Lament

This weeks message is by Chad Bird.
Sometimes, a few words say all that's required:

How long will we dwell in a dry land where there is no water?
How long, O Lord, will you forget us forever?
When shall we come and appear before you? 
We were glad when they said, “Let us go to the house of the Lord.”
But we are cut off, we are estranged, from your courts.

Too long have our souls had their dwelling far from you.
Too long have we hungered for the table of your presence. 
Consider and answer us, O Lord, our God.

Do not be deaf to our cry.
Do not be silent at our tears.
Do not close your eyes to our uplifted hands. 
Lift up the light of your countenance upon us once more.

Make your face to shine upon your servants once again.
Gather us, as a shepherd gathers the sheep of his flock,
To make us lie down in pastures green with mercy. Why are you in despair, O my soul?
Why have you become disturbed within me?
Hope in God, for we shall again praise him.

Trust in Christ, for we shall again appear before him. O Lord, hear our prayer.

O Lord, have mercy.
O Christ, have mercy.
O Lord, have mercy.

A new entry

If you look over on the top of the right column of this page you will notice a new entry in the 'books published' section entitled 'Cry Freedom!'.

Over the last year, I've been working on a rendition of Martin Luther's superb commentary on Paul's epistle to the Galatians, and now, it's up for the world to see.

It's available in a basic word format and should just pop up, ready to read.

I've done it this way so as many people as possible can make use of it and enjoy it for free, so please avail yourself and I hope it whets your appetite for more.

C o n t a g i o n

Said you woke up this morning
Said you woke up under a curse 

I've heard the blues are bad but this is something worse

And the ambulance driver
Well he tips his hat and stares
And he asks you in a grave voice "Can I take you anywhere?"

Yeah, it's the thing we cannot speak of
Too painful to behold

Oh this blister soul

Vigilantes of Love - Blister Soul.

Its a sure-fire killer, and it's everywhere.
In our blood, in our homes, in the very air we breathe.
There's no escape.

From when you wake up, you know its poison inside,
because it's there in everything you say and do.
You'd like to ignore it, for it to go away,
but when you're ruthlessly honest with yourself,
you know it's hurting your being with others,
and it's killing you inside.

It isn't a misery you can really solve with a pill or a drink,
though you may often try.
It isn't a pain that can be eased by having piles of cash, or by jumping from one moment of pleasure to another,
though you may fool yourself into thinking that's enough.
It isn't an illusion you can mask by adopting some nice belief to make you feel good about yourself.

It's a sure-fire killer, that burns in our veins, and takes us all to the grave.

The bible calls it sin - the wickedness we do against everyone and everything, born out of our broken relationship with God. It even causes us to be cruel to ourselves.

A virus needs a remedy - an antidote that is going to make us whole and well, but this malady is beyond our means to ease or cure - God alone can heal us, and easter shows us how that was done. Jesus took our sin upon Himself that we can be healed and set free.

The present circumstances have shown us just how deadly a virus is, and how radically it can change everything.

How will you choose to deal with the contagion that we all carry?
There is a remedy.

Giving Way

If these present days have reminded us of anything, it's how hard we often find it to re-orientate ourselves to change... that involves us taking a pause.

Ours indeed is our world that we think spins constantly around what we do; our days being filled with everything that matters so much in respect to showing just how busy we are. So what happens when the ground is pulled from beneath our feet and we have to re-group and gain a new set of bearings?

When we face such an abyss, we usually loose it and sink in the uncertainty of it all... but that's the opportunity to something good.

Escaping the whirlwind of 'the norm' and facing a world without that, without what we think defines life, allows us to look into what takes up our lives and ask what is this really all about? What are we doing?

When life throws us a curve ball, it's usually because we need to take a pause and deeply think about what counts.

The current crisis has given many the opportunity to invest again into life at home with family and to re-gain some fresh forms of connection, even if that has had to be virtually. It can be a crucible that tests us (parents are nodding loudly), but out of such refinement can grow a new level of connection and bonding that re-affirms the love that we know was there, but this space has given it new room to breathe.

So, what next?
One of my favourite Christian writers noted this week that easter is the time when we witness the 'hauling out' of "pretty floral dresses" as we stand "on the precipice" of the feast, uncertain what to expect...
So she advises that we hurl ourselves off.

It's when we surround ourselves in the vulnerability of love that we become so much more, and easter is all about surrendering ourselves to the love of one who surrendered all to rescue us.

The unexpected, the deeply beautiful, comes so often in the very midst of our struggling out of our depth.
Easter is here to tell us that hope is here, amidst our current trials.

Today, we look to one dying a cruel death not because all we see is tragedy, but encapsulated there is something beyond all our failure and frailty. As He dies, death itself is broken, and sin is removed because He has borne it's consequence.

Dive into that love, and life will truly be changed.

Happy Easter.

The Healing Death

"Faith also came to believe in doing things I could not understand, in trusting that authenticity wasn’t always about feeling something and then acting on that feeling; that it could involve acting toward feeling a different way—trusting that there might be something on the other side of intention that felt less willed, more sublime. So much of that 'trust-fall' shows up in other parts of life, of course: Showing up for another day of marriage. Showing up for another day of writing. Showing up for another day of parenting. Feeling frustrated, cloistered, doubtful, but believing in the other side of all those feelings. Believing in another horizon, beyond what you can see".

Jamie Quatro.


"Put this in any liquid thing you will, 
And drink it off; and, if you had the strength
Of twenty men, it would dispatch you straight".

Shakespeare - Romeo and Juliet.


Gone, now, are the days of being carefree, perhaps allowing careless negligence.
Now, the most basic of behaviours must be preceded by cleansing to avoid the vileness of a cruel death.

No place now for what we may define as rash piety or indulgent nonchalance - each are equally burned in the bite of indiscriminate and exhaustive excise.

All of life, from the arrangement of our hours at home with others or alone to the very routine of buying goods or walking the dog must be considered with great care in order to escape the shadow of a peril that could truly end us.

Cleanliness and separation, coupled with concern and consideration, are no longer options; things we take for granted - they are matters of life and death to each of us.

And so, we are constantly entreated via the media - look to this vital distance apart if you wish to be safe, and to live!

This all sounds very familiar to anyone who has spent a while reading the Bible.

A great deal of the Old Testament is about the need to find in us a purity - a cleanliness on the outside that is a reflection of what's going on on the inside, and the problem that we all have that disrupts and breaks down attaining this - an infection called sin that leads to spiritual and physical death. God is constantly expressed as the one who is entreating us to put aside this malady by trusting in Him (rather than ourselves) to rescue and cleanse us and thereby provide the true remedy to our lawless nature and the means to be those free of the evil that is distancing us from Him and each other.

It's easy for people to think that none of this actually applies to them  - we've seen that played out numerous times in the last few weeks here - but that is a folly which merely increases the problem and the consequences this death creates. The fact is that we're all carriers of something highly destructive and only when a very real vaccine is provided can something work in us that eliminates what is so wrong.

A few weeks of living under the reality of a infected world has totally changed things, and people are now keenly aware that a remedy is imperative if they are to return to the kind of things they so liked to take for granted.
The same is true about us in a far deeper sense, and only God's work in Jesus Christ provides our world with the cure so urgently and deeply needed for us to be whole once again.

Something to really think about during this life-changing crisis.

So, what is it?

"When I consider the stars - the work of your fingers, I ask what is a man, that you are mindful of him?"


Monumental Indifference.
That's how one film maker defined the way the universe looks upon us this week - it is indifferent to our being here.

The hard data seems to be irrefutable. In a place where something like the equivalent of millions of thermonuclear explosions everyday take place inside our sun, and viruses smite people on mass arbitrarily, bringing death, sorrow and total carnage to society, who can argue with that?
So, it may be surprising to see that the same film maker goes on to say that life is really worthwhile - that we actually do count, and what we do has value.

Why?

Werner Hertzog (quoted above) would no doubt speak about the delight of being curious and engaging with what we find, but his glances at reality, whether through his camera lens or in his comments, touch upon something that should cause us to pause for thought.

Simply saying something has a point 'because it's there' is fine, but it shouldn't end there - if we're truly curious, it's going to mean asking harder questions and seeking deeper answers.

We've all had to become far more conscientious about our own actions recently - what we do and what we believe has huge bearing now upon those around us, but if we're honest, we know that's always the case - when we do what is good or evil, the consequences ripple out and can cause caring or destructive results.

It's also true that however 'nice' we may wish things to be, we harbour this nasty propensity to do harm, but unlike the universe, it's not something we can truly be indifferent about (unless we detach our humanity), and that says so much about the real 'why' of our being here.

When we're confronted with what our cruelty does, we know that we're as broken as the damage we have done, and that tells us something much bigger than the apparent 'emptiness' of the vastness of space is required to touch something that defies our standard 'weights and measures' - the human soul. That's no doubt why Jesus spoke about this essence of us being the most valuable thing in the natural realm (Mark 8 :36) - it is the vehicle that drives us towards so much more, or less, if we abuse it's raw data. That's why we say there's more to us, even in the face of the 'indifference' we seemingly observe all around.

One of the things that gets me up most mornings is beauty. The way light playfully spreads colour in the sky or the world, to allow an often fleeting sight that makes the familiar fresh and new, or the manner in which the elements combine to blanket the moors in a sea of still mist or dramatic sky-scapes is staggering, and that's just looking at the world from my window, before I've begun to get out amongst it.
There's a great deal more to unpack there, but as you spend time at home, take a moment to think on this. It can lead to some pretty deep thoughts.

The present circumstances grant us a window of opportunity to look harder, think deeper, than time often allows, so let's not waste it. Consider what life, the universe and everything is really trying to say to each of us.

Are we listening?

Decimation

"Yet at the most fundamental level—and this can’t be emphasized too strongly—the cross is in no way “religious.” The cross is by a very long way the most irreligious object ever to find its way into the heart of faith. J. Christiaan Beker refers to it as “the most nonreligious and horrendous feature of the gospel.

The crucifixion marks out the essential distinction between Christianity and “religion.” Religion as defined in these pages is either an organized system of belief or, alternatively, a loose collection of ideas and practices, projected out of humanity’s needs and wishes. The cross is “irreligious” because no human being individually or human beings collectively would have projected their hopes, wishes, longings, and needs onto a crucified man".

Fleming Routlidge - The Crucifixion.

In my childhood, I would often play with my cousins and sister at the open London common known as Blackheath. The title was awarded to the place because of the dark colour of its soil, but there is a common urban legend that it was so named because it became a famous graveyard for the city during the time of the Black Death. Whilst there are people buried on the heath from that period, it isn't a mass grave, but it certainly proved a macabre story to tell us as we learned 'ring a ring a roses'.

There is nothing so mythical about the images recorded in Europe this week.Hundreds of people are dying every day and the contagion is clearly just beginning to spread in many places, so the worst is clearly yet to come.

There have been all manner of reactions to this dreadful moment about who and what is right or wrong, but the awful truth is that many of us are facing a palpable threat of death that is clearly dreadful, and, at the moment, facing it without a readily available form of remedy or aid, so what are we to do? Where are we to look for aid?

There have been countless times in the past few weeks where my thoughts have wanted to just landslide into blind panic over this - I had one very disturbed night where the dreadful truth of what's happening gripped me - but I know that dwelling in such a place isn't going to help, especially if I'm facing my own mortality.

What we are clearly all facing is a breaking of our society that no one would have imagined as generally credible beyond fiction just a few months ago, so where can we find any genuine solace and comfort when pretty well everything we've known is taken away?

Fleming Routlidge gives us a very gritty and tangible place to start:
"Religious figures are not usually associated with disgrace and rejection. We want our objects of worship to be radiant, dazzling avatars offering the potential of transcendent happiness. The most compelling argument for the truth of Christianity is the Cross at its center. Humankind’s religious imagination could never have produced such an image. Wishful thinking never projected a despised and rejected Messiah. There is a contradiction at the very heart of our faith that demands our attention. We need to put a sign on it, though, like the signs on trucks carrying chemicals: Hazardous material, highly inflammatory cargo. Handle at your own risk.".

Like the Coronavirus itself, the truth of Christianity is a hazardous thing - it will twist and turn us as we seek to genuinely come to terms with its pain and joy, but it will heal us even as we face our certain mortality, and that is the healing we so genuinely need.

As Paul puts it, God forbid that I should glory in anything save the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ.