God in the Garden 2. Hidden Problems

It even surprises me.

When we filmed the Easter Morning pandemic recording in the garden there was the awkwardness of a derelict pond motor cupboard, used by a previous resident to create a flowing water feature.  It is clearly many years into its decay.

'Why,' I wondered, 'have I never fixed it?'   

I ventured my best explanation - that in the summer it was hidden, because in truth I could hardly remember thinking about it in days in the garden over the years.

And so it proved to be.  I simply hadn't realised how totally the greenery in the pond left the old cupboard out of sight and out of mind.  Here it is in the summer:

That is why it is never fixed!

As we thought about at Easter, the reason for the coming and sacrifice of Jesus is because sin is never hidden from Him - it required action.  The reason why humankind can be equivocal about, blase towards or disinterested in the great salvation Jesus achieved is because we simply cover up our sinfulness to ourselves and among ourselves.  It doesn't need fixing, so we don't need Jesus.

This strategy fails to take account of the end of the story - where what God sees is the basis of our eternal accountability.

Summer Sundays

We had a very good time in the Lord's presence today at church.  But who is 'we'?

Every summer in my ministry life these July Sundays present an exaggerated version of the constant challenge - where is he/she gone and why?  No response to this ever seems to me to work very well.  Blithely assuming that usually healthy people are healthy later uncovers some sudden illness and a sense of neglect; unwisely imagining that someone who is a strong Christian could not be lapsing yields a later story of having witnessed too lazily the first signs of decline; pursuing the absentee on the other hand provokes a sense of Big Brother and loss of freedom - in short, July presents like a multiple choice question where each answer is wrong.

In general it is not, in my general experience, wise to assume the best (which is why many services begin with confession).  Any reading of history yields support for the view that many a non-engaged Christian is simultaneously disengaged from the Word of God and from God himself as, centuries upon centuries ago, the great Eastern preacher John Chrysostom, preaching on John remarked;

If a harper, or dancer, or stage-player call the city, they all run eagerly, and feel obliged to him for the call, and spend the half of an entire day in attending to him alone; but when God speaks to us by Prophets and Apostles, we yawn, we scratch ourselves, we are drowsy. 

And in summer, the heat seems too great, and we betake ourselves to the market place; and again, in winter, the rain and mire are a hindrance, and we sit at home; yet at horse races, though there is no roof over them to keep off the wet, the greater number, while heavy rains are falling, and the wind is dashing the water into their faces, stand like madmen, caring not for cold, and wet, and mud, and length of way, and nothing either keeps them at home, or prevents their going there. 

But here, where there are roofs over head, and where the warmth is admirable, they hold back instead of running together; and this too, when the gain is that of their own souls. How is this tolerable, tell me? Thus it happens, that while we are more skilled than any in those matters, in things necessary we are more ignorant than children. If a man call you a charioteer, or a dancer, you say that you have been insulted, and use every means to wipe off the affront; but if he draw you to be a spectator of the action, you do not start away, and the art whose name you shun, you almost in every case pursue. But where you ought to have both the action and the name, both to be and to be called a Christian, you do not even know what kind of thing the action is. 

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.

Stop!

It's that time of year when things stop.  For those who work on Summer Camps, Conferences and Clubs this is farcically not true but in the general sense many things that happen over forty plus weeks of the year don't happen for five or six about now.

Lest this induce the activist Christian guilt (it doesn't take much) let us be heartened by this paragraph from the old Rule of the Society of St John regarding the monastic ministry of hospitality for which they were so famous:

If we let our life as a brotherhood be overwhelmed by the claims of the guests we could endanger the resources by which we serve them . . . there shall be interludes during the year when guests are not normally received.

Heat

There must be many places to be on a 95 degree day, but London certainly isn't one of them. 

 

I feel strangely satisfied sitting in my study before doing an afternoon visit.  I've just been on the phone to someone who, it turned out, was answering their phone from Hampton Court Garden Show.  Far from feeling jealous I felt sorry for my friend.

 

The atmosphere changes everything, doesn't it?  Ordinary places become extraordinary on an unusual weather day.  I find myself paying attention to shaded streets so I can walk comfortably, minimising my time outside, closing my curtains.

 

A song that is a few steps past my current church's style but which I love is the only one I know with the word atmosphere in.  It's a reminder that although we have meetings that try to change things, the only really big change comes when God turns up the heat.  Then nothing is the same.

 

 

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.

Mediterranean

It's that time of year when, in the company of uncomfortably large numbers of fellow-Britons we are off to the Mediterranean.

This picture, from last year in Rome, seems suitably symbolic.

For a start, it was taken in such ridiculous heat that I can remember telling my spouse-photographer to hurry or I would have to move!

Secondly it is of part of a very ancient statue that bespeaks the empire that once straddled the Mediterranean and affected the globe. A little toe the size of my head says it all really.

Thirdly, standing amid history is exactly why my daughter is not and would not want to be with us. This is a very adult vacation. Not adult in the way of the binge-drinking hoards of fellow-countrymen and women who populate various Mediterranean bar strips. Adult in the number of miles walked. For while we will have no hangovers, the repaired little toe on the statue looks, for all the world, like our little toes will look when we've finished hot-footing around another Mediterranean city this week.

Lastly, although I am no lover of the heat, I like the Mediterranean for at least this; that every time I see that sea it brings to mind any number of stories from the Bible whose dramas were played out around its shores and sometimes upon its waves. In fact the P Q R on the plinth stands for 'The People of Rome' and as I'm halfway through preaching Paul's letter to the People of Rome it all seems very appropriate indeed!

Summer

August.

‘The cloakroom pegs are empty now and locked the classroom door’;

so begins Philip Larkins’ poem The School in August.

When school stops, it really stops. Yet when church activities stop (as they do in August in the UK), the greater purpose that they serve continues - it just continues in a different way. Look at this section from a wonderful old Celtic prayer-poem, attributed (possibly correctly in this case) to Columba;

At times kneeling to beloved Heaven

At times psalm singing;

At times contemplating the King of Heaven

Holy the chief;

At times at work without compulsion

This would be delightful.

At times plucking duilisc from the rocks

At times at fishing;

At times giving food to the poor;

At times in a carcair:

The poem pictures a life devoted to God in which formal worship is offered at times to the Chief of Heaven. But there are also times to pluck duilisc. Columba, in common with all Celtic saints, knew that God would not be neglected by taking time to enjoy his handiwork. Thus we imagine the breezy summer Atlantic shoreline and a man in a habit plucking juicy seaweed (duilisc) from the rocks just because he can, and it’s free, and God is there.

Duilisc washes in on the tides from June to September; you won’t get to pluck any in January even if you can stand upright on the windswept, gloomy, wave-lashed shore. Get plucking because there are also times in a carcair. We don’t know exactly what carcair meant in Columba's mind. A carcair was a prison - it may have meant the enclosed hermitage or imprisonment by hostile communities. But either way it was a loss of freedom that the seaweed-plucker enjoys!

We are wise to remember how, a little further inland, the Lord said in his greatest discourse, ‘Consider the lilies of the field how they grow’. He credited us with the intelligence to realise that such consideration would only happen by taking the opportunity while it blooms and the carcair, or in his case the cross, belongs to a time yet to be.