Great (Hymn) One Liners 9. The Gate

 It's Easter, and today our Great Hymn One Liner comes from a German hymn.  Generally Easter hymns are simple by the very nature of the event.  Whilst profound in its significance, the Resurrection of Christ tends to be sung about in straightforward terms.  And why not?

henceforth is death but the gate to life immortal

The line neatly captures the forever transformation that Easter Day brings to the singer, and everyone else, who believes.   Nothing, following the resurrection, will ever be the same again, ever.

There is such a difference between the brick wall that unbelievers see themselves  hitting in death and the gate to a new future that the believer in Jesus sees.  This is a glorious day to be a Christian.  Yet in  truth, so is every other day!!

Top Ten Funeral Songs 2018: 8. You Raise Me Up (Westlife)

2018:  The Co-operative Funeral Services list of Top Ten Funeral Songs (now containing no Christian songs or hymns).  I'm looking at the merits and demerits of the top ten, and this time number 8 - You raise me up, popularised by Westlife, covered by half the music industry . . .

Why it's good for a funeral:

Norwegian Rolf Lovland originally wrote the music for his own mother's funeral. (Brendan Graham wrote the lyrics).

Why it's bad for a funeral:

It doesn't contain God (unless you supply him by how you mean the words).

Line that's most like a Christian song:

You raise me up to more than I can be

Line that's least like a Christian song:

[Not applicable - as Brendan Graham was for a while a Catholic Seminarian it all has Christian echoes]

A Quote from (writer) Brendan Graham:

'Keep a green bough in your heart and the singing bird will come'.

Why I don't want this song at my funeral:

It is so much like a hymn I might as well have a real hymn which honours God rather than one that reflects a hopeful ideal.

A better Christian alternative:

.

[There is a Redeemer . . .]

When I stand in Glory

I will see His face

And there I'll serve my King forever

In that Holy Place

Thank you, oh my father

For giving us Your Son

And leaving Your Spirit

'Til the work on Earth is done

Easter Weekend translated for cats?

Death, the Olympics and Easter Day

About the time of the Olympics last year (2016) an alarming thought crossed some people's minds.  It was that the previous London 2012 Olympics had been cursed.

The trigger for this alarming thought was the death of Australian rower Sarah Tait from cervical cancer.  On its own Sarah's death was an ordinary (but genuine) sadness - but she was latest in the line of very many others.  British consciousness had been heightened by the deaths of sailor Andrew Simpson in a 2013 sailing accident and our tennis player Elena Baltacha who died of cancer the next year.  A French swimmer, boxer and triathlete had all died, but so had 12 others from around the world.  It seemed crazy that by the next Olympics 18 of the previous Olympians were dead and gone.

There turned out to be good news and bad news when it was researched.

The good news was that, in simple terms, over four years about 32 in a 1000 people die. There were over 10,000 participants at the 2012 Olympics so hundreds, statistically, should have died before the next Olympiad.  Except that Olympians are young and fit.

Some whizzy research yielded the expected death rate for the average age to be 25-30 over four years.  So if the 18 were the full number (though some athletes from obscure regions [e.g. North Korea] might not be known about)  it would a below-average death rate.

And this means what, exactly? Well that is the bad news.

I think it shows how unrealistic the living are about death.  Of course we know that death and taxes are the only certainties - but we live as though we will never die.  One reason why not enough people are excited enough about Easter morning is because they do not acknowledge the scale of the problem, the general curse, from which this day and its Lord potentially sets them free.

It is a mistake of Olympian proportions.

It's a tragedy

People have been dying a lot recently.

Only in the past week we have seen the funeral of Ronnie Corbett, the death of Victoria Wood and the suitably mysterious decease of Prince.

Today, St George's Day, we remember the mysterious George (about whom we know little more than we know about the Dragon) and the more-mysterious-than-we-often-think William Shakespeare, star of stage and screen (though the screen was a time coming of course).

Four hundred years is a while and thus nobody is saying how much they miss William or that their 'thoughts are with his family' (whatever that phrase means when uttered by a politician).  Simply put we first encountered old William as dead.  We've never thought of him otherwise.  I think he would approve.

A few weeks ago we went to watch Hamlet and although we have seen many Shakespeare plays we had, surprisingly, never seen this famous one.  The subtleties of Shakespeare are legendary, but the one very unsubtle thing about Hamlet is that it is a tragedy.  At the end the major players are all lying dead on the stage (or off stage).  It is not subtle. "When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions".How true it is and how untrue.As we move through Easter toward Ascension Day the Greatest Drama of All is revealed to be death's crushing defeat as every one of its supposed clients is raised up to stand before the throne of the Man who left death dead.When resurrections come they come not single lives but all as Christ commands.

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.

Happy Easter!

An Easter Song, in my opinion, never improved upon in all contemporary Christian music.

Happy Birthday Leaplings!

Ah yes, today is that day that occurs just in a Leap Year and those who are born today are, it is said, leaplings.  Among their ranks was Sir James Milne Wilson, sometime Premier of Tasmania.  Sir James added to his rare birthday the unlikely additional note that he also died on February 29th.  This seems a vanishingly small probability for a human being.

A vanishingly small probability for a human being until you do the maths.  Dying on your birthday may be a miserable thought but the chances are generally about 1 in 365.  Your birthday being February 29th and dying on in later years is about 1 in 2.1 million.  Not likely then, but hardly unimaginable odds.

In fact it is almost exactly the same as the odds that your ticket will win £100,000 in the UK Lottery.  Rather grimly we are a thousand times more likely to have a fatal slip in a bath or shower, and ten thousand times more likely to have our identity stolen . . .

As I pointed out in a talk I gave yesterday, the really big odds thing is what Jesus did.  By taking back his life from the dead ('it was impossible for death to hold him') he produced a unique day.  Which is why millions of Christians worship each week on that day, Sunday.  In the human story it has become more singular and more significant than this weirdest of calendar days.

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.

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.

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. 

In Vain

Tonight England played San Marino in an International.  But the question is - why?  San Marino are the lowest ranked of 208 football nations and have lost every one of dozens of games they have played in competitive football.  If any team ever turned up in vain it is them.

 

In vain.  Only two small words, but they conjure up rotten thoughts for most of us.  At its least threatening it will be memories of queues that were endured only for the doorman to turn us away, the cashier to close or the shop shelf to prove empty.  We waited in vain.  Worse - much worse = an investment, an emigration, or a nation’s decision to go to war.  No-one wants such things to be in vain.

 

In literature the greatest and therefore most painful experience of acting in vain is summed up by, among others, the English poet Abraham Crowley,

 

A mighty pain to love it is,

and 'tis a pain that pain to miss;

but of all the pains,

the greatest pain is to love,

but love in vain.

 

Whatever else we do in vain, the last thing of all we want to do in vain is to love.  Yet in a myriad of broken relationships - spouse with spouse, child with parent, brother with sister - human beings inflict this emptiness upon one another so that whole swathes of lives appear to have been invested in vain.  Could any feeling be worse? Could anything be worse?

Unfortunately yes.  And there is a whole Bible book devoted to reflecting upon it.  Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, bewails the wisdom of Ecclesiastes.  “Let’s look at everything”, says the writer, “and look - it is all, from cradle to grave, from king to pauper, from nurture to wealth-creating, from history to hope - in vain.”  Life is Vanity Fair.

 

But then, as the Apostle Paul reflects on the Resurrection of Jesus (1 Corinthians 15) he in the living Christ the key of purposeful living:   For you know that your labour is NOT in vain in the Lord. 

Mozart

Salzburg is very proud of Mozart.  I had no wish to avoid him, but even if I had so wished I could not have done.  As the story unfolded I started to find this quite amusing.

 

Poor Wolfgang Amadeus himself did not like Salzburg anything like as much as Salzburg has come to like him.  As far as the story can be understood, he spent a great deal of energy trying to extricate himself from the mediocre Salzburg Court to become more widely rich and famous in Vienna or Munich or the like.

 

It is nearly as ironic that to do almost anything truly Mozartian in Salzburg will cost a small fortune.  Some people somewhere are making a lot of money when an opera ticket costs over £300.00.  Mozart himself made a decent amount of money but spent an indecent amount leaving him indecently in debt: a few forward royalties might have helped as I imagine his link to the city adds up to 20% to the cost.

 

One might imagine that no-one is more empowered to control their legacy than a genius composer or artist.  Hundreds of years on their work is still being enjoyed, their locations remembered.  Yet human beings are not like that.  They take up legacies and shape them in the way that suits them.

 

The only way to ultimately control your legacy would be to rise again from the dead.

The King of Leicester Cathedral

When Jesus was crucified, Pilate irritated the local leaders by designating him their king –Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews read the sign above his dying body.

It is the nature of the history of kingship that one was usually either crowned with glory or defeated in ignominy.  Jesus was one of countless kings to suffer shame and mockery in his demise.  The fate of some was gruesome even compared to crucifixion.

Whereas the normal dead disappear with the grandchildren’s memories, kings linger on in the history books, their reputation being sullied or restored by succeeding generations of commentators and changing fashions.

 

Richard III of England will make his incongruous way to Leicester Cathedral for a royal interment sometime this year.

So, since his bones were unearthed from a municipal car park in Leicester his reputation, concerning which history had been unkind, has been undergoing restoration by Leicester City Council (no tourist wants to visit the remains of a failed King).

21^st century computer technology was amazingly able to reconstruct his facial features from the mere bones.   Dr Ashdown-Hill was very excited, "I had said previously that when I stood by the grave in Leicester that I felt closer to Richard III than I had ever been, but when I saw the facial reconstruction I realised I had been close to a dead Richard III. It was just bones, just a body, whereas confronting a facial reconstruction, I felt almost in the presence of a living Richard III."

Now that’s what I call an Easter experience!

No, wait a minute. Felt almost is not the same thing at all. 

The two disciples on the road to Emmaus confessed to their travelling companion that they had felt almost that Jesus of Nazareth had been their Messiah.  Then their hearts burned within them as their companion explained that his shame-filled death was the whole point.  The king of a defeated race must share, indeed front, their defeatedness.  At the cross the human race was invited to see its defeat in its true King.

Then, at Emmaus, their companion shared the bread at the table with them – and they recognised him!  It was not feeling almost that an animation had reconstructed him.  The Jerusalem City Council’s attempt to keep him buried had failed!  Jesus was there!  He was risen! He is risen! He is here!  For our King is also Heaven’s King – and cannot end defeated!

Happy Easter!

Gold

As the Metropolitan Police today made a devastating statement about the late celebrity Sir (for now) Jimmy Savile - and as his nearest and dearest decide to dismantle his portentous grave - it seems fitting to revive the memory of a Blog from a year ago.
And to which we might add that golden coffins continue to accrue interesting associations.  Not only, in fact, is the danger of too much gold in your dying place that the living will take it from you, or you from it but that the light of history may destroy it faster than the Yorkshire weather.  Cheap wood or wicker for me please, and regarding the rest I'll keep trusting Jesus'll fix it.

9 NOVEMBER  2011
Prior to today's funeral, showman Jimmy Savile's golden coffin lay 'in state' in a hotel in Leeds.  We'll miss him, epitomised in his epitaph IT WAS GOOD WHILE IT LASTED. 

A couple of days before we've heard of the conclusion of the trial of Michael Jackson's doctor - and the international star also had a golden coffin.  Sadly the story of Michel Jackson, notwithstanding his great talents, was that it was not always good while it lasted.  That was why he died young.

Who else?  There was Carl Williams (2006); he was a killer himself killed in jail in Australia after being a leader of the Melbourne underworld; Nick Rizutto, son of the imprisoned Mafia boss in Montreal (2010). And so on: golden coffins have some interesting associations.

There's nothing new about golden caskets either.  The gilded bed on which old Tutankhamen's remains lay is but one of the golden treasures that, since their discovery, have made his death arrangements among the best known in history.  Sadly for him, the treasures were so wonderful that he (or at least his remaining molecules) were separated from the gold so that museum visitors can see the gold.  So the danger of too much gold in your dying place is that the living will take it from you, or you from it.

The real trick would not be about gold at all.  It would be to be able to exit the place to join the living once again.  Lady Gaga achieved this earlier this year at Radio 1's Big Weekend.  For her first song she emerged from a golden coffin to launch her song set.  Great show!  Sir Jimmy was proud I'm sure.  But the tricky, and achingly important, part of the real trick would be to do that after being publicly dead, say on the third day . . .

Jesus'll fix it.

Higgs boson

Professor Stephen Hawking told the BBC this week that the result of an incredible thing that has happened in my lifetime (the almost-certain discovery of the Higgs boson particle at CERN, Geneva) cost him $100.  The scientists cheered at the Great Announcement of this (unconfirmed) discovery.  Hawking might have added that the Large Hadron Collider where it was probably discovered cost $10 billion.

This is the scientific equivalent of when I look on the back of a margarine container and discover a very obscure ingredient that was always there but I never knew for sure.  Then I carry on eating my toast.

I think I'll stick with being excited about the resurrection of the Lord Jesus.  Unpredictable but prophesied, inexplicable yet inevitable, unapplauded but history-changing.

Literally AVD

Great regret has been expressed regarding Nick Clegg, our Deputy Prime Minister, who said in a keynote speech last weekend,

It makes people so incredibly angry when you are getting up early in the morning, working really hard to try and do the right thing for your family and for your community, you are paying your taxes and then you see people literally in a different galaxy who are paying extraordinarily low rates of tax.

If these people are literally in a different galaxy they are not, of course, liable for UK tax of any sort. Literally none. This is the kind of linguistic torture that many a public speaker (Guilty, m'Lud) inflicts on words.  Someone colourfully described it as AVD - Adjectival Vomiting Disease! 

Literally, for Nick, meant nothing of the sort.  In fact it means the opposite - metaphorically in a different galaxy, perhaps.

For all who claim to be Bible believers the word 'literally' is a heavily significant one.  The problem is that it is a word that serves us less well than we think.  For example,

"Do you believe there was a literal Good Samaritan?" is a fairly irrelevant question, though sometimes asked, compared to the more sobering, "Do you literally do what Jesus taught his hearer to do?"

Huge controversy surrounds the question, "Are the days in Genesis chapter 1 literal 24 hour days?" yet this is hardly a question at all.  Richard Dawkins, for example, believes that they are.  It's just that he inconveniently thinks that they are wrong.  Literal interpretation is not the same thing as faith.  Others believe that they are literal days in a piece of poetry.  Others believe they are not literal 24 hour days but believe they describe literal eras of creating.  Others believe that there were indeed seven 24 hour days but then have to wrestle with how the Word that spoke life to the dead in a moment took a whole 24 literal hours to create (or how the other 23+ hours did not constitute literal rest (which belongs to day seven)).  All of which is to say that literally is literally one of the more difficult words and concepts.

There are places where it is THE word however;

¹ Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. ² By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain ³ For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, ⁴ that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, ⁵ and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. ⁶ After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. ⁷ Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, ⁸ and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. ⁹ For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. ¹⁰ But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them— yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. ¹¹ Whether, then, it was I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed.' [1 Corinthians 15] 

The Apostle is not vomiting adjectives; he is listing evidences.  It would reveal so much less if he had written that Jesus was literally risen from the dead.  Instead he shows how this must have happened, how we can know it happened, why it happened and why it matters.  Without a risen Saviour everything else about being human is ultimately useless.  Literally.

Gold in Concrete

As things turned out (see last week's blog), Jimmy Savile's coffin was encased in concrete to prevent thieves stealing some of his extravagant jewellery which was not inside but might have been (or indeed investigating whether the coffin was real gold . . . Tutanjimmy's tomb as it were.)

All that concrete is going to make it very difficult on resurrection day. 

Like moving a stone I suppose.

Happy Easter!

Ironed

Overheard at the Sports Centre on this morning after the Resurrection Day before:

Mildred: "Did you have a nice day yesterday?"

Mavis: "It was alright.  Just did some washing and ironing really."

This seemed a bizarre behaviour for the day that the only human being who has ever conquered death by taking his life back from the grave.  Or was it?

Looking into the empty tomb (John 20:6) Peter and John are stunned - so it appears - to see the graveclothes lying there.  Why?  Because if the body had been stolen the clothes would have gone with it.  If the thieves had left the outer burial wrappings they would have been unwound all over the floor.  But for sure in the pitch dark they would not have been reconstituted like a banana peel restored without the banana inside.

Then the headcloth.  It was entetuligmenon.  Sometimes translated folded this rather misses the point.  Like as if it had been ironed on Easter Day!  No, this  is how Lazarus's head wrapping (John 11:44) is described when Jesus resurrected him.  The headcloth, somewhat in the manner of a turban, was where it would have been and how it would have but without the head in it!

In a nutshell, John saw and believed.  He hadn't seen Jesus at all yet.  He just knew that there was no way that the body had done other then rise back to life, and in a manner that meant at once that it was the same body (the tomb was empty) but a different set of properties (the wrapping had been passed through).

Mavis seems to have missed the point about Easter Day quite disastrously.  Yet strangely, in spending the day with clothing, she was closer to the glorious reality than she could have imagined!