Song for Hefina

Recently came across this piece, written after an 18-week miscarriage in 1995. The little girl was due to be born in June 1996, hence the name we chose for her ('June' in Welsh is Mehefin). Posting it here fwiw.



Song for Hefina

Out of time,
yet your time hadn't come;
Out of the darkness,
into eternal light.

Joy we never tasted
and shared at your dawn,
Is multiplied to you
in heaven's glory song.

And lullabies soft whispered
never soothed a troubled cry;
Yet music wholly other
holds and charms you now.

Our arms never held
and cradled you in love;
His are everlasting,
how can we long for return?

Tested and examined,
consigned to history.
Our hearts will never forget you
nor will our tears dry
until the day faith turns to sight
and God, who is rich in mercy,
unfurls the banner
of love's final triumph.

On the cusp

of a study-week, to be spent in our Dandy, sans famile (as Alain Dah-vey might say). Here are the books I plan to take and (maybe) to read:

John Goldingay, Old Testament Theology Vol 2 - Israel's Faith
Kevin Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine
Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book
Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way
Miroslav Volf, Free of Charge
Miroslav Volf, The End of Memory
Larry Crabb, Soul Talk
Chris Wright, The Mission of God

I guess that's enough. I've never had a study week before so I figured that it's best to take too many books rather than take only a few and then find they aren't what's most needed. I also decided to take a variety of styles and subjects. And some are small and some are big.

Of course, a Bible or three will also be needed. And a mobile phone, a set of headphones and directions to the nearest public house showing the Champions' League final on Wednesday. The essentials, so to speak.

The Dandy? This is it:

the words that saved my life

I know, LORD, that your laws are righteous,
and that in faithfulness you have afflicted me.

May your unfailing love be my comfort,
according to your promise to your servant.

(Psalm 119:75,76)

Tagged!

Msr Alain Dah-vey has apparently tagged me (it hasn't happened since I was at Junior School in Pwllheli) so I ought to try to reply (this is where he did so).

Three characters I wish were real, so I could meet them:
i) Reginald Perrin
ii) Esther Greenwood (from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath)
iii) Querry (from A Burnt-Out Case by Graham Greene)

Three characters I would like to be:
i) Reginald Perrin
ii) Richard Hannay
iii) Alf Tupper (from The Victor comic for boys)

Three characters who scare me:
i) Dr Mary Malone (from Philip Pulman's His Dark Materials)
ii) Maxwell Edison (from Maxwell's Silver Hammer by The Beatles)
iii) The Cook (in Yann Martel's Life of Pi)

I need to tag 3 people. I only know one who qualifies: The Masked Badger. You're tagged, sonny.

Prescience

Americans are not particularly good at sensing the real elements of another people's culture. It helps them to approach foreigners with carefree warmth and an animated lack of misgiving. It also makes them, on the whole, poor administrators on foreign soil. They find it almost impossible to believe that poorer peoples, far from the Statue of Liberty, should not want in their hearts to become Americans. If it should happen that America, in its new period of world power, comes to do what every other world power has done: if Americans should have to govern large numbers of foreigners, you must expect that Americans will be well hated before they are admired for themselves.

Alistair Cooke, The Immigrant Strain, 6th May 1946.

Why bother to read the Bible? Why bother to preach?

Christians feed on Scripture. Holy Scripture nurtures the holy community as food nurtures the human body. Christians don't simply learn or study or use Scripture; we assimilate it, take it into our lives in such a way that it gets metabolised into acts of love, cups of cold water, missions into all the world, healing and evangelism and justice in Jesus' name, hands raised in adoration of the Father, feet washed in company with the Son.

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book, p.18

faithful servant; faithful son

In Numbers 12 we're told that Moses "was a very humble man, more humble than anyone else on the face of the earth" (v.3). The context for that comment is the jealousy of Aaron and Miriam; part of the Lord's response is to declare that Moses "is faithful in all my house" (v.7) and, unlike other prophets who receive the Lord's word in dreams and visions, Moses has face-to-face dealings with the LORD and sees his form (v.8). There could be no clearer nor more powerful affirmation and exaltation of Moses as the LORD's servant.

The writer of Hebrews also makes use of this incident (or at least of the LORD's commendation of Moses) but in a quite unexpected way. Yes, "Moses was faithful as a servant in all God's house" (Heb. 3:5); the commendation is repeated almost word for word, but the writer has in view one who is even greater than this Moses: "But Christ is faithful as a son over God's house" (3:6).

Moses was outstanding in his generation, commended by the LORD and deeply privileged. But there is one even more worthy of commendation, outstanding in all time and whose privilege derives from his being "the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being" (Heb. 1:3). As the house-builder, he has greater honour than the house itself (Heb. 3:3) and as the son over that house is worthy of the deepest devotion and the highest praise.

of nails & masts

5 points from Tom Wright, mediated by Peter Leithart.

hallowing the name

Hallowed be your name - the adoration that springs from the appreciation of God as our Father in heaven. The question I had was this: who does the hallowing and how? My assumption was that it is we (in concert with all humanity) who are to do the former by living hallowed lives, in every context and in every possible way.

But enter Ezekiel 36.

Therefore say to the house of Israel, 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says: It is not for your sake, house of Israel, that I am going to do these things, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations where you have gone. I will show the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, the name you have profaned among them. Then the nations will know that I am the LORD, declares the Sovereign LORD, when I am proved holy through you before their eyes. (vv.22,23)

It is the LORD who will show his name to be holy, who will hallow his name. And he will do so through the return from exile and the gift of his Spirit:

For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. Then you will live in the land I gave your ancestors; you will be my people, and I will be your God. (vv.24-28)

That is to say, God will hallow his name in and through his Son and his great achievements, through the great events of the gospel. And through those achievements being visible in the lives of the people he brings back from the exile (of sin) and into whom he gifts his Spirit.

Maybe it's startlingly obvious to all & sundry but it was a fresh discovery to me. And a welcome, humbling one.

evening fear

In the cool of the day, the LORD God walked in the garden and the man and his wife hid in fear from him. Sin had spoiled the world.

In John 20:19ff, it is evening once more and again there is fear - but this time of men, not the Lord. A fear that the same fate will befall the disciples that had befallen their beloved Master. And then he's there, among them, speaking words of peace. No longer is there any need for evening fear, because sin has been dealt with and death has been conquered.

He shows them his hands and his side, the evidence of being so recently slaughtered. And their response to such a sight, to such a devastating display of the horrors of death and the mauling meted out by sin and evil? They are overjoyed because the one they see, the one whose ruptured side and battered hands are in full view, is the LORD.

Far from denying his lordship, these marks are the crown he wears, the vindication of his reign, the symbols of victory.

And the reason why evening fear - all fear - can be banished forever.

Chris Wright on Noah & Mission

Although we live on a cursed earth, we also live on a covenanted earth.

This is God's earth, and God is covenantally committed to its survival, just as later revelation will show us that God is also covenantally committed to its ultimate redemption.

Our mission takes place within the framework of God's universal promise to the created order.

The rainbow promise spans whatever horizon we can ever see.

Christopher J H Wright, The Mission of God, IVP 2006, pp.326,7

Blessing, not cursing

In commenting on Genesis 3, John Goldingay (Old Testament Theology p.139) notices that "God actively blesses; God does not actively curse, but declares that the snake and ground are cursed." While acknowledging that "at one level the distinction is purely syntactical" he goes on to (fairly, imo) comment that "To describe God as blessing but not directly cursing suggests that blessing is Yhwh's natural activity, while cursing is less so...In Yhwh's nature blessing has priority over cursing, love over anger, mercy over retribution."

An interesting example that seems to confirm Goldingay's observation is found in Exodus 20:5 where the Lord delcares that he will punish the children for the sin of their parents to the fourth generation but will show love to a thousand generations of those who love him. Because his priority is blessing, not cursing.

The Best Paragraph Ever Written

I believe this to be one of the finest paragraphs ever written. It makes you want to continue reading, its use of english is faultless and its pace and tone are exemplary (I'm sure the venerable Mr Zinsser would agree). The author is Eugene Peterson and he is writing about the pastoral ministry.

Here it is:

The adjective apocalyptic is not commonly found in company with the noun pastor. I can't remember ever hearing them in the same sentence. They grew up on different sides of the tracks. I'd like to play Cupid between the two words and see if I can instigate a courtship.

(from a piece entitled The Apocalyptic Pastor, found in various places including here)

I read the paragraph to my wife (whose name is a palindrome) and told her that I would give my life-savings to be able to write like that. She half-laughed, safe in the knowledge that were my intent true it wouldn't change our lives much. When I told her that I would sell this house to be able to write like that, she stood aghast and said "Surely you wouldn't!" I don't recall my response but it probably masked, for her sake, how real that desire was. Because it's the finest paragraph I have ever read.

sermons on john 13-17

for what it's worth, my sermon notes on john 13-17, preached in swinton a couple of years ago, are available here (and also via the sermons link in the sidebar).

those who sleep in boats

Jonah is commissioned by God but flees.
Jesus is commissioned by God and follows.

Jonah is caught in a storm sent by God.
Jesus is caught in a storm of satanic fury.

Jonah sleeps through the storm while the others on the boat are full of terror.
Jesus sleeps through the storm while the others on the boat are full of terror.

Jonah sleeps callously and carelessly.
Jesus sleeps content in his Father's care.

Jonah is woken and his voice (indirectly) is the means for the storm to be stilled ("throw me into the sea").
Jesus is woken and his voice is the means for the storm to be stilled ("Peace; be still.").

Two ways to sleep in a boat; one way to do so well.

Leah: pain and praise

Genesis 29:31-35 records the birth and naming of Jacob's first four sons by Leah. Interestingly, it is she who names the children, not Jacob (is he really that disinterested?) and the names, along with the reasoning behind them, seem to give some insight into Leah's handling of the pain of her situation.

When the first son is born, she names him Reuben because she believes YHWH has seen her misery, being relatively unloved by her husband. Her hope is that Jacob will love her now.

But that seems not to be the case. When her second son is born, she names him Simeon because YHWH has heard she is (still) not loved. The fond hopes that surrounded the birth of Reuben were clearly not fulfilled.

Leah's pain evidently continues; when her third son is born she names him Levi, ardently hoping that now at last his birth will cause her husband to be attached to her. It seems a forlorn hope. She has been placed in an intolerable situation and not by her own choice. She is deeply pained at Jacob's rejection of her and longs for him to have a change of heart in order to heal the pain in hers. But it seems Jacob is unmoved by the kindness of YHWH in giving sons to he and Leah and blind to the favour of YHWH towards Leah.

Yet when her fourth son is born, she names him Judah saying, "This time I will praise YHWH". No mention this time of her husband, nor of her desperate desire to be loved and accepted by him (an entirely understandable and legitimate desire).

But Leah, so slighted and demeaned, is not abandoned in her misery and with the birth of Judah she recognises this. No doubt the pain remains but she is able now to praise YHWH out of her pain. Reconciled to her situation, she is able to rejoice in the God who is ever-loving and ever-loyal to his people. "This time" her focus is higher than her husband and her joy greater than he could arouse or sustain. To be loved and accepted by YHWH and to know his favour means more than anything else could.

Maybe it's no coincidence that at this point "she stopped having children".

stirring the pot

In many books, a new chapter begins with a quote from some notable or other, or some not-notable-but-still-quotable or other; in his book, The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church, Alan Hirsch does just that. Here are a couple of such quotes that are worth pondering:

A church which pitches its tents without constantly looking out for new horizons, which does not continually strike camp, is being untrue to its calling.. . . [We must] play down our longing for certainty, accept what is risky, and live by improvisation and experiment. (Hans Küng, The Church as the People of God)

If you want to build a ship, don’t summon people to buy wood, prepare tools, distribute jobs, and organize the work, rather teach people the yearning for the wide, boundless ocean. (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

Leithart Links

Peter Leithart's writing is always stimulating - here are some recent posts that seemed especially so to me.

Unbearable Burden of Evangelicalism

You Shall Know Them By Their Fear

Fear and Fear

Christian Idolatry

A huge religious marketplace has been set up in North America to meet the needs and fantasies of people just like us. There are conferences and gatherings custom-designed to give us the lift we need. There are books, videos, and seminars that promise to let us in on the Christian "secret" of whatever it is we feel is lacking in our life-financial security, well-behaved children, weight loss, sex, travel to holy sites, exciting worship, celebrity teachers. The people who promote these goods and services all smile a lot and are good-looking. They are obviously not bored.

It isn't long before we're standing in line to buy whatever is being offered. And because none of the purchases does what we had hoped for, or at least not for long, we're soon back to buy another, and then another. The process is addicting. We become consumers of packaged spiritualities.

This also is idolatry. We never think of using this term because everything we're buying or paying for is defined by the adjective Christian. But idolatry it is, nevertheless. It's God packaged as a product-God depersonalized and made available as a technique or a program. The Christian market in idols has never been more brisk or lucrative. The late medieval indulgences that provoked Luther's righteous wrath are small potatoes compared to what's going on in our evangelical backyard.

Eugene H. Peterson, Living the Resurrection, NavPress 2006, pp.35,36

How to Encourage the Church

The incident of Peter and Cornelius is a major one within the book of Acts. Cornelius is presented as a prime example of the gospel being received by Gentiles. But, in terms of reaching out to Gentiles, Acts 11:19ff could be at least as significant as the Cornelius incident. It may well have begun before Peter’s encounter with Cornelius (see v.19) and, in terms of numbers and the future significance of the church at Antioch, it is extremely important.

All of which makes it very interesting that this expansion to the Gentiles is not an organised mission but takes place naturally as the church scatters following the death of Stephen. In Acts, missionaries are sent out by churches and usually work to a clear plan but that needs to be set alongside what we see here of these early believers sharing the gospel as they went.

The calling and responsibility to reach out to others is not the preserve of pastors, evangelists and missionaries; it is a whole church calling and we each have a responsibility to take it to heart. These early believers shared the gospel naturally, as they travelled, as they set up home, as they worked. And this was the norm, not the exception.

It is, of course, right and good that churches and mission agencies plan and partner in the sending-out of gospel workers. It would be a betrayal of the Lord not to do so. But the responsibility of churches and mission agencies is not simply to initiate ministries; it is also about being sensitive to and catching-up with what the Lord is already doing in spontaneous and (humanly-speaking) unplanned ways. That was the reality faced here by the church in Jerusalem.

As the gospel spreads among the Gentiles, one of the big questions to be faced is, How will the church in Jerusalem react? When Philip preached in Samaria, they sent Peter and John to authenticate the work, to give it the apostolic imprimatur. Given that these are Gentiles, will they react with suspicion and try to suppress what is going on?

What they do is send Barnabas to them. This time they send one man, not two. He isn’t an apostle. He’s a native of Cyprus, as were many of these believers. And he was a man of exceptional spirit, warm and encouraging. This doesn’t smack of control and suspicion but of contribution and support for this young church. The church at Jerusalem was the original one; the apostles were the authentic witnesses to the Lord Jesus and his gospel. But that doesn’t mean they must hereafter control everything that happens in terms of the spread of the gospel. It is the Lord Jesus who directs the mission; they are his co-workers. So instead of sending people to check out this new development, they choose instead to send a man who will cheer on those involved in it.

Sending Barnabas to Antioch was perhaps the greatest thing the church at Jerusalem ever did for their brothers and sisters there. He is an outstanding example of a Christian and of what a church-worker should be. He isn’t jealous of their work, nor does he want to take it over; he rejoices in the work and encourages them to keep going and remain true to the Lord. His concern was not sectarian (to make them Jews) but to strengthen their Christian life and witness.

But this humble man is ready to acknowledge that he doesn’t have all the gifts necessary to help this church and so he goes on a long 200-mile round trip to bring Saul to join him in the work. He recognised the Lord’s calling of Saul and the gifts he’d been given – what a great encouragement to Saul that must have been! And, in God’s providence, this almost incidental action has immense strategic significance for the whole progress of the gospel; it is from Antioch that Barnabas and Saul will be sent out by the church into further mission.

The rest, as they say and as we know, is history.


(this piece first appeared in the UFM Worldwide magazine, 4 Corners, Jan-April 2007)

A Hermeneutic Of Trust

In Shakespeare's Measure for Measure the self-righteous villain Angelo pronounces a death sentence on Claudio, who is guilty of committing fornication. Claudio's sister Isabella comes to Angelo to plead for the life of her brother, but Angelo, who is trying to manipulate Isabella into bed with him, spurns her suit, saying,

Your brother is a forfeit of the law,
And you but waste your words.

Isabella's reply alludes to the great theme of Romans and calls upon the hypocritical judge Angelo to see his life anew in light of God's judgment and grace:

Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once;
And He that might the vantage best have took
Found out the remedy. How would you be
If He, which is the top of judgment, should
But judge you as you are? 0, think on that;
And mercy then will breathe within your lips,
Like man new made.

Isabella resists the oppressor by applying a hermeneutic of suspicion to his pose of righteousness and by appealing to a hermeneutic of trust in the biblical story of God's mercy. Isabella is a profound interpreter of Scripture. We should follow her example.

Richard B. Hays - The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel's Scriptures; Eerdmans 2005; p.200f

Loving and Hearing the Text

When I was an undergraduate at Yale University, students flocked to Professor Alvin Kernan's lecture courses on Shakespeare. Kernan's work predated the academy's current infatuation with ideological criticism. Even though it was the late 1960s and we were all living in an atmosphere charged with political suspicion and protest, none of this overtly impinged on Kernan's lectures. Kernan was not a flashy lecturer. What, then, was the draw?

He loved the texts. His teaching method - as I remember it - was simply to engage in reflective close readings of the Shakespeare tragedies and comedies, delineating their rich texture of image and metaphor and opening up their complex central themes - moral, philosophical, and religious. Often, Kernan would devote a significant part of his lecture time to reading the text aloud, not in any highly dramatic manner, but with sensitivity to the text's rhythms and semantic nuances. I would often sit in class thinking, "Oh! ... I hadn't heard that in the text before." And I would leave the class pondering the problems Shakespeare addressed: love, betrayal, fidelity, sacrifice, death, and hope.

Richard B. Hays - The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel's Scriptures; Eerdmans 2005; p.200

Loving the text so that others truly hear the text. That's a good aim for 2007.

Two thoughts

from John 19:

i) The correlation in v.7 & v.12 of the terms 'Son of God' and 'King' suggests that the Jewish leaders were not accusing Jesus of claiming divinity but of claiming to be the Messiah;

ii) The irony of the Jewish leaders' assertion, "We have no king but Caesar" being followed in the text by Pilate finally handing Jesus over to be crucified: the irony lies in the fact that to say they have no king but Caesar is the final capitulation.

voluntary gifts (Volf)

Since God gives freely, we should too. That's how the apostle Paul thought of gift giving; it should be voluntary. He praised believers from Macedonia for giving "voluntarily" to the poor of Jerusalem (2 Corinthians 8:3). Similarly, he urged that the Corinthians' gift be ready when he came to collect it "as a voluntary gift and not as an extortion" (2 Corinthians 9:5).

Why is freedom in giving so important? Because the gift consists more in the freely undertaken choice to give than in the things given. In this regard, the Apostle might well have agreed with Seneca, the great stoic writer on gift giving, who said: "For, since in the case of a benefit the chief pleasure of it comes from the intention of the bestower, he who by his very hesitation has shown that he made his bestowal unwillingly has not `given', but has failed to withstand the effort to extract it."' As for Seneca, for the Apostle the "eagerness" of the giver matters more than the magnitude of the gift. God loves "a cheerful giver" (2 Corinthians 8:12 and 9:7).

And yet we noted earlier that we are obliged to give. God's gifts themselves oblige us, and God's commands reinforce that obligation. Now we see that we are obliged to give freely - and there's the rub. How can we give freely if we are obliged to give? Inversely, how can we be obliged to give if we give freely? Is it possible to be obliged to give freely?

The apostle Paul thought so. True, he never commanded the Corinthians to give, and he underscored this for them (2 Corinthians 8:8). But he exerted enormous pressure on them using some potent rhetorical weapons. He played with their sense of shame: they would humiliate themselves if they didn't give (2 Corinthians 9:4). He had them compete with other donors: the Macedonians gave, so the Corinthians should stick to their promise and give (which is also what he said to the Macedonians in 2 Corinthians 9:2). He appealed to their debt to him: he would be humiliated if they didn't give (2 Corinthians 9:4). And he did all this in order to nudge them to give, as he put it, "not reluctantly or under compulsion", but voluntarily (2 Corinthians 9:7)!

Was the Apostle twisting their arm to be free? Some strange freedom this must be! But maybe our sense that to be free is to act under no constraint whatsoever is mistaken. We tend to think that we must be autonomous and spontaneous to act freely. Behind this identification of freedom with autonomous spontaneity lies the notion of a self-defined and free-floating person. Strip down all the influences of time and place, abstract from culture and nurture, and then you'll come to your authentic core. This core is who you truly are, the thinking goes - unique, unshaped, unconstrained.

But that's more like a caricature of a divine self than an accurate description of a human self. Using the image of the beast, Luther argued that human beings are always ridden by someone, either by God or by the Devil. That's a crude way of putting it, but it's basically right. The point is not that either God or the Devil compels us. In that case, our will would turn into, as Luther put it, "unwill". It's rather that, unlike God, we always exercise our will as beings constantly shaped by many factors - by language, parental rearing, culture, media, advertising, and peer pressure, and through all these, we are shaped either by God or by God's adversary. Often we don't perceive ourselves as shaped at all. If we are not visibly and palpably coerced, we think that we act autonomously, spontaneously, and authentically. Yet we are wrong.

Take our preferences for one soft drink over another. I am thirsty, walk into a store, reach for a Pepsi, and walk away, never doubting that I acted autonomously and spontaneously. But why did I choose Pepsi over Coke or just plain water? I may like its taste better. But most likely it's because Pepsi's ads got to me the way Coke's didn't. I don't autonomously and spontaneously choose to be a Pepsi drinker; I'm made into a Pepsi drinker. Yet I freely chose that Pepsi can that is in my hand.

Recall what I said about the old and the new selves. Our old self died, and our new self was raised. It's a self in whom Christ dwells and through whom Christ acts, a self that has put on Christ and "learned" Christ. We are these new selves, and that's why we give (though non-Christians can give for many other reasons). We don't give mainly because God or God's messengers command us to. If we did, we would be giving under compulsion, and therefore, reluctantly. Instead, we give because we are givers, because Christ living in us is a giver. Informing every seemingly small act of Christian giving is a change in our very being, a transformation of a person from being one who either illicitly takes or merely legitimately acquires, into being one who beneficently gives. As I will explain in chapter 3, even as such transformed people, we still need to grow into the joy of giving. But the command to give is not compelling us to act against ourselves, even if it often feels like this.

That feeling that the command is against us, a sense of reluctance in giving, is not unfounded. When we have failed to put away our "former way of life", the new self becomes an obligation that butts against the ingrained habits of the old self. Yet as uncomfortable as it may feel, the pressure is not to our detriment, but in our favor. It pushes us to act true to who we most properly are. That's why we can be obliged to give freely: the obligation nudges us to do what the new self would do if the old one didn't stand in the way.

Imagine your life as a piece of music, a Bach cello suite. You've heard it played by a virtuoso. You love it and would like to play it well. But try as you might, you fail - not so much because you've had a bad teacher or haven't practiced enough, but because your left hand has a defect. You make music, but it's nothing like it's supposed to sound. Then you have surgery performed by a magician with a scalpel. Your hand heals. You return to your lessons with new vigor. And then one day, you play the piece nearly perfectly. Full of joy, you exclaim, "Yes! I love it! This is the way the music of my life should sound!" Constrained by the score because you have to follow its notation? Well, yes. But loving every moment of that constraint - and not feeling it as constraint at all - because the very constraint is what makes for the beauty and delight.

Something like this is what it means to be a free giver. God obliges us to give. But it is precisely when we act in accordance with the obligation that we have a sense of unspoiled authenticity and freedom. So in our best moments, we forget the command and just give the way we are supposed to give. We are like a motor-powered sailboat when it's "running", as sailors say: With the wind at the back of a powered boat, all resistance is gone; the boat is always where the wind would push it to be. The same is true of us when we give freely. Living out of our new selves, we are always already where the command would want us to be.

(Miroslav Volf, Free Of Charge, pp.64-67)

in celebration of palindromes...

Go for it, Al!

the psalms & us

The attempt to recover and renew psalmody in our time must not be undertaken merely as an embellishment of liturgical practice. Crucial possibilities for the theological, liturgical, and pastoral life of the church are involved. The liveliness and actuality of the language of the reign of God supply an organizing milieu for all the principal topics of the Christian faith. It constitutes the basis and medium of the three primary functions of our religion - praise, prayer, and the practice of piety. It provides a way of thinking and understanding that holds the individual and corporate relation to God together. Said and sung as Christian liturgy, the language of the psalms discloses the unity of the canon of scripture. It articulates a polemic against the polytheism and paganism that go unnoticed in our culture. It establishes a critical resistance to the domination of any human politics and the apotheosizing of any ideology, including democracy. The language of the psalms puts all who use them in the role of servants to the LORD God, and so lays a basis for an ethic of trust and obedience. It opens up a realm for existence in which the dying may take hope, the afflicted find strength, and the faithful encouragement.

Mere recitation of the psalms will lay hold on none of these possibilities. If, however, in the use of psalms as our praise and prayer and scripture we are led to feel and think and decide as those who live in the kingdom of God in hope of the kingdom of God, then we might begin to grasp some of them. We might be better able to trust ourselves to the One who comes saying, "The kingdom of God is at hand." That would be the right reason for the renewal of psalmody today.

James L. Mays, The LORD Reigns - A Theological Handbook to the Psalms, p.11

augustine & the psalms

In his Confessions, Augustine tells how he used the psalms in a period of retreat between his conversion and baptism. "What utterances sent I unto Thee, my God, when I read the Psalms of David, those faithful songs and sounds of devotion.... What utterances I used to send up unto Thee in those Psalms, and how was I inflamed toward Thee by them" (IX, 4).

For Augustine it was a time of preparation for a different life, of initiation into a new existence, a period in which habits of thought, customs of practice, and feelings about self and others and the world had to be reconstituted. As part of the transformation, he was learning a new language.

He spoke the psalms to and before the Christian God, who was now source and subject of his faith and life. He took their vocabulary and sentences as his own. He identified himself with the speaker of the psalms. He said the psalms as his words, let his feelings be evoked and led by their language, spoke the words that resonated in his own consciousness in concord with those of the psalms. He was acquiring a language world that went with his new identity as a Christian. It was the vocabulary of prayer and praise, the "first order" language that expressed the sense of self and world that comes with faith in the God to whom, of whom, and for whom the psalms speak.

James L. Mays, The LORD Reigns - A Theological Handbook to the Psalms, p.3

In a different light

It has always struck me as a great (and regrettable irony): Festus and Agrippa agree that Paul could have been set free (Acts 26:32) but because Paul has appealed to Caesar (Acts 25:11 ), to Caesar he must go. If only he'd held on a little while longer before making that last-ditch appeal, it could all have been so much simpler; still, I'm sure the Lord is able to use it for Paul's and the gospel's good. He is sovereign, after all.

But no; it's much more definite than that, in every sense. Paul has already been told that the Lord is taking him to Rome (Acts 23:11) - the only thing not specified was the how and why of the way in which that journey would come about. The purpose for going was as clear as day:

As you have testified about me in Jerusalem, so you must also testify in Rome (Acts 23:11)

So Paul's appeal to Caesar is neither impetuous nor desperate; it arises in the context of the Lord's clear direction and decision to send his apostle to the heart of the empire. And the forcing of Festus' hand is not a matter for regret; it is simply the Lord's time and place for enacting his plan to send Paul to Rome.

I'd never seen it that way before. I do now.

doctrine & competence

Doctrines, then, are profitable for celebrating, communicating, criticizing - and coping - provided they are used competently. The present work sets forth an account of theological competence, which involves more than academic expertise. Theological competence is ultimately a matter of being able to make judgements that display the mind of Christ. Individual Christians, and the church as a whole, have no more crucial task than achieving such theological competence. One of the chief means of doing so is by attending to doctrine - to its derivation from Scripture and its development in the believing community."

Kevin J. Vanhoozer, in the introduction to The Drama of Doctrine: A Canonical-Liguistic Approach to Christian Theology, p. 2

final blessing

God bless you, Dad;
God bless you, Dad.

You've been
a wonderful father,
a good husband
and
a lovely grandad.

You've loved us all so much;
we all love you so much.

God bless you, Dad;
God bless you, Dad.

(the final words spoken to George Myerscough, early morning 30/11/05)