Great (Hymn) One Liners 13. The wine of the world

For me, one of the greatest English language hymns that I have never sung (in a congregation) is Lift up your voice and sing. 

It is a reflection on freedom in the context of slavery and oppression in America, and framed in the language of the Exodus.  Although it could apply in many situations it has never resonated outside Black America and those who are its allies.  It has been sung at the SuperBowl, and especially in the context of George Floyd's death - but certainly not at Wembley or Westminster Abbey  This is why I have never got to sing it, having only once preached in a Black American church.

It deserves far better and although much of it is movingly written, the line I have chosen is in the last verse which applies the spiritual warning for the freedom ahead - a verse sometimes left out perhaps exactly because it is so spiritual:

[Keep us forever in the path, we pray . . .] Lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;

Freedom is painful to achieve, wonderful if it is gained, potentially intoxicating when it is known.  The devil loves oppression, division and hatred, but he is clever enough to do well in freedom too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lift_Every_Voice_and_Sing

World Cup Churches 24. Croatia

Continuing a series of blogs heading round the 32 qualifying countries in the 2022 World Cup - I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is an exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

For this blog  I'm pleased to move from buildings to people of faith: Zagreb Baptist Church shares some of its testimonies online:

ZORAN: I was so dissatisfied with life that at one point I even thought about suicide. Yet I did not have the courage to do it. Thus began my search for the answers to questions about life that had plagued me. My friends and my environment didn't help me much because they mostly avoided those questions and told me that I was still young and that I shouldn't bother with all that. Dalibor the computer salesman]  gave me the New Testament and a few books which I started reading. I sought the truth with a truly open and sincere heart. And then everything suddenly opened up. It was enough for me to read the first few pages of the Gospel of John when my hair literally started to rise on my head and I suddenly realized who Jesus was and what he wanted from me.

STEPHANIE: After years of spiritual death, over a period of months, I began to think about the truth of what others were telling me about Jesus. Nothing happened abruptly - it was as if Jesus' gentle voice was slowly calling to his lost sheep. My spiritual skeleton slowly began to gain flesh and skin, and God then breathed His Spirit into me. My perspectives miraculously changed.  Now I understand that living with Christ means living with full lungs, that it is a life in which there is no emptiness because He is always there.  When I look back I see that I am truly born again, because the old me certainly couldn’t have imagined that I would be what I am and where I am now.  This is my greatest testimony - I was dead, but Christ brought me to life!

TAMARA: As I grew, I faced many things apart from the fact that my parents were separated. I have even attempted to commit suicide in the past as an attempt to punish my father for what he had done.  I was a very angry person and for everything I blamed my father and I blamed the woman he was with. 

Soon after I gave my life to Jesus, I was in Church one day and a preacher said “there is someone who is filled with hatred towards another person, God wants to set you free today”  I grew so angry at that very moment and I was offended by Jesus that He would even suggest such a ridiculous thing. As I struggled to let go of what happened to my mum, somehow I felt like my forgiving was letting my mum down, but He told me vengeance is His.  Then the Lord asked me to go to this woman’s house and I said to God “ I really hope I heard right because I don’t know what I’m doing here.” How do you walk up to someone's house and say “I forgive you" when they never apologised to you?  As she opened the door I felt something like a fire fill my body and my body just leapt forward, and I just hugged her. I remember as I turned and walked away that I had never felt joy like that in my life. For 14 years I had been imprisoned and that was my first moment of freedom. I felt like I was walking on air. I couldn’t stop smiling and laughing, I couldn’t imagine that I could be this free. I felt like I had not been living up until that moment. It’s 10 years later and I can tell you God has blessed me so much.

Holiday pics 4: Ish

We saw this brilliant sign on holiday.

I imagine the lack of such a sign in our local shopping streets in London.  Everything is very exact.  I can be sure that if a shutter is being pulled down it will be close to an exact time.

To me this sign is a sign of freedom.  The clock matters less than we think.

World Cup Blogs 24: Saudi Arabia

What could be more natural then adorning the pub with the flags of the 32 nations in the World Cup tournament?

But nothing in this world is simple.  In some places local pressure has insisted on the removal of the Saudi Arabian flag from such places because its Islamic connections should not be associated with alcohol.

In a previous World Cup FIFA (football's governing body) fell foul of the Saudis by intending to have footballs with a flag in each panel.  It turns out, then, that drinking by the Creed (for the Muslim Creed is written on the flag) or kicking it is not at all the thing to do.

I have some sympathy for the Saudi problem: every church has a set of dos and don'ts for its premises which can be similarly awkward.  The net effect of it all is to imply a general view that whereas sport unites, religion divides.  But maybe they need to choose to change their football participation or the flag.

Perhaps this kind of religious sensitivity is why the Lord Jesus shredded so many of the religious predilections of his day, eating and drinking with sinners, touching lepers, blessing children and healing on the Sabbath - just generally saying something about people being more important to God than religious rules designed to protect God but divide people.

Magna Carta

Freedom is a strangely elusive idea.  Instinctively we want it, value it, demand it, yet it is much less clear what it really is.  

Take the striking opening of the Magna Carta, and one of the only four of its clauses that remain in contemporary English Law:

• I. FIRST, We have granted to God, and by this our present Charter have confirmed, for Us and our Heirs for ever, that the Church of England shall be free, and shall have all her whole Rights and Liberties inviolable. 

This might warm the heart, one would think, of any Christian. Yet strangely it did not work out quite as this reads.  After all, it was the Monarchy that effectively changed the Church of England (on account of Henry VIII's marital woes) into a non-Roman Church.  That seems some way short of the Church being free of the monarch as the Charter indicated.

Then there have been the times when, whatever freedoms the Church did enjoy it used against other expressions of church and religion.  You would have to look very hard to find any other longstanding expressions of Church on the actual City of London (which is a double irony as the freedoms of the City of London are also contained as a remaining Law from Magna Carta).

Then there is the irony that the institutional Church of England (which Magna Carta most obviously references) is, in fact, the least free of all expressions of Church with a multitude of things it can't do, must do, must have and may not have.

On the bright side, it offers an early trend toward freedom of religion in a broader sense, and one which is happily still respected (though losing ground through the double whammy of militant Islam and rampant secular Humanism).

What it most confirms - and this I think is truly frightening - is that the basis of what old King John did was under the watchful eye of God - We have granted to God.  A society that no longer believes it is answerable to God and where pockets of it believe in a God of vengeance and violence is not likely for too long to hold dear the idea of freedom.  Oppression is so much more human (as Cain effectively said).

Edward Digby

Through a good fortune of survival, now aided by the National Trust, The George Inn in Southwark  still stands.  It is unique as a surviving galleried inn of a kind once common.

For me the most attractive feature of this inn is its part in the story of a young man called Edward Digby.  There were several Edward Digbys in succession in the family, and they were a noble family in the City of London over the River Thames, peers of the realm.  Southwark, outside the City, was associated with ne'er-do-wells of many kinds.  Unsurprisingly then, on the marshes beyond, lay a large debtors prison.  In the style of the eighteenth century debtors were committed there until their debts were paid.  Being there all but guaranteed ones debts would never be paid.

An uncle of the young Digby became concerned that, at holiday seasons, he discarded his City finery and dressed in a blue coat only, disappeared.  He had him followed.  His spies saw him head past Southwark and out to the debtor's prison.  They enquired at the gate as to what Mr Digby was doing.  The gatekeepers confessed to no idea as to the blue-coated man's identity but reported that he came each Christmas and Easter and other auspicious times and paid several inmates' debts.  The gatekeepers informed the investigators that though they might well not wish to enter the prison, the man the sought would always take those he set free to The George Inn in Southwark for a celebratory meal.  And that is where they found him.  

Edward Digby died aged 27 years.  At Communion on Sunday we thought of his story as we remembered the comparable in type but incomparable in scale story of One who left the glory of the City Above to share the place of debtors below to set them free so they could eat with him and he with them.

Trolleys

On my study wall is a picture of a trolley bus that someone gave me for a present.  It is from my home town and I can never look at it without casting a smiling thought back to what, at the time were quite miserable experiences.  I thought of them too when, in Salzburg last summer, we travelled on the city's trolleybuses (below) but they seemed a world away from the ones I remember.

 

I remember them because, quite simply, they were almost useless.  The number of things that could go wrong were amazing.  In addition to all the usual hazards of a busy town's roads and bus system they added

 

A) the ability to get stuck at junctions that dislodged the contact poles because of joins in the wiring

B) losing the power contact when overtaking too wide when vehicles were parked

C) not being able to continue for fear of B)

D) just losing contact for no apparent reason

E) losing power when the wires themselves came town because of weather etc.

F) getting stuck behind another trolley bus that could not progress because of A) - D)

 

The picture on my wall is drawn as if from the kerbside and this is very apt because walking onwards along the path leaving looking back at the trolley bus at just that angle was a childhood experience that is etched on the memory.

 

Maybe it helps to understand how we relate to God though.  No human life is as free as a vehicle that can go anywhere; our times are in his hands.  No human life is as regimented as the tram that can only follow a rail.  We are free, but if we use our freedom to move from him we become redundant very quickly.

 

 

 

The Bitter Fruit of Freedom

As a Baptist Christian I celebrate the freedom of our Parliament to make law on behalf of the ordinary people.  It was not a freedom inherent in the place or in most historic government.

 

The emperor or monarch could make the laws.  While it is hard to see how this policy could have survived into the 21st century it took the spilling of blood and many an imprisonment to make it happen when it did.

 

Every November 5th we are supposed to remember that outside powers have longed to hold sway on this island, powers that include religious ones.  The people thus could have been enabled to do only what those authorities told them to do.

 

Or it could have been the landowners, or the men, who made the laws.  For years it was. The majority of people thus excluded by poverty or gender from representation.

 

Or we may have had the Third Reich.  What would a provincial government of that have looked like in Westminster?

 

And so to today, when our Parliament took upon itself the role of improving God's idea of marriage.

Freedom brings responsibility.  Before and again, like many a teenager leaving home, those who have a sense of authoritative freedom have disregarded and will disregard any limitations that might have previously constrained them.  Who cares what the Queen thinks?  Who cares what the Bible teaches?  Who cares what millennia of marriage has meant and its place in our story?  Who cares what the Church thinks?  Who cares what the Pope thinks, or the Islamic world thinks?  We can make our own, more perfect world.  Look, they think, we just did.  'An important step forward', David Cameron (and Ed Miliband) called it.  At least we can agree that it is an important step.  On that the redefiners and the Creator of marriage do agree.

 

We celebrate freedom not because it gets things right but because it reinforces human responsibility.  There will be no Britons of this generation who can look God in the eye (if that were possible) and say, "They messed about with your idea of marriage".  Do we seriously think that this Parliament would be redefining marriage if 90% of the voters were strongly opposed?  If a United Kingdom Marriage Party had been formed and UKMP had 55% in the opinion polls would the Bill voted on today have received the same support?  We all know that exactly the same MPs in exactly the same Parliament would be whistling a very different tune.

 

Freedom means this is our Parliament, our decision, our law, our redefinition, our responsibility and either God sits in his heaven tonight toasting the enlightened way we and David Cameron have improved on His original idea or the Bible is true and He's starting to look away until he calls us to account later.

It's no yoke

Jesus said, Come to me all you who are weary and carrying heavy burdens and I will give you rest.