know that what the apartheid regime couldn't defeat death has, I would not want anyone to mistake who is humanity's only truly victorious hero.

And he's living today and is still forgiving and reconciling human beings day by day.



Dave and Nick

Vote for change, we're always told.

But you don't have to vote for change because change happens whether we like it or not.  Now into the shoes (or perhaps mules or spats) previously worn by First Lords of the Treasury and/or Prime Ministers named His Grace the 1st Duke of Newcastle, His Grace William Cavendish-Bentinck, Henry Temple The Viscount Palmerston and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman arrive Dave and Nick.

It reminds me of the Church Membership List with which I was confronted on leaving training college on which not a single first name appeared.  If someone said that she was Elsie I simply had to best guess which of the Mrs or Miss Es she was, a process vexed with potential disaster.  Mr D. Cameron, Mr N. Clegg.

Now I have bizarre discussions about Ann, Ben, Carol or Darren before finding out later that the other party was talking about a different Darren, Carol, Ben or Ann.  Things have changed completely, yet in that peculiarly human way that sees the Garden of Eden replicated by people's Internet behaviour, nothing has changed at all.  The first name issue has become the last name issue! 

Dave and Nick, take note. 

Norway

There are plenty of reasons for the British to be envious of the Norwegians. The kind of landscapes that we travel to the corners of our island to see are found everywhere in Norway. When it comes to Oslo, the capital city, you have on the face of it an orderly, clean city typical of Scandinavia yet with the added attraction that it is based in a pretty fjord of its own. So the view from one side of the City square (think Trafalgar Square in London perhaps) is this:

That it is a fantastic land is not very surprising because Norway is also one of the richest countries in the world, courtesy of oil wealth and a sensible attitude to saving it. You should probably stop reading now if you are in the USA or especially the UK - Norway has a national debt of (wait for it) nil. That is, it doesn't have a national debt.

And it gets better (worse if you're looking from the UK): Norway also has - and expects to continue to have even this year - a budget surplus of 11%. Got that? It takes in 11 % more money than it needs as a nation and has no debt. Americans and Britons alike will never live to see the day when that is true of their nations. Indeed the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund is one of the world's largest - possibly second largest - and yet the nation has less than 5 million people.

So what interested me most about my recent visit to Norway, apart from trying to keep my eyes from watering at the prices of everything, was that there is another story. Being on Sabbatical, I was not there to ferry across fjords, even if I could afford it. Rather, it was to taste the Christian ministries and their settings.

And out of those visits came these kind of pictures. One taken from the doorstep of an Oslo Church after the man who had been there for me had left for his next appointment.

Another taken from round the corner of a Baptist Church in as seedy a city street as you would find anywhere.

They won't make it on to the 'Visit Norway' website. But, if you imagine the scenes and add in some menacing groups of people hanging around (whose pictures I felt would best not be taken!) you will be reassured that humanity can make a mess of things in the face of even the greatest natural and national advantages.

And these were the places that Christ's people were ministering. Even if the sordid streets were a shock, that God's people were there serving was not a surprise!

Emma

In his well-researched account of Charles Darwin's faith (or increasing lack of faith) Nick Spencer pulls out a fascinating sentence from a letter written to Charles by his wife-to-be Emma.

May not the habit in scientific pursuits of believing nothing till it is proved, influence your mind too much in other things which cannot be proved in the same way, and which if true are likely to be above our comprehension.

As Easter approaches it seems to state the obvious that if we apply only reason and experiment we will never discover the wonder of the Easter message. Studying biological processes reveals only that dead means dead. No amount of evolutionary speculation can anticipate the human DNA becoming God-in-flesh. Consequently, that God incarnate died for my sins and came back to life is, frankly, unprojectable from the laboratory.


Walking past or standing at a place of burial I don't need a scientific experiment to tell me that the odds are stacked against a return to bodily life. So, to return to Emma's wise warning to her future husband, we are without hope if there is nowhere we can look above the laboratory.

On my travels in Scandinavia I was at first bewildered by several pews in the style above. It looked more like an intimate railway carriage than a church seating plan! All became clear when I attended a service in such a church. The pulpit was halfway along the side wall. Thus the pews in the front section had their back to the pulpit. When later in the liturgy the preacher entered the pulpit to preach, the half of the congregation in the front pews turn round by moving to sit on the opposite pew while the sermon is preached, thus facing the pulpit after all!

Though Emma Darwin was hardly an orthodox believer, she at least perceived the need to turn round to understand some things that will only be revealed by a higher Word. Easter week is supremely a time to stop facing the way I came into this world, and face the way that listens to what God's word is wonderfully revealing.