Great (Hymn) One Liners 11. More

Matt Papa's worship song What love could remember was written in this century but owes its greatest line to an 18th Century sermon by John Newton which inspired it:

Our sins they are many, His mercy is more

Among great hymn lines it is hard to imagine a greater one than this.  We come to worship trying to block out of our thoughts the behaviours of another week, the things undone or scarcely done or wrongly done.  Yet in coming to our great yet forgiving and merciful God we discover that the pile of detriment is dwarfed by the sea of mercy.  Something John Newton had needed to depend on more than many.

Hallelujah.

For other blogs in this series click on the 'hymnline' tag

Psalms in Lent: Psalm 105 - Lockdown Anniversary

The past week marked a year since the UK went into full lockdown.  Nothing in any living Briton's experience of life in the UK prepared us for that day and its subsequent year.

It also marked a year since our household went into lockdown when our nurse daughter came home from hospital with Covid symptoms.

We celebrated the unwelcome anniversary with an Indian curry and a sense of quiet gratitude to God for a year of provision and safety in the storm.

Psalm 105 seemed an apt place to be one day last week in our Lent readings.  In it the story of Israel is recounted, and the providence of God celebrated, which I abbreviate below.  Just one line at the end is, however, significant - that they might observe his statutes, and keep his laws.

When the Lord is merciful to us, it is incumbent on us to respond in faithfulness back to him.  And if not - as Israel was later to discover - it all happens again  . .

O give thanks unto the Lord; call upon his name: 

. . . He is the Lord our God: his judgments are in all the earth.

He hath remembered his covenant for ever,

the word which he commanded to a thousand generations.

When they went from one nation to another,  from one kingdom to another people;

he suffered no man to do them wrong:

yea, he reproved kings for their sakes;

Joseph, who was sold for a servant:

whose feet they hurt with fetters:

he was laid in iron:

until the time that his word came:

the word of the Lord tried him.

The king sent and loosed him;

even the ruler of the people, and let him go free.

Israel also came into Egypt;

and Jacob sojourned in the land of Ham.

And he increased his people greatly;

and made them stronger than their enemies.

He turned their heart to hate his people,

to deal subtilly with his servants.

He sent Moses his servant;

and Aaron whom he had chosen.

They shewed his signs among them,

and wonders in the land of Ham.

He brought them forth also with silver and gold:

and there was not one feeble person among their tribes.

Egypt was glad when they departed:

for the fear of them fell upon them.

He spread a cloud for a covering;

and fire to give light in the night.

The people asked, and he brought quails,

and satisfied them with the bread of heaven.

He opened the rock, and the waters gushed out;

they ran in the dry places like a river.

For he remembered his holy promise,

and Abraham his servant.

And he brought forth his people with joy,

and his chosen with gladness:

and gave them the lands of the heathen:

and they inherited the labour of the people;

that they might observe his statutes, and keep his laws.

Praise ye the Lord.

Mercy on the 134 bus

A few stops down the road from us one of London's latest knife attacks took place - on a bus.  The next day I sat on the same numbered bus and all of a sudden a 134 bus felt all bad.

The Curate's Egg is famously used to describe the part-good, part bad.

The wit derives from the curate awkwardly answering the Bishop that his bad egg is good in some parts.  Awed by the Clerical Eminence he is too timid to agree that it is all bad.  But a bad egg is, of course, just bad.

Life is a curate's egg of good and bad.  Only in the bad, such as on my 134 bus, it rarely feels that there's another chunk that is/was/will be good.  Only one organ may be diseased but the whole body seems bad;  only one neighbourhood gang is hostile, but the whole place feels unsafe; only one charge relating to one incident is made in court against you but you feel wholly criminal; only one relative is dangerously ill but the whole family lives under a cloud.  And so on. 

Psalm 23 does this in reverse. 

Goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. 

Part of life is goodness from God.  And the other part?  Well, others may call it badness, the wrong side of the street, a run of bad luck or the going getting tough.  But for the believer it is interpreted as the place of God's Mercy.  Was my bus ride no longer good?  Then it had become a place, for me, of mercy instead.  But no less divine.

Barsanuphius

I'm not the greatest authority on Saints Days but today being that of Barsanuphius I thought he deserved some attention. In fact attention was exactly what he didn't have as he disappeared for 50 years as a hermit and communicated by correspondence only. That has a certain appeal as a lifestyle when faced with an unsympathetic culture, but he also wrote many things that offered wisdom to those more engaged with the world than he . . .

Do not demand love from your neighbour, because you will suffer if you don’t receive it; but better still, you indicate your love toward your neighbour and you will settle down. In this way, you will lead your neighbour toward love.

Don’t exchange your love toward your neighbour for some type of object, because in having love toward your neighbour, you acquire within yourself Him who is most precious in the whole world.

Forsake the petty so as to acquire the great; spurn the excessive and everything meaningless so as to acquire the valuable.

Shelter the sinner if it brings you no harm. Through this you will encourage him toward repentance and reform — and attract the Lord’s mercy to yourself. With a kind word and all possible means, fortify the infirm and the sorrowful and that Right Arm that controls everything, will also support you. With prayers and sorrow of your heart, share your lot with the aggrieved and the source of God’s mercy will open to your entreaties.

Do not distinguish the worthy from the unworthy. Let everyone be equal to you for good deeds, so that you may be able to also attract the unworthy toward goodness, because through outside acts, the soul quickly learns to be reverent before God.

Do not annoy or hate anyone – neither for faith, nor for his evil deeds… If you want to convert someone to truth, then grieve over him, with tears and love say a word or two to him, but do not burst out in anger, and may he not see any sign of hatred on your part, because love is not able to hate, or become irritated, or reproach anyone with passion…

Reigning, Raining

It was a wet day in London yesterday as I stood on tip-toe to see a distant glimpse of the Queen on the river.  Nearly as much water above her as below her!  I thought I owed it to her long reign to make some effort as I had last seen her in 1961 when she was driven past our flat.  (I was very, very young . . .)

I'd been thinking.

Queen Elizabeth has now reigned longer than all but one of the Kings of Israel in the Bible. The one who reigned a little less than her is proof, if such were needed, that longevity is not itself a virtue. Our Queen has witnessed marked spiritual decline in her nation during her reign but she herself has exercised considerable goodness and God-fearing stability in the midst of it all. Mannasseh reigned in Jerusalem for 55 years and no such compliments can be paid to him.

As with all long-reigning monarchs he started early - at twelve years old in fact. The son of the godly king Hezekiah he set about undoing all the good that his father had done. Over centuries since Joshua led them into the Promised Land the Israelite people and kings had struggled to be holy and good among the Canaanites. Mannasseh didn't appear to struggle - he behaved exactly as if he was a Canaanite king. He involved his own son in fire sacrifice, practiced witchcraft, placed the sex symbol Asherah pole in the middle of God's temple and more besides. He was astonishing but for all the wrong reasons: longevity gives its beneficiary time but not goodness.

Thankfully Israel's longest reigning monarch demonstrates that goodness itself has greater longevity than evil. His was a peculiar enthronement - his initial throne the place where he was lifted up to die, his title King of the Jews written first by a foreign official, his crown one of thorns, his miltary escort spitting at him and his people telling jokes at his expense or running away.

The prophet Isaiah, though, foresaw that a throne will be established in steadfast love, and of his government and peace there will be no end. The King of the Jews remains the world's longest serving human monarch, an honour recognised in Queen Elizabeth's own coronation service when the Dean said, Receive this Orb set under the Cross, and remember that the whole world is subject to the Power and Empire of Christ our Redeemer.

Manasseh's story is remarkable for its ending. The Assyrians captured him, bound him and dumped him in a dungeon far away in Babylon. When, records the Chronicler, he was in distress, he entreated the favour of the Lord his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers. He prayed to him, and God was moved by his entreaty and heard his plea and brought him again to Jerusalem into his kingdom. Then Manasseh knew that the Lord was God.

He set about undoing some of the spiritual carnage he had created. How grateful Manasseh and every human being should be that the longest-serving monarch and the One who will remain on the throne when all other thrones have fallen, is unalterably good and unfathomably merciful.