World Cup Blogs 13: Iceland

I pulled the car up, climbed out and took this photograph.

Of course there are countless mountain passes where one could do such a thing and see rocks and more rocks.  But this was not on a mountain pass.  It was on a flat road through what might be, in most parts of the world, fields, meadows, houses, farmland or woodland.  This is Iceland though, and this is rock, and volcanic rock at that.

That Iceland, with a population similar to a London Borough, should be at the World Cup while the world's four most populous nations are not is itself quite miraculous.  That they have achieved so much not only from a small population but in such a geological and climatic background is almost incredible.

In their opening game Iceland scored and drew with the famed footballing nation of Argentina.  How do they do it?  Perhaps the picture holds a clue.

For looked at quickly and without local insight the sight stretching off into the distance is, somehow, green.  This was deep winter and if you visit Iceland in summer the green can be overwhelming so that the rock is invisible.  It is, of course, moss.

When dried it could be used for bedding or to insulate housing structures.  Life is so persistent, so innovative, that a large area with no soil at all can still be very green.

The Icelandic football team, together with nature, remind us that a promising environment is not necessary for success.  

It is a thought that, as a Christian in London in 2018 I find uplifting too.

Missing Notes

I was listening to an organist bemoaning this amazing Fugue by J S Bach (s. 948).  It is not the famous one of the same notation (in D Minor) but it has many spectacular elements in it as you will hear.

It is usually played on the harpsichord.  The organist pointed out that he'd heard harpsichordists didn't care for it much either.

For a harpsichord (which has a much smaller keyboard than a piano) there are a few impossibly low notes.  For an organ (with its pedal board of low notes) those notes are easy, but there are very few of them.  That's what the organist was complaining about.  "It's not really for organ".

What does all this musical stuff add up to?

Perhaps this.  That just because life isn't a perfect fit for us, some talents under-used, some requirements out of reach, we should see in our imperfections the beauty created by the Composer and forget our limitations by comparison.

A Fool's Guide to Resurrection

Easter!  New Life! Spring!  But on April Fool's Day I contend that resurrection is overrated.

At first thought it seems impossible to overrate it. Doesn’t it deal with the one thing that China’s manufacturing, the US military, Microsoft, the United Nations Security Council, Apple or the International Monetary Fund cannot?  Doesn’t it deal with death? When we lay our dear ones in the dust nothing seems more important.  If only mortuaries could be replaced by Resurrection Units!

But what if. 

What if the first human being to conquer death had been Adolf Hitler, emerging victorious from the rubble of his bunker never to die again?  Or you or me?  What would we do with our newly-evident resurrection power?  Do we seriously trust our untrustworthy selves to make resurrection life a virtue?

That’s not all. What is resurrection for?  

Resurrection is not attractive if it reintroduces the resurrectee to illness or further serious injury, to more wars and violence, to other years of heartbreak and despair, to new enemies and more pollution.  A thousand years of hospital appointments has its limitations.  Globally over 100 million people seriously contemplate ending their own lives each year - the very opposite of resurrection. Life is the problem sometimes.

The resonance of Easter with returning spring is both obvious and meaningless.  Yes, the bunnies jump, the daffodils bloom, the birds sing and daylight dissolves the darkness.  But this is life again, not life transformed.

Simply put, resurrection is useless without Jesus.  It had to be him.  It had to be the rebirth of humanity, the new creation beginning on the First Day of a new week.  It had to be life with a Leader, resurrection with a Redeemer, it had to be the Way and the Truth as well as the Life. It had to be the One who could credibly promise a life that would always be worth living!

On a previous day when, one might think, Lazarus became the resurrection and the life as he meets us from his tomb Jesus said it - I AM the resurrection and the life.  And Jesus hadn’t even died yet.

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 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.

Mrs Green

A year and a half ago, not many miles down the road from my Mum, an elderly lady in a Nursing Home slipped quietly away to meet her Maker.  It was a predictable event, given that she was nearly 111 years old - by any contemporary reckoning her passing was almost overdue.

 

What made Mrs Florence Green's death into news was that she was the last living First World War Veteran.  This is a technical term in that as a 17 year old she joined the newly formed Royal Air Force right at the end of the war and worked a few weeks as a waitress in the Mess but this rendered her a servicewoman and therefore an official Veteran.  By starting late and living long she became the symbolic end of the living human story of the Great War, closing the book on the war to end all wars almost 100 years after it began as the reporter rather beautifully put it.

 So there you have it.

The unpalatable human fact that every single man and woman who served in the First World War died.  On Sunday at the Cenotaph Isaac Watts version of Psalm 90 was sung . . .  Time like an ever rolling stream bears all its sons away.

Some of us feel very blessed to have avoided the historically frequent shortening of life that war brings on the young.  How much more blessed the believer who realises that death itself has been subject to defeat in Jesus; that the sons of time can be the children of eternity in him. 

Pre Seasons

The new Football League season kicks off at about the time everyone is off on their holidays.  The reason is next summer's World Cup in Brazil and the need for the English season to be wrapped up well before it.

 

Here, then, ends preseason.  This is a strange time of sweaty endeavour to get fit for the winter to come.  In blistering heat the lads run themselves into shape for the wet and windy nights in some football outpost on a Tuesday night in November and blistering heat is a distant, incredible memory.

 

The disconcerting thought occurs to me, though, that the actual season is also a preseason - which is why it starts so early.  Beyond the parochial ranks of the local supporters the big world of football is looking at next summer and the season for which we have just had the preseason is itself a preseason.

This week hundreds of local families in and around Wycombe will have sent their children and teenagers to Lighthouse Holiday Clubs and Fresh Cafe youth nights.  These are brilliant events.  We are very blessed to have them.

 

Certainly one way of approaching Children and Youth ministry is that it is a kind of preseason.  This is alarming for two reasons - the most obvious being that children and young people are real people (and may not make adulthood) and need to know forgiveness and faith right where they are. The second reason is that the attrition between children's ministry and adult faith is appallingly high.  No truism seems less true now than the old maxim, Give me the child for seven years and I will give you the man.

 

I am somewhat of the view that, like the season about to unfold, the whole season of life is preseason.  Admittedly the World Cup with its gathering of the nations under a near equatorial sun seems a distant dream right now.  Yet it is shaping everything about football in months to come.

 

And so our whole life, even to what we misleadingly describe as our last breath, is a season that is really a preseason.  And under the same Son that we now live, the nations will gather for the Real Thing and the momentary things of preseason will give way in the shadow of its glory.

 

Maranatha.

Life

The other day we were walking round an amazing landscaped garden.  Water features, wisely placed roses, glasshouses and beautiful shrubs and flower beds adorned the summer scene.  It was very beautiful, even to a relatively untrained eye such as mine.

 

Then there was a startling section.

 

Simply enough, it was left wild and in such a setting it looked quite wrong (in my own garden it would have blended somewhat better!).  That was not what was startling though.

 

It was startling because it was absolutely full of life.  I don't mean that, instead of one flying insect for every 20 flowers there were two.  I mean startling.  Instead of a decent few insects this area was teeming with them, large butterflies and tiny gnat-like insects and all points in between.  Soon I was hardly looking at the somewhat common looking wild flowers but was staring at this flying sea (to mix the metaphor) of life.

 

We have just spent much of a year in 1 Corinthians.  This letter dispels any notion that the Church of the 21st century is in some kind of qualitative decline for there is portrayed a wild church such as even the trendiest, most rebellious of Christian outlaws in the 21st century would find hard to emulate.  More to the point it was wilder than is the Sunday Assembly, the atheist parody of Christian services but is actually more decent than Corinth was.

 

Wild. 

 

But there was life there.  Like the insects he created, God does not seek out human formality and order for its own sake.   He is the author and partaker of spiritual life and if that is in the chaotic meadow it is better to him than a neatly ordered spiritual mausoleum.

Yippee!

Here's one of the most spectacularly encouraging news items I have ever read - male death rates have fallen by a quarter!

I confess I was sceptically thinking the rate had remained stubbornly at 100% with a couple of notable exceptions . . .

Ten

Today is the Tenth Anniversary of my first Sunday as Pastor in my current church. Alarmingly this is my second Tenth Anniversary! But time is not the issue, is it?

A few days ago I heard an interview with a professor who had researched the effects of trees on the human spirit. Apparantly the good professor’s research revealed that if you drive down a tree-lined highway you arrive more relaxed, less stressed, than you do if surrounded by concrete. This effect is more pronounced in heavy traffic. And it works in walking too.

But the interviewer came up with a devastating question, "Do trees have the same effect when their leaves fall off?"

And the answer was no. Without their leaves they are essentially useless to changing the passer-by. Like the Christian church really. It doesn’t do any traceable good by just being there. It must be seen to be alive..

I have come, said Jesus, that they might have life, and have it more abundantly..