Thanksgiving Wisdom: 4. Flattery

The culture of the United States accepts, far more willingly than that of the UK, the idea of talking people up.  As someone who worked in the US I went through strange reactions to this.

At first I hated it, wanting my old British realism.

Then I started to love it.  How much more motivating to be told how great you are!  I started to see why many Americans I knew exhibited far more confidence than we did in the UK.

Then, later, I started to revert to type.  Flattery can only take you so far, and sincerity seemed a more beautifying companion.   Donald, are you reading?

Wherever this braggadocio derived from, we can be confident it did not travel over on the Mayflower from members of John Robinson's congregation in Leiden.  For he said of flattery:

Flattery is in all cases and persons a base sin . . . but in ministers of God's holy Word is most pernicious.  How few are there so hating their vices as may not rather seek friends that cover their faults than cure them by faithful reproofs.  A man needs no other flatterer than his own partial heart to infatuate him. 

God in the Garden 2. Hidden Problems

It even surprises me.

When we filmed the Easter Morning pandemic recording in the garden there was the awkwardness of a derelict pond motor cupboard, used by a previous resident to create a flowing water feature.  It is clearly many years into its decay.

'Why,' I wondered, 'have I never fixed it?'   

I ventured my best explanation - that in the summer it was hidden, because in truth I could hardly remember thinking about it in days in the garden over the years.

And so it proved to be.  I simply hadn't realised how totally the greenery in the pond left the old cupboard out of sight and out of mind.  Here it is in the summer:

That is why it is never fixed!

As we thought about at Easter, the reason for the coming and sacrifice of Jesus is because sin is never hidden from Him - it required action.  The reason why humankind can be equivocal about, blase towards or disinterested in the great salvation Jesus achieved is because we simply cover up our sinfulness to ourselves and among ourselves.  It doesn't need fixing, so we don't need Jesus.

This strategy fails to take account of the end of the story - where what God sees is the basis of our eternal accountability.

Good News in a Pandemic: 5. NHS (etc.)

Someone writing about the National Health Service was wistfully observing that it seems to have become a national religion.

There is no doubt that the NHS is held in high regard by most Britons - even ones who might tolerate the opposite extreme in the USA were they living there.  The pandemic centres everyone on doctors, nurses and paramedics and in the UK they are synonymous with the NHS.

Thus every Thursday we clap our praise to our religion in the form of community thanks for NHS staff (more recently widened to care workers in general). 

Normally applause is reserved for sportspeople, for actors or for speeches.  But when we are sick, or when we fear we might be sick, we suddenly see the value of the doctors and nurses.

"It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick", said Jesus (Luke 5:31).  "I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance."

It is the person who needs a Saviour - who knows they need a Saviour - who praises Jesus the Saviour.

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

Glorious Ruins

I've been sorting through my ridiculously large collection of photographs, a product of the digital age's invitation to wastefulness.  Though I have a moderate interest in history it is hardly my obsession and so I am amazed to find how many photographs I have that look something like this . . .

It is a picture among many pictures that I have of ruins. 

In my defence, I have rarely found myself alone as I have stood seeking to get the corner of the broken buttress or the top of the long-empty window frame in my composition.  Ruins, and Britain has a seemingly biased love for them, are somehow glorious.  So much so that, for example, I am not as sure I would have taken this picture of the significant but unpretentious abbey if it were still complete.

Glorious ruins was the picturesque phrase coined by Francis Schaeffer to describe humanity in this fallen world.  I think that is very good.  The vestiges of greatness are there.  Yet history cruelly draws our gaze to horrific wonders; isolated or even systemic stories of infanticide, a fate only narrowly escaped by the infant Lord of Glory in Herod's jurisdiction.  There is no human aspect that does not show brokenness as well as beauty, where the glory is the glory of ruins.

It is the peculiar work of God that makes humanity's ugly story somehow glorious.  Not so that we will see our belonging in the ruins but that we may see a portent of our undeserved glory there. 

I thank Thee, Lord, that here our souls

Though amply blessed,

Can never find, although they seek

A perfect rest;

Nor ever shall, until they lean

On Jesus’ breast.

World Cup Blogs 25: Senegal

This has been the second World Cup finals tournament for which Senegal have qualified.  At their first tournament in they surprised everyone by reaching the Quarter Finals..  In this year's tournament they made their mark in another, less satisfactory, way.

It is straightforward to decide a single game that is equal by having a penalty shoot-out, it is not so simple in the four-team Group Stage.  But what happens when two teams have the same points from the three results, drew with each other, and have scored and let in the same number of goals?

While it sounds a little unlikely, this scenario over three games in a low scoring sport with fairly equal teams is not that strange and nearly happened in a couple of groups.  And it DID happen in Senegal's group.

In such a case FIFA decided this time that the next determining factor would be yellow and red cards.  In this first use of that deciding system the team that was eliminated by the rule was Senegal who had accumulated two more cards to Japan. A first!

A classic example, then, of the life truth that little sins can grow into big consequences.

It's Missing 1. A Lost Peace

Missing things are often interesting.

Take jigsaw puzzles.  If it has a thousand pieces and, on using all that are available, one is missing then that is the one that gains all your attention.

To me this works in other things.  Not least hymns.  How many times, for example, have churchgoers sung the Wesley hymn And can it be and assumed (because it flows) that it is intact?  Well it isn't.

Including a little of the traditional verses four and then the final verse, here is the original verse 5:

. . . My chains fell off, my heart was free,

I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.

Still the small inward voice I hear,

That whispers all my sins forgiven;

Still the atoning blood is near,

That quenched the wrath of hostile Heaven.

I feel the life His wounds impart;

I feel the Saviour in my heart.

No condemnation now I dread;

Jesus, and all in Him, is mine . . .

For any worship leader or organist the advantages of removing this verse are obvious.  Its personal, reflective words would rudely interrupt the grand musical transition from the victorious end of verse 4 to the equally victorious beginning of the final verse.  The musician has an ally in many a theologian.  What's all this about hostile Heaven?  How could a cuddly god be hostile toward sin?  If god loves us she/he must at least love in a small way all the stuff we do - she/he could never inhabit a hostility?  Why, we'd have to put her/him on a register if she/he wasn't careful!

But then again.  What if God really hates sin?  What if having rose up and followed thee I begin to share his loathing of it.  Then I do not just need a tuba stop or drum roll of confidence - I need a whisper.  A whisper that God and I can walk together even though he hates sin and I still at times like it rather too much.

Leadership

A Son's Tribute - Caravans

Although this picture comes from a generation earlier, it depicts the kind of setting in which my Dad began Christian ministry as a Wickliffe Preacher.  Three young men, a caravan plastered with big texts and a drive from village to village and including market towns and occasionally urban centres with missions to teach the children about the Gospel.

Today's children see many more words than these.  Why, as I write this they are busy tweeting them to one another, looking at them on endless websites and generally being bombarded by the messengers of the global village.

 

We smile at the change.

 

The quality of the media is vastly different but the message carried is vastly inferior.  Windows 8 has introduced no new input that improves on THIS IS A FAITHFUL SAYING THAT CHRIST JESUS CAME INTO THE WORLD TO SAVE SINNERS.

 

Sure, we can save documents, blogs, digital images, spreadsheets and the like.  But is there a new, improved way to save sinners?

 

One way to look at this in the 21st century is to say that we no longer interpret behaviours as sin.  That is to miss the point.  Sin is not the human way of looking at human behaviour, it is the revealed divine way.  Like the arrested bloke's, "Get yer 'ands off me. I ain't done nuthin' wrong." this self-described innocence needs some higher corroboration.  The Bible makes it clear enough that we cannot change the way God looks at our sin.  The Gospel declares that God has.  He has sent a saving Messiah - Christ Jesus came to save.

 

Throughout his life my dad lived with people gently observing him as pleasantly quaint and earnestly unnecessary.   It is the evangelist's lot.  But they were wrong.  He was witnessing to the only solution to the only long term problem we humans face.

 

 

 



Dentist

Yesterday I went to the dentist.

My official position on this is that 'I hate the dentist'.  I am not alone in thinking that of course.

This is wrong in a number of ways. 

For a start, my dentist is very nice.  She's funny and, as far as I can tell, she's good at her job.  So I don't hate my dentist at all.  Perhaps, instead, I hate going to my dentist.

But that is wrong-headed too.  I'm afraid my teeth are not in the condition of the ones in the mirror above but at least this time there was no work to be done.  To find that out, and have them cleaned, and come away with change from a £20.00 note - it's hardly the worst thing in my week.  Perhaps I hate being treated by my dentist.

This too is crazily wrong.  Frankly, I have had most of my dental treatment at short notice when I have been desperate to be treated by my dentist.  It is closer to the truth to say I hate not being treated by my dentist - the kind of dread that comes with a worrying crunch on something hard when away on holiday.  Perhaps it's just the thought - I hate the thought of being treated by my dentist.

But no.  That thought is a great privilege as I walk past my dentist's surgery as I often do.  Along the road from her is my doctor's surgery, down from there the hospital (just past the pharmacies).  To walk to all four and home again would be about two miles.  How many places in the world is that possible?

I don't hate my dentist at all.  I hate having bad teeth sometimes.

And when somebody says the hate God or Jesus (or probably even the Church) they probably mean they hate not being righteous - only they never think about it long enough to work it through.

Gone

History will not easily forget Osama Bin Laden.  Any attempt to describe the first decade of this century will almost certainly feature his name and in his death he has comfortably dislodged the Royal Wedding from the front pages.  

His infamy hasn't stopped the American government acting to try to make his name and reputation disappear as soon as possible following his killing by a Special Forces raid in Pakistan.  They opted to remove his body and dump it (I suppose the official version is bury it) in the Arabian Gulf.

In one way this reminds me of the Roman authority's Easter Guard, positioned in front of the tomb to make sure that the dead died.  It is a curiously fearful thing to do, a superpower vs. one man.

On a more heartening note it reminds me of God.  The prophet Micah describes God dealing with his people's sin; You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. (Micah 7:19)  Sin is God's enemy and he doesn't want it coming back to haunt us.