What Three Words: 1. ///glaze.gown.glory

You may be familiar with the location-finding app what3words.  Splitting the whole planet into small squares it provides a unique guide to a location.  It's obvious advantage is in a field or on a mountain where it is plainly more helpful than 'past the clump of trees' or 'next to the round rock'.

The words themselves are random - or so we suppose.  However, when looking it up to add it to our church directions I confess to becoming alarmed.  Thankfully we have a big building and this offers a wide choice - which as you will see in future blogs - is just as well.

I settled on the box GLAZE GOWN GLORY.  Mainly, I think, drawn by the attraction of the word glory for a Place of Worship.  Perhaps the preacher in me enjoyed the 3 Gs alliteration.

My best theology of it is that one day our eyes will glaze as we gaze, dressed in a gown of white, upon Christ's glory.  See, you can make a sermon out of anything!

It represents a spot somewhere near a vestry.  Why didn't I use the entrance, or the street by the entrance?  That's another blog . . .

The Glory of Salvation

Among the questions we ask is: why does God not bring all the sufferings of this world to an end RIGHT NOW - assuming he can?

Today at our Fellowship meeting we thought about the words 'NO LONGER', found in many Bible verses.  Including this one in Revelation 22: 

No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be within the city, and His servants will worship Him.

Yes but - why must we wait for that happy day?

In any Lifeboat Station, as in the picture above, a place of honour is given to the record of salvation.  What, after all, is a lifeboat that has never saved?  There is no lifeboat in our back garden pond, and no frightening waves or storms, but there is also no record of salvation there.

The same book of Revelation that reveals the coming day when the curse is no longer also reveals the adoring praise of heaven to the Saviour, the Lamb at the centre of heaven's glory.  His glory is the salvation he has accomplished, the salvation is from the cursed environment of sin.

So the agonies of this world are the backcloth of his glory, a trick pulled by Satan and rebels like me that has backfired to the glory of the God against whom we sinned.  The storm of sin has - and continues to - produce ever more praise to the one whose grace saves human beings from the curse of their own making.

And they sang a new song: "Worthy are You to take the scroll and open its seals, because You were slain, and by Your blood You purchased for God those from every tribe and tongue and people and nation

All Souls

This is an interesting day to me this year, the year in which I laid my Dad's remains to rest.  Mostly but not exclusively in Catholic settings this is All Souls Day, or the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed.



There is unquestionably a fellowship between the Church on earth and the Church at rest but this has been an awkward fellowship to define.  It has alarming, spooky elements when Spiritualists or those inclined their way seek to speak with the Dead.  It is only a little better in the one way communication by which the Saints are allegedly spoken to in prayer (without any assurance that they can hear and no Bible promise that suggests they can).  In evangelicalism a peculiar two part problem arises when the Faithful Departed are dispensed with in somewhat the way of any text containing the word Thou, i.e. they are fine but they are history.  This, however is countered by a hope that in the sweet by and by we will meet on that beautiful shore and reconstitute our families.

This latter hope has always bemused me given that my Grandad was also someone else's nephew or Grandson - so how would that work?  Jesus was asked a similar question about married reunion - what happens if a wife has remarried six times?  Who's she married to up there?  Jesus answer is authoritative and exactly explains what the future state is all about - one family in God not Mr and Mrs, Father and Son.

Or to put it another way, today a son celebrates not a departed father but a departed brother in Christ; a widower not a departed wife but a departed sister in Christ. 

There are other times when old relationships, contingent to this world, may be reflected upon with tears or cheers.  But once in a while it is good to remember our soul-fellowship; to remember that relationship in baptism which binds us eternally; to remember the Lover whose love modelled the best of our earthly love without ever being matched down here; to remember that unity in Him that holds us tighter to him and to each other than any imitation found in the relationships recorded on birth, marriage and death certificates. 

This is the fellowship planned and formed and preserved by the love of Jesus.

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.