The Forty Days: 4. A Giant Problem

During the forty days of Lent we have been looking at some other 'forty days' in the Bible.  

As a point of introduction, today it is forty days since Russia invaded Ukraine to plunge Europe into a situation we liked to think had been left behind in 1945.  (Some hope, given European history).

While forty days often seem to have a divine connection in Scripture, that is not always so.  Back in the days of Israelite King Saul his primitive army faced harassment from the Philistines.  One in particular made a mockery of Saul's forces - a giant man named Goliath.  Day after day he issued a dueling challenge:

For forty days the Philistine came forward every morning and evening and took his stand.

On reaching 40 days of the Russian-Ukraine War we can perhaps appreciate the length of intimidation Goliath represented.  And the heart of the problem was that there seemed no more likelihood of him being rivalled on the evening of the fortieth day than on the morning of the first.

Length of time - for all its meaning in Lent - is not a virtue by itself.  As we all know, the contest was settled by the whizz of one stone from David's sling - from a David who utterly trusted in the power of God to make his own learned skills count.

Have you been watching giants for 40 days?  Is it time to fight and trust the Lord? 

Our Church Flags: 7. Hong Kong

On a sadly memorable day in which Russia launched bloodshed upon Europe, it seems appropriate to have a cheerful flag.  The flag of Hong Kong.

That is not to suggest that everything in Hong Kong is going well.  Those who come to our church from that background would not say so.  But the flag at least is a cheerful thing.

In this blog series we have seen often enough that red on a flag usually means bloodshed.  It is hard not to imagine some (perhaps many) years hence a Ukrainian flag with red on it somewhere.

Happily the Hong Kong flag's red is the festive celebratory red more familiarly found in Chinese New Year decorations.

Then there is the flower.  Astonishingly for such a tiny land area, this is representative of a flower that was actually first discovered in Hong Kong.  Nobody looking at the teeming city would imagine it as the place of such a discovery.

Oh for a world that discovers flowers instead of shedding blood.

Remembrance

 The poem from which today's commemorative poppies began (written on the battlefield in 20 minutes):

In Flanders fields the poppies blow 

Between the crosses, row on row, 

That mark our place; and in the sky 

The larks, still bravely singing, fly 

Scarce heard amid the guns below. 

 We are the Dead. Short days ago 

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, 

Loved and were loved, and now we lie 

In Flanders fields. 

Take up our quarrel with the foe: 

To you from failing hands we throw 

The torch; be yours to hold it high. 

If ye break faith with us who die 

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow 

In Flanders fields

Unknown

These moving Bible words are found on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, just inside Westminster Abbey,

THEY BURIED HIM AMONG THE KINGS BECAUSE HE
HAD DONE GOOD TOWARD GOD AND TOWARD HIS HOUSE

It was the first such tomb in the world, though many nations have since followed suit. The soldier's corpse within was chosen by a series of randomisations to make sure he was absolutely unknown. The Tomb says so much about the impersonality of War and its random destructiveness of young and other lives.

It is an extraordinary place, and deeply moving.

Strangely, it is also one of the most astonishing misuses of the Bible to be found anywhere. For the text is adapted from the Chronicler's statement at the end of the life of a priest named Jehoiada who was responsible for God's temple in the days of King Joash. Sure, he was buried among the kings but once you get past that observation the text is vexingly inappropriate. For a start, he was not unknown.

Not only that, he was a man who spent his life in Temple service (while Joash went around killing people as a soldier-king). Jehoiada was the very opposite of a soldier.

Perhaps the weirdest thing of all is that Jehoiada lived to 130 years old - in the words of the text he died 'full of years' - which is the exact opposite of what makes the young soldier in that Abbey tomb a reason for poignant remembrance.

Indeed, the more I think about it the more I struggle to imagine a more inappropriate epitaph. It is as if someone selected words from the Bible in as random a way as they selected the corpse to bury. Which is sad because the Bible has plenty of poignant and meaningful things to say for such a place and for such a day as today when we remember the waste of human life.

For example, how about the following which combines both the meaning of the tomb and the meaning of the Abbey:

Gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.
But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting.

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.

A nice view spoiled

Before leaving Malta behind on my blog this year I think that the single most shocking moment for me came when I realised the history of this beautiful bay by which we walked several times.  The bay I expected to remember when I left Malta was the one where Paul was shipwrecked but it proved difficult to set that over against the grotesque story of this bay in the Great Siege (referenced in my previous post).

On one grim day of that siege the headless crucified corpses of some Knights of St John were floated over the bay to terrorise their allies.  In retaliation, the knights, having beheaded many Ottoman prisoners, fired their heads from cannons back across the bay.

As we enter Advent, this is a good time to remember that the coming of the Light of the World has never ceased to be necessary - for however blue the sky, darkness is never far away.

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.

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. 

Name - Crofton Brown

One hundred years since the Great War began.  The amazing field of poppies by the Tower of London is quite a sight.  It is not easy to know whether it is good or not.

 

It is very beautiful.

 

Should the deaths of war be commemorated by beauty though?  Would we, for example (in reverse) commemorate the birth of a baby with the ugliness of birth leftovers?  It is hard to know if beauty helps or hinders. 

 

Memorialising is so hard because we interpret everything from our own place in history.  I have been extraordinarily blessed to live through wars only on television.  Even a cursory glance at the statistics of international terrorism indicate that at its worst it is a pale reflection of the Somme, Ypres, the Blitz, Auschwitz or Hiroshima to name but a few.  What do I know of the buzzing excitement of young recruits who often well realised that they might not come home?  How can I, who sees soldier's bodies returning in ceremonial procession from the back of transport planes at RAF bases imagine the slaughter that left tens of thousands of bodies unaccounted for?

 

This morning in Church we considered each of the men memorialised on the plaque in our Chapel building,  One of them is simply among the unknown who were never buried but never came back.  Would a ceramic poppy help?  No.  What helped was that we knew his name and that he was missed by name from the community that placed the plaque in his memory.

Likewise our value to God is not our equal part of a great number.  As the Scriptures teach, our names are written in the Lamb's book of life.  We are not valued as one of the many.  We are simply, personally valued.

Falling Apart

A few blog readers will know to whom I refer , but out of internet modesty I will content myself with the relative anonymity of writing that I was recently in a meeting with a Government Minister.  The purpose of the meeting was itself interesting (and not at all confidential).  What caught my attention was a little phrase that the minister used in passing:  referring to the general state of the nations the minister commented, "things seem to be falling apart everywhere at the moment".

 

 

In itself it is plain obvious.  Libya, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Nigeria, Somalia, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mali and even, in its own way, the (formerly) United Kingdom.

 

I suppose if I'd heard two congregants in Church, two people at a bus stop or two people watching the news on TV saying it I'd have barely noticed.  But a Government Minister?  So even up there at the Top it looks scary?

 

Well, thank God that Top is not the real Top.

 

Among a thousand Bible verses that help - but less well known than most - the disasters of the human story are characterised as God gathering grapes . . .

 

Still another angel, who had charge of the fire, came from the altar and called in a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle, "Take your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of grapes from the earth's vine, because its grapes are ripe."

 

From the real Top it really does look different.

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.

Invaders

The other Sunday, by way of illustration, we noted in a service the countries of the world that Britain had not invaded.

NOT invaded.

I imagine this supposed fact is open to considerable historical controversy but it doesn't need to be exactly right to be very telling. Invasion includes more negotiated occupations of nations too.  Just 22 nations have avoided British boots.

Here is Stuart Laycock's short list of the only countries Britain has not invaded in case you haven't used the link above.

 Andorra

Belarus

Bolivia

Burundi

Central African Republic

Chad

Congo, Republic of

Guatemala

Ivory Coast

Kyrgyzstan

Liechtenstein

Luxembourg

Mali

Marshall Islands

Monaco

Mongolia

Paraguay

Sao Tome and Principe

Sweden

Tajikistan

Uzbekistan

Vatican City

 

Stuart, probably wisely, abrogated all moral judgment about his list and described it as a bitt of fun.   In doing so he was probably neatly reflecting the sense of responsibility most modern Britons feel for the past, though this Sunday we like to remember some noble victories over nasty enemies in the last century.

 

It creates quite an alarming image when the nations stand before the throne of God's judgment.  In my mind's eye I imagine all these peoples being questioned about their responsibilities for the nationally and ethnically inspired wrongs amid humankind's history - and frequently seeing them pointing over at, er, us.

 

No wonder we stop and pray and think about the wars of the world.

The 14 Billion Question

Fine.  So the world is 14 billion years old possibly - and no-one really cares (Novenber 8th).  After all it is SUCH a big number.

 

Such a big number.

 

In fact, it is such a big number that it is the number of bullets produced in the world each year (approximately, but probably a safer statistic than the age of the universe one).

 

Such a big number.

 

So big, in fact, that it is twice the number of human beings on the planet.  So, in case you or I thought there was a bullet with my name on it . . .

 

 

. . . the bad news is that every year there are two.

Anne Frank

There are few more haunting places in Western Europe than Anne Frank's House in Amsterdam.
 

That is not to say that there are not worse places.  Massacres have littered the history of Europe; massacres on battlefields, in gas chambers, on hillsides and God knows where else.  Europe, whilst being a very nice continent to live as supplied by God through Mother Nature has also been turned into killing fields very many times and the sites are there to visit (together with a Tourist Office of course).

 

Anne Frank's house touristic too.  Annexes have turned it into a veritable museum and although there is a reality about it in some ways there is also a sense (with the Restaurant and Bookshop at the end)  that this could have been recreated from scratch in, say, Las Vegas.

 

Except for me it couldn't.

 

When we visited it on our vacation it was not the House itself that haunted me - though it is despairingly poignant.  It was just one (black and white of course) picture combined with our experience of visiting.
 

Duly warned, we had turned up early - a very strong recommendation given that there was an eye-poppingly long line waiting by the time we exited.  We lined up for no more than ten minutes and next to the canal and the Great Western Church we watched the cyclists scuttle by, the barges and boats glide past under a summer's sky.

The haunting black and white picture in the House was of exactly the same kind of Amsterdam canalside scene.  Only this time there were Nazi security forces and a line of Jewish families being rounded up for deportation.  The same canals, churches, sunshine, and another line of people out on the street.  These apparently glorious delights buried beneath human hatred.

That a setting that delighted me was a terror to Anne Frank: that I was pleased to linger in a place that she was for years terrified to step into; this showed me that the human heart is far more important than architecture, church buildings, summer weather and lining up.

Fabrice

When a 23-year-old Premiership footballer collapses in front of tens of thousands of people, a game is abandoned and teammates call for prayer for him following a technical death from cardiac arrest the worlds of ministry and sports chaplaincy feel very close together.

Fabrice Muanga's life, we all agree, is more important than his footballing life.  Football, even at its highest level, is nowhere near as important as life and death.  This one man's trouble has stopped thousands in their tracks and brought an encouraging humanity into the business whirl of top-level football.

But.

The beauty of what has happened in response to Fabrice's heart attack is a reason to think harder about humanity than we first imagine.  In this connection it has been passingly commented that Muanga's father came to Britain as a refugee from Congo.  From this upheaval Fabrice grew into a fine student as well as an excellent footballer.  And if he'd stayed in Congo?

Over ten years of the internal strife in that land it is estimated over five million people have died and hundreds of thousands have been raped.  Under the floodlights one man's hurt was shared by thousands but in the Congolese rainforests thousands' hurt has, too often, not been observed or shared by anyone.

This is not a fair world, though sometimes (as here) gems of kindness gleam within it.  We are about to relive the God-Man's journey to a hill where a crowd watched, a Saviour died, but more truly he was the one who was watching them - "Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing".  Never a truer, kinder, or more heartfelt observation by one man. 

By one man watching a dying crowd.

CLC

On Sunday morning I referenced the story of Kenneth Adams (and Jessie his wife) who founded what is now a worldwide network of Christian bookshops.  Their's was an inspiring story of faith

which you can read here.

What I find interesting is that this story began in a small property in Colchester, Essex on November 1 1941.  Anything else going on at the time?  Well, the German Army was still trying to march on Moscow.  The British and Allies were preparing in two weeks to launch what now appears unfortunately-named Operation Crusader to capture Tobruk in North Africa.  Thousands of miles East the Japanese were preparing for the momentous attack on America's Pearl Harbor in a month's time.

Strange, isn't it?  The German Army never reached Moscow, despite commiting its whole strength to the task.  The British and Germans are long gone from, and not very welcome in Libya, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor backfired spectacularly resulting in their land being the first, and to date only, place that has suffered nuclear war. 

But there are still CLC bookshops carrying out their intended purpose.

And one other thing.  The bookshops were once spoken of as a 'spiritual Woolworths'.  This would have seemed a bit ridiculous as you walked into a little Christian Bookshop dwarfed by the large Woolworths store down the street.  But again, CLC Bookshops have lasted rather better than Woolworths, which entered High Street oblivion a year ago.

I suppose, in a similar manner, Caesar Augustus would be surprised to find that so many people have recently been singing about a baby born in an obscure building in an obscure town in one of his obscure Eastern provinces. And not a single song about him.

You really cannot tell what God might be up to with small things.

Copenhagen

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference descends gently and inevitably into inter-nation political squabbling, we can only pity those unpolitical scientists who claimed this was the 'most important conference in the history of the world.'

Bombs in Baghdad have simultaneously reminded us that Climate Change takes an early back seat when power takes over. Especially power expressed in war and violence. Tanks running on biofuel? Eco-friendly bombs delivered by low energy bombers? Nuclear warheads that preserve rare species? Dolphin-friendly depth charges?

This is the kind of Conference that only happens in peace time. It has laudable aims but there will come future days and places when human beings are so busy trying to kill each other that the fate of delicate ecosystems will be the last thing on their minds.

The chief planetary problem is in the heart of its dominant species. A heart that doesn't always seek peace, but always seeks more things for itself and its interests. The problem is more Greed than Green.

Christmas, because it points to how God changes souls, matters a lot more than Copenhagen. And the humblest conference, or Carol Service, that applies the lessons of Christ likely offers greater hope than any portentous gathering of the political elite. For we need the power to lay down the power, and that is a very illusive form of power indeed.