God in the Garden 3. Seeing Beyond

When we arrived at our house and to this garden there were one or two potted leftovers from previous residents. 

They were either flowering or livening up toward that happening.  It was nice to have a garden hose (our previous house didn't have an outside tap) to help them on their way.

One pot, however, looked a lost cause . . .

Looking at the single flower at the bottom and no apparent buds anywhere else it appeared a waste of a good pot.  I made a mental note to get a good plant for it the next year.  But i watered it anyway.

And suddenly in July - over about two days - it turned into this,  A riot of flowers that essentially buries the leaves!

This has helped my in pandemic ministry.  It feels alot like the leafy, productless pot.  But the watering goes on; perhaps obedience, perhaps habit, perhaps desperation, perhaps faithfulness.

May the God who made and cares for the flowers, care for all of his work in the hearts of mankind too.

World Cup Blogs 14: Iran

While Egypt clearly takes first place as the most Biblical nation in this World Cup, the runner up is equally certain - Iran.  In English translations it is generally called Persia and it figures in many later parts of the Old Testament.

One Bible Book is set entirely in Iran - the Book of Esther.  And one of the Bible's most famous stories also happened at least within its Empire - Daniel's deliverance in the lions' den.

The Iranian National Team have, as their most common nickname, the Lions.  This is very suitable because historically - and not just via Daniel - Persia was closely associated with the lions that populated its vast and wild countryside.

Today, apart from the odd zoo, there are no Persian lions in Persia.  The only wild population of them is found in a Reserve in India.  It is a sad story replicated over so many species of large animals.

God shut the mouths of the lions one night in the Persian Empire.  But in the end the human beings of Persia and elsewhere have brought the Asiatic lions to the brink of extinction.  The world is a poorer place when the only living expression of a lion is on the banners supporting a football team: the World Cup, we note again, is not the answer to everything.

World Cup Blogs 13: Iceland

I pulled the car up, climbed out and took this photograph.

Of course there are countless mountain passes where one could do such a thing and see rocks and more rocks.  But this was not on a mountain pass.  It was on a flat road through what might be, in most parts of the world, fields, meadows, houses, farmland or woodland.  This is Iceland though, and this is rock, and volcanic rock at that.

That Iceland, with a population similar to a London Borough, should be at the World Cup while the world's four most populous nations are not is itself quite miraculous.  That they have achieved so much not only from a small population but in such a geological and climatic background is almost incredible.

In their opening game Iceland scored and drew with the famed footballing nation of Argentina.  How do they do it?  Perhaps the picture holds a clue.

For looked at quickly and without local insight the sight stretching off into the distance is, somehow, green.  This was deep winter and if you visit Iceland in summer the green can be overwhelming so that the rock is invisible.  It is, of course, moss.

When dried it could be used for bedding or to insulate housing structures.  Life is so persistent, so innovative, that a large area with no soil at all can still be very green.

The Icelandic football team, together with nature, remind us that a promising environment is not necessary for success.  

It is a thought that, as a Christian in London in 2018 I find uplifting too.

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.

Ivy

I have been pulling out ivy.  I have never planted ivy at any house I have lived in but it has been a constant companion, appearing in just about every garden I have tended.

 

To be honest, I think this is s natural judgment because many years back while living in a bedsit I was given an ivy plant which I planted (undoubtedly contrary to regulations) outside the building.  A few years later I noticed the building façade had turned wholly green and only God and I knew why . . .

 

Ivy is allegedly in some danger of death during English winters but that has never been my experience (unless I do the killing).  It just stays and gets ready to take over more of the garden than it had previously done.  It clings.

 

Edward Bickersteth noticed that too:

 

Ivy, which unsupported would lay on the ground, by clinging can rise high in the air. The more the wind blows, the more it clings to its support and so is safe.  Similarly Christians are linked to God.

Life

The other day we were walking round an amazing landscaped garden.  Water features, wisely placed roses, glasshouses and beautiful shrubs and flower beds adorned the summer scene.  It was very beautiful, even to a relatively untrained eye such as mine.

 

Then there was a startling section.

 

Simply enough, it was left wild and in such a setting it looked quite wrong (in my own garden it would have blended somewhat better!).  That was not what was startling though.

 

It was startling because it was absolutely full of life.  I don't mean that, instead of one flying insect for every 20 flowers there were two.  I mean startling.  Instead of a decent few insects this area was teeming with them, large butterflies and tiny gnat-like insects and all points in between.  Soon I was hardly looking at the somewhat common looking wild flowers but was staring at this flying sea (to mix the metaphor) of life.

 

We have just spent much of a year in 1 Corinthians.  This letter dispels any notion that the Church of the 21st century is in some kind of qualitative decline for there is portrayed a wild church such as even the trendiest, most rebellious of Christian outlaws in the 21st century would find hard to emulate.  More to the point it was wilder than is the Sunday Assembly, the atheist parody of Christian services but is actually more decent than Corinth was.

 

Wild. 

 

But there was life there.  Like the insects he created, God does not seek out human formality and order for its own sake.   He is the author and partaker of spiritual life and if that is in the chaotic meadow it is better to him than a neatly ordered spiritual mausoleum.