Psalm 84 & stuff

LutheranChik left a comment on my last post to the effect that she's always loved the verse (3) from Psalm 84 that reads “Even the sparrow has found a home ... where she may have her young – a place near your altar, O Lord Almighty, my King and my God.”

Me too.. I love that whole psalm. There are just irreplaceable lines so full of our Lord's grace and beauty, and the yearning of our response:

"Happy are those whose strength is in you,
in whose heart are the highways to Zion.

As they go through the valley of Baca
they make it a place of springs;
the early rain also covers it with pools."

and

" For a day in your courts is better
than a thousand elsewhere.
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God
than live in the tents of wickedness."

Oh Amen!

CS Lewis knew this feeling so well - it's at the heart of this wonderful passage from The Last Battle:

They had seen strange enough things at the Doorway. But it was stranger than any of them to look round and find themselves in warm daylight, the blue sky above them, flowers at their feet and laughter in Aslan’s eyes. He turned swiftly round, crouched lower, lashed himself with his tail and shot away like a golden arrow.

“Come further in! Come further up!” he shouted over his shoulder. But who could keep up with him at that pace?

If that's what awaits us on the other side, then that's, as I think it was Gandalf and Pippin who agreed, "not so bad..."

"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." (Romans 8:38-39)

Thinking a lot about death, and about God's love for all his creatures, just at the moment (Matthew 10:29 and so on). We had to have our beloved dog Mable (yes, spelled like that) put to sleep on Tuesday, at the age of 16. She had finally become so old she could hardly walk up the steps to the back lawn, and could only eat chicken, hand-fed. She had her last Easter with us, and died licking Jan's hand. She'd been our constant companion, friend and comforter since the age of 6 weeks... she was an indefatigable ally of the cats, and the hens, and the calves and the lambs, and the best farm ratter ever! A true lurcher (whippet/collie mix) and one of the gentlest dogs I've known. We'll miss her.

St Clare & her Cats - one of my favourite icons

St Clare apparently loved cats, and had one special one who would sit on her bed as she knitted. Clare had trained her so that if the ball of yarn fell away, the cat would jump down and bring it back to her.

I don't know how many cats there were at San Damiano, but I love the way this icon shows a couple rubbing round her ankles.

The icon is by Terence Nelson - his note on it reads, in part:

As in her life, St. Clare devoutly holds the monstrance with the Blessed Sacrament in protection of the monastery. At her feet are cats, symbolizing the contemplative life. Consistent with Franciscan love of nature, a sparrow nests in the colonnade, “Even the sparrow has found a home ... where she may have her young – a place near your altar, O Lord Almighty, my King and my God.” (Psalm 84:3)

Cats symbolising the contemplative life? Yes, I could go along with that!

Figgy, our little round black rescue cat, loves to pray with me in the early mornings, either sitting on my lap or on the desk in front of me. If I have my Bible or Office folder open, she'll often put a paw on the open page to hold it for me. If I ever forget to let leave my study door ajar for her, she makes a terrible fuss till I do!

Upside down...

I wonder if I’ll get used to God turning my mental and spiritual world upside down on a regular basis? So many unspoken – not to mention spoken – evangelical assumptions are getting exposed by the light of grace that I’m getting slightly vertiginous.

I was mildly offended the other day when I tried one of Beliefnet’s little “What kind of Christian are you?” quizzes and discovered I was supposed to be a “Jerry Falwell Christian”. Now given that the alternatives included Hilary Clinton and Bishop Spong I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but it was a nasty shock all the same. It did however have the side-effect of spurring me to write this post.

For so many years I’d been sinking into a kind of grace vacuum. One of the comforting things about all but the finest and most self-aware evangelicalism is that there’s a set of rules and regulations to steer by... that the risks inherent in faith (John Wimber: “faith is spelled R-I-S-K”) are replaced by codes of practice. There are so many of them, going by names like “accountability”, “purity”, “Bible-believing”...

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not knocking the actual things themselves. We all need to be accountable, we all need moral clarity, we all most certainly need the Bible at the very centre of our faith and praxis. What worries me are the packages that come with these words.

We affirm our faith in the Bible as the core of our understanding of God, as his word, as inspired by his Holy Spirit and “useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness” and we find we’ve bought into a hermeneutic that applies Old Testament strictures, and very specific, localised New Testament advice, uncritically to life 2,000+ years later and in a very different cultural setting.

We affirm our understanding of morality as having to do with the outworkings of Jesus’ “two greatest commandments” (Matthew 22:37-39) and we suddenly discover we’ve bought into a set of largely unwritten rules that excludes minorities and the marginalised from fulfilling God’s call on their lives in ministry, and that applies a “give 10% of gross income or else” rule to people living on means-tested benefits.

We affirm our need of accountability, and we discover we really shouldn’t accept a lift from someone of the opposite sex (or maybe it’s the same sex if someone suspects we may swing that way) unless there’s at least one other person of their sex (or maybe it’s our own sex?) (scratches head a while) in the car.

My point, if I haven’t laboured it too far already, is that we have to be so careful that our strongly-held convictions don’t lead us to buy into value systems that we don’t belong in, and that can lead us to unthinkingly reinforcing those sets of assumptions, promulgating them, judging others by them, seeking to re-arrange their lives in accordance with them...

You remember those wristbands that were so popular a few years ago, with the letters WWJD stamped on them? Perhaps we should revive the fashion. Would Jesus refuse to speak to a woman alone in case some busybody or easily led and morally challenged person got the wrong idea? Well did he? (John 4) Would Jesus refuse to accept God’s call in someone’s life because she didn’t measure up to the lifestyle yardsticks of the religious establishment? Did he? (Luke 10:42)

Andy Hickford has an interesting observation in an article in the April issue of Christianity magazine: “Then of course there’s Jesus! When it comes to Jesus and the law, it can be a bit confusing. Matthew 5:17 says that Jesus came to fulfil the law. Romans 3:31 says that he upholds the law. In Romans 7:6 it says that Jesus released us from the law and in Ephesians 2 Paul writes that Jesus abolished the law! So, just what is the relationship between Jesus and the Old Testament’s laws?! Basically, Jesus replaces the Old Testament law. In him it is all fulfilled and upheld, because he completes it. We are released from its regulation and condemnation- that’s what meant by ‘He abolished the law.’ However, its wisdom and history is fulfilled in Christ.”

It’s odd, but I’ve discovered more honesty and grace, more love and clear, courageous thinking on things like this within the “established churches” than anywhere else recently. I don’t know just what God’s up to with the Anglican Communion at the moment, but within these ivy-clad ancient walls there’s a positive explosion of Christlikeness going on. You've only to look in a few of the blogs in the Blogging Episcopalians webring (link in the sidebar) to see what I mean.

Grace, grace, grace... “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.” (John 1:16-17)

Easter Vigil

Sunlight early on cold stone
dry and rough
against our fingers;
the new fire flutters,
clinging to its twigs
in the wall angle,
against a chill breeze.

He is risen, and his light
finds our hearts in the still of dawn,
our bodies only half awake,
our white breath following us
to the porch and the great candle:
his light given,
that we must give and give.

He Is Risen!

He is risen indeed!

Alleluia!

Easter Saturday...

the day taken out, like an empty hole in time, anechoic, no-thing.

Prayer is like this very often, a place without a place, “waterless over the harsh rocks, down the dry valley of heedless stones...”

What could have happened in the tomb, between Joseph and Nicodemus leaving, and that dawn of glory? There will never be a way to know: those hours were outside time, and what we are, creatures of days and years, cannot comprehend it.

Again prayer: the truer our prayer, the more we come to him who will forever be beyond our comprehension. We meet him as nearly face to face as we could ever bear, and yet we don’t recognise him. We don’t have the equipment to take him in – we are as uncomprehending as a profoundly deaf man at a symphony concert, or a blind cave salamander in a measureless cavern of crystal.

Tomorrow morning, Mary had this problem. She met her Lord and her Saviour face to face, and thought he was the gardener. Maria Boulding, from Marked for Life - Prayer in the Easter Christ:

Prayer is listening, listening to the word. Like Mary Magdalene we hear many words, but at rare intervals we hear the really piercing word, the word that affirms us in our beings, the fiat that creates and re-creates us. This word is our own name. It is the secret name written on the white stone that no one knows except him who receives it, the secret truth of our own person that we do not yet fully know ourselves but only glimpse, because it is only potentially true as yet, true to God but not yet fully brought to birth.

Tomorrow morning Jesus speaks our name, piercing our incomprehension with his recognition, his knowing, his comprehending us. Our part is to listen – listen into the anechoic disorienting silence, the dead room, the empty garden, long before dawn, “while it was still dark.” This is the time Mary set off, thinking she knew but not even knowing why she went, like we must go, not being able to know why till our Lord calls us by name, but going anyway, into the dark, into the place of tombs, the hortus conclusus, the garden closed to our senses but open to our going in. Listen... listen!

Darkness and Sun Shadows

Darkness
and sun-shadows - the I AM
broken, thirsting forsaken.

The sun’s light failed
and the curtain tore
forever.

You, Jesus, agnus Dei,
qui tollis peccata mundi
accomplished this;

and wrecked despair
against the constant keep
of hope.

Back Home!

Holy Week seems like a good place to turn over a new blogging leaf, and Maundy Thursday particularly appropriate. Though we are many...

I’ve been well and truly convicted by reading Kathryn’s astonishing Good in Parts, as well as my long-time favourite Roman Catholic blogger and solitary Karen Marie Knapp. The Mercy Blog has been so impersonal, especially recently – and yet my life has been in such passionate turmoil over the period I’ve been posting here. I’ve been less than honest I guess, not speaking of the extraordinary journey God’s been taking me on over the last few months, and how he’s brought me back to the Anglican church after 7 years in the Baptist church, and the next 11 in the Vineyard. I’ll have to omit some of the finer details, as they involve other people, but suffice it to say it’s been quite a ride!

It’s crucially important too that for the last 3 years or so I’ve been involved in a conversation with various Franciscans, culminating in my being noviced as a Tertiary on March 4 this year. It just feels so right – Helen Julian CSF, in an essay published in New Daylight, calls it “finding a home.” And so it is. I’ve never been more sure of anything since marrying Jan!

As Mercy Site readers will know, the contemplative life has been drawing me in more and more deeply since, oh, 1978 at least, when I was introduced to the Jesus Prayer by Fr Francis Horner SSM, on an extended visit to Willen Priory. (He gave me Per Olof Sjögren’s wonderful book to read!) About that time, too, I began to read Thomas Merton, and he opened my eyes to the wonderful riches of the church’s experience in prayer. So wherever I’ve been, that’s been the centre of it all – the longing of God in my heart for closeness, intimacy; and the pain he’s let me feel for creation, for all my sister and brother creatures, human and otherwise – an ache that just doesn’t go away but gets stronger over the years and months, like St Paul says in Romans 8:19-23: “For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labour pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.”

But the amazing thing that’s happened since I began to explore this possibility of returning to the Anglican church, is the joy of coming back to liturgical prayer. I’d been noticing for a few years that my own private “quiet times” had been taking on a more and more liturgical shape, all by themselves somehow, with psalms and readings and regular bits of Scripture that kept coming back, and which I guess I’d have to call canticles. Coming back to this kind of prayer among my sisters and brothers, especially in the context of the Eucharist, has been mind-blowing. I can only describe it as being like being carried along by a deep and powerful river, rather than splashing about trying to swim in the pools.

Some of my past colleagues might be saying to themselves here, “OK as far as it goes, maybe, but what about the Spirit? What about freedom in worship?” All I can say is that I’ve found the Holy Spirit to be alive and well and living in the Church, in every bit of it, in every denomination and movement and flavour. (Unless people really make a determined effort to shut him out, I suppose, but I have to admit I’ve yet to see this theoretical possibility in practice!) And he’s the same Spirit, yesterday and today and forever. I have found so much of grace, of love, of mercy – of Jesus – over recent months. No, I’m not missing out – I feel more like the woman in Luke 15, who lost her coin and found it again, “Rejoice with me!”

A New Language of Prayer

I came across this wonderful article by Ann Kline on the Shalem Institute website ( http://www.shalem.org/) - do read it prayerfully - I think Ann is saying some vitally important things...

A New Language of Prayer

"We are going to have to create a new language of prayer. And this new language of prayer has to come out of something which transcends all our traditions, and comes out of the immediacy of love."
Thomas Merton

I love the word "radical." It speaks to me of a kind of dramatic force that overcomes resistance with its sheer audacity and undeniable truth. Not surprisingly, I am attracted to the idea of radical prayer, prayer so powerful that I am fundamentally changed by it. Heaven knows that kind of radical grace is the only way real change in me is going to happen. Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that true prayer is subversive, overturning our limited sense of ourselves and transforming us into partners with God's vision for the world. That kind of prayer speaks deeply to me.

What is the language of radical prayer? When Thomas Merton wrote about a new language of prayer, I do not think he meant something the world had never heard before. In fact, I think the language of prayer he points to is quite old. A clue to what Merton may have meant can be found in the words he wrote in a letter to Heschel, where he spoke about his "latent ambition to be a true Jew underneath his Catholic skin." The kind of conversion that Merton suggests was not one of religion; Merton's Catholicism was not in jeopardy. What I hear in those words is a desire for a conversion of heart such that each tradition could hear the deeper language of prayer they already share.

Our shared prayer language is the language of compassion. It is, to me, the true language of God. As Heschel wrote: "Who is God to you? There is only one answer that survives all the theories which we carry to the grave. He is full of compassion." Compassion is a dialogue of trust in our shared humanity, and in God's unifying presence.

The language of compassion is quite radical. It asks nothing less of us than a total conversion to God, to a unified vision of life. This is what I hear in Merton's words: "Love is my true identify, Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my true name." It is echoed in the words of Heschel, who called prayer "an invitation to God to intervene in our lives, to let His will prevail in our affairs; it is the opening of a window to Him in our will, an effort to make him the Lord of our soul."

We can see in the lives of Heschel and Merton how radical prayer was for them. It made them, as scholar Shaul Maggid put it, "heretics of modernity." Deeply committed to their religions, they challenged those traditions to address where adherence to tradition without heart had led to callousness, shallowness or hypocrisy. Critical of modern life and its temptations, they were also appreciative of all its potential.

The language of radical prayer moved Heschel out of his study and into the march for civil rights with Martin Luther King, Jr. It moved Merton to speak out against war and intolerance and, as a consequence, experience the censorship of his community. Radical prayer puts us at odds with whatever is complacent in us or society. Radical prayer is radical trust in a vision of a world overturned by reverence.

Heschel and Merton taught that there is only one way to develop this radical language of prayer: in silence. As Heschel wrote: "Our awareness of God is a syntax of silence, in which our souls mingle with the divine, in which the ineffable in us communes with the ineffable beyond us." In silence we find a way to touch the wellspring of compassion, the words that God speaks in us. In silence, we find the courage to speak these words in the ways we act in the world. Silence teaches us how to speak (H Nouwen).

Today we are struggling with the challenges of pluralism. We do not all believe the same way, look the same way, live the same way. As I watch and listen to events that increasingly polarize and divide us, I hear echoes of the past. As a Jew I am well aware of the ways fear can turn the heart of a whole nation to stone so that it can no longer feel a shared humanity. More and more I am convinced that the only thing that speaks to these times is radical prayer, radical compassion.

Radical prayer, as Merton tells us, "requires not talent, not mere insight, but sorrow pouring itself out in love and trust." The challenge and possibilities of this prayer fills me with "the fear of God." It is at once too big for me to imagine and something I can not turn away from. But slowly, breath by breath in the silence, I can feel my heart softening, strengthening, learning this new language of prayer. May we all take a deep breath, quiet our fears and begin to teach our hearts to speak.

© Copyright 2005 Shalem Institute. All rights reserved.

Salutary remarks...

In technological society, in which the means of communication and signification have become fabulously versatile, and are at the point of an even more prolific development, thanks to the computer with its inexhaustible memory and its capacity for immediate absorption and organization of facts, the very nature and use of communication itself becomes unconsciously symbolic. Though he now has the capacity to communicate anything, anywhere, instantly, man finds himself with nothing to say. Not that there are not many things he could communicate, or should attempt to communicate. He should, for instance, be able to meet with his fellow man and discuss ways of building a peaceful world. He is incapable of this kind of confrontation. Instead of this, he has intercontinental ballistic missiles which can deliver nuclear death to tens of millions of people in a few moments. This is the most sophisticated message modern man has, apparently, to convey to his fellow man. It is, of course, a message about himself, his alienation from himself, and his inability to come to terms with life.

From Love and Living by Thomas Merton, edited by Naomi Burton Stone and Br. Patrick Hart (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985) Page 64-65.

This seems to be entirely true...

"If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men." - St. Francis of Assisi

Why the Jesus Prayer (and all contemplative prayer) matters...

"We must begin by frankly admitting that the first place in which to go looking for the world is not outside us but in ourselves. We are the world. In the deepest ground of our being we remain in metaphysical contact with the whole of that creation in which we are only small parts. Through our senses and our minds, our loves, needs, and desires, we are implicated, without possibility of evasion, in this world of matter and of men, of things and of persons, which not only affect us and change our lives but are also affected and changed by us… The question, then, is not to speculate about how we are to contact the world – as if we were somehow in outer space – but how to validate our relationship, give it a fully honest and human significance, and make it truly productive and worthwhile for our world."

From Love and Living by Thomas Merton, edited by Naomi Burton Stone and Br. Patrick Hart (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985) Page 120.

[Courtesy of the Thomas Merton Foundation]

"We have seen that the Jesus Prayer involves body, mind and spirit... The cosmic nature of the Prayer means that the believer lives as a human being in solidarity with all other human beings, and with the animal creation, together with the whole created order (the cosmos). All this is drawn into and affected by the Prayer. One person's prayers send out vibrations and reverberations that increase the power of the divine Love in the cosmos.

The Christian is well aware of the fact that the world is also evil. There is a falseness and alienation which has distracted and infected the world, and men and women of prayer, by the power of the Name of Jesus, stand against the cosmic darkness, and enter into conflict with dark powers... The power of the Jesus Prayer is the armour against the wiles of the devil, taking heed of the apostle's word, 'Pray at all times in the Spirit, with all prayers and supplications...' [Ephesians 6:18]"

From Praying the Jesus Prayer by Br Ramon SSF (Basingstoke: Marshall Pickering, 1988) Page 26.

A Key Quote, I think ...

This from Thomas Merton just about sums it up for me at this precise moment!

“Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt. On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding. For every gain in deep certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial ‘doubt.’ This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious ‘faith’ of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion.“

From New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

(New York: New Directions Publishing Company, 1961) Page 12.

What is mercy?

I just found a quotation which sums up all I know about what God is trying to do with me, what I want to live for, far better than anything else I've read. Brother Ramon SSF quotes it in The Heart of Prayer, (Marshall Pickering 1995) pp 198-9 ...

From St. Isaac of Nineveh,

An elder was once asked, “What is a compassionate heart?” He replied:

“It is a heart on fire for the whole of creation, for humanity, for the birds, for the animals, for all that exists. At the recollection and at the sight of them such a person’s eyes overflow with tears owing to the vehemence of the compassion which grips his heart. As a result of his deep mercy his heart shrinks and cannot bear to hear or look on any injury or the slightest suffering of anything in creation.

That is why he constantly offers up prayer full of tears, even for the irrational animals and for the enemies of truth, even for those who harm him, so that they may be protected and find mercy.

He even prays for the reptiles as a result of the great compassion which is poured out beyond measure --- after the likeness of God --- in his heart.” .

Yet more Merton ...

“If the salvation of society depends, in the long run, on the moral and spiritual health of individuals, the subject of contemplation becomes a vastly important one, since contemplation is one of the indications of spiritual maturity. It is closely allied to sanctity. You cannot save the world merely with a system. You cannot have peace without charity. You cannot have social order without saints, mystics, and prophets.”

From A Thomas Merton Reader edited by Thomas P. McDonnell. Image Books,

A Division of Doubleday @ Company, Inc. Garden City, NY. 1974 Page 375.

Yet more Merton ...

“There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all.

There must be a time of day when the man who has to speak falls very silent. And his mind forms no more propositions, and he asks himself: Did they have a meaning?

There must be a time when the man of prayer goes to pray as if it were the first time in his life he had ever prayed; when the man of resolutions puts his resolutions aside as if they had all been broken, and he learns a different wisdom: distinguishing the sun from the moon, the stars from the darkness, the sea from the dry land, and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill.”

From No Man is an Island by Thomas Merton – Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, New York, 1955. Page 260.

[see previous post for source]

Merton again ...

“This then is what it means to seek God perfectly: to withdraw from illusion and pleasure, from worldly anxieties and desires, from the works that God does not want, from a glory that is only human display; to keep my mind free from confusion in order that my liberty may be always at the disposal of His will; to entertain silence in my heart and listen for the voice of God; to cultivate an intellectual freedom from the images of created things in order to receive the secret contact of God in obscure love; to love all men as myself...”

From New Seeds of Contemplation by Thomas Merton

New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1972. Pages 45-46.

[From the Merton Foundation Newsletter http://www.mertonfoundation.org/merton.php3?page=guestbook.ext]

Happy Christmas everyone!

The people walking in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of the shadow of death
a light has dawned ...

For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given,
and the government will be on his shoulders.
And he will be called
Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. Isaiah 9:2, 6 (NIV)


Christmas is above all the time when God's mercy in the gift of his Son is celebrated.

What exactly is mercy? We all know the word so well that maybe a redefinition is in order. Easton’s Bible Dictionary puts it like this:

MERCY: compassion for the miserable. Its object is misery. By the atoning sacrifice of Christ a way is open for the exercise of mercy towards the sons of men, in harmony with the demands of truth and righteousness (Genesis 19:19; Exodus 20:6; Exodus 34:6-7; Psalm 85:10; Psalm 86:15-16). In Christ mercy and truth meet together. Mercy is also a Christian grace (Matthew 5:7; Matthew 18:33-35).

The object—i.e. what it is directed towards—of mercy is misery. Think about that a moment. What does a life of misery look like? A life broken, unhealed—maybe a life with embarrassing problems like addictions, debt, social dysfunction. Certainly messy, and possibly dangerous.

God is calling us to minister—to each other certainly—but far more than that to people with whom you wouldn’t normally think of getting along. People who live lives of misery aren’t comfortable, respectable people. They’re not guaranteed to enhance our lives, and they certainly aren’t guaranteed to enhance our reputations! They won’t always accept our help, and if they do they won’t always be properly grateful. What’s more, they are likely to be perennially needy, always coming back for help, unless and until God does something amazing in their lives.

Remember Jesus’ pattern of mercy? He helped people first, and then recommended lifestyle changes. The perfect example of course is the beginning of John 8, the story of the woman who was about to be stoned for adultery. Or take the time Jesus spoke to the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4). Jesus didn’t instruct her to get her messy life straightened out before he’d talk to her. In fact, he allowed her to minister to her people as an evangelist (John 4:28-30; 39-42) even before she’d sorted out her tangled love-life. (Re-read the passage if you don’t believe me!)

Jesus’ ideas are not like our ideas (cf. Isaiah 55:8) and he doesn’t give a fig for our respectable ideas of who is or isn’t fit company for a proper Christian (Luke 5:30; Luke 7:36-48)—in fact it’s those who are in trouble, who are living lives of misery, that he came specially to save.

This Christmas, and on into this New Year of 2006, let us live in the expectation of our Lord’s return: let us live lives of such mercy that all those we meet and minister to will meet Jesus in the love we show them, as we reflect the love he has for us—“We love because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:19)

Repent!

Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord... Acts 3:19 (NIV)

Repentance is a term some of us have difficulty coming to terms with. There’s a tendency to think of it either as a synonym for guilt-trip, a wallowing in the past, endlessly replaying in our minds the things we’ve done wrong, unable ever to forgive ourselves, or else an unhealthy scrupulousness, figuratively or literally (medieval penitents with knotted cords and hair shirts?) beating oneself up, often over things no normal person would take any notice of...

We associate repentance with long faces, miserable expressions, a hollow, churchy voice. We unconsciously imagine those given to much repentance to be either hypocrites or sick – quite possibly both! In the age we’ve all grown up in, or into(!), we’ve unconsciously taken on board Frank Sinatra’s lyrics (well, actually Paul Anka wrote them, but it’s Ol’ Blue Eyes we remember) where nearly at the end of the song he sings, just before the break, “For what is a man, what has he got? If not himself, then he has naught. To say the things he truly feels and not the words of one who kneels. The record shows I took the blows and did it my way!” To kneel, to admit that we’re wrong, makes us less than a man, somehow – or a woman, I guess... makes us, in fact, pathetic.

Of course, suffering can in itself be redemptive, but search the Scriptures as I may, I can’t find any examples of deliberately self-inflicted suffering being redemptive. Paul, James and Peter may teach that one should rejoice in one’s sufferings, but only because they produce good things, and only in sufferings, persecution for example, inflicted from outside...

And yet in Peter’s second recorded sermon, where he stood up and addressed the people in Solomon’s Colonnade, after he and John had healed the beggar crippled from birth, he said, “Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord...” “Times of refreshing...” Doesn’t sound too miserable, does it? Doesn’t sound much like hair shirts...

So what is this word, anyway? The Greek is interesting – sorry for all this Greek stuff, but really, this is a whole new way of understanding the word, a way of undercutting all our prejudices and assumptions, a way of seeing what Peter would have meant, and what his listeners would have understood. The word is metanoeo – literally, to think differently afterwards. After what? After our sinful life. Not just after individual sins – naughty thoughts or actions – but after living for ourselves and not for God, that whole way of life that began in the Garden when the serpent said to Eve, “You will be like God...”

As such, repentance is something God calls us into, by his Holy Spirit – directly, through Scripture, or through the words of another Christian, as Nathan called David to repent after his affair with Bathsheba and it s tragic consequences. It comes by God’s mercy, and it is an operation of grace. The call to repentance is, ultimately, what Jesus calls us to, what he’s getting at when he says, in Matthew 9:13, “But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (NIV)

Repentance is not just saying sorry for some sin or another, still less trying to make amends for that sin by causing oneself emotional or physical pain. Repentance is a way of life. Not a way of life that involves going around in a hair shirt, looking miserable enough to curdle milk, but a way of life characterised by our sins being wiped out, not brooded over, and by those enticing “times of refreshing”!

Repentance is freedom.

Repentance is lightness of heart.

Repentance is joy and clarity and sanity.

Repentance is turning to God in the freshness of the morning.

Repentance is early morning dew on spring grass, larch flowers in the misty woodland.

It is our sad, sweaty, self-obsessed sin-lives that are the miserable thing, scratching in the mud for worms when all the glory of the morning sky is spread out above us. That’s pathetic, if you like.

Repentance is lifting our gaze from that mud, and looking instead into the clearest light of dawn, where “...for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings. And you will go out and leap like calves released from the stall.” (Malachi 4:2 NIV)

H’mm, perhaps I shouldn’t get so carried away, but after the last fortnight or so – which has been one of those pastoral high spots we all hope won’t come too often, if at all – I need something to remind me of what this craziness is all about!

Tomorrow is Remembrance Sunday, when we meet to remember before God all those who gave their lives in war that we might know peace.

We remember especially the dead of the two Word Wars – but we must never forget those who died in countless smaller conflicts, some of which are all but forgotten by any but those who served, or who lost relatives: Aden, Radfan, Suez, The Falklands, Northern Ireland, Omar Dhofar, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, two Gulf Wars... the list goes on...

“Blessed are the poor in spirit...” (Matthew 5 - the Beatitudes)

But who are the poor in spirit?

If you know your OT you will know how often God’s people, people after God’s own heart, are called “the poor”: “Yet I am poor and needy; may the Lord think of me. You are my help and my deliverer; O my God, do not delay.” (Psalm 40:17 NIV) – “The poor and needy search for water, but there is none; their tongues are parched with thirst. But I the Lord will answer them; I, the God of Israel, will not forsake them.” ( Isaiah 41:17 NIV) In Hebrew they are the anawim, the ones with nothing...

Clearly God is talking about the economically poor here – and that’s not inappropriate: “Listen, my dear brothers: Has not God chosen those who are poor in the eyes of the world to be rich in faith and to inherit the kingdom he promised those who love him?” (James 2:5 NIV) God plainly has a soft spot for the hard up, and we’d better not forget that when we pull up in our new car alongside some tatty old heap, and are tempted to give them one of those Clarkson looks...

But not just the economically poor... there are those like the poor in Isaiah 61 (the Hebrew is 'anaw – the same root as anawim – that Jesus famously came to preach the good news to, and the ones in Rev 3:8, whom God knows have little strength, but who have kept his word, and have not denied his name.

We have to know we are poor, that “before God we are void of everything” (JFB). If we don’t, our hands can’t be open to the riches Jesus wants to pour into them – if we do, then we are in the fitting state for receiving all spiritual supplies... like the people Jesus met who were at the ends of their tethers – Bartimaeus (Mark 10:46ff), the woman caught in the act of adultery (John 8:3ff), the tax collector who became a Gospel writer...

So the poor in spirit are those who know they have nothing ultimately worth having, nothing they can “take with them when they go” as the saying goes. And it is the economically poor who are so often open to know that – those of us who are more comfortably off all too often cover over our emptiness with good food, good wine and good times, not to mention “cool stuff”! (I have a weakness for cool stuff myself – usually it’s either musical or electronic – ideally, both!)

But what about those who have lost what made life worth living for due to the cruel hand of war? The just-married lads who walk on a landmine (you know the main explosive force, and the spread of shrapnel, is directly upwards?), those blinded, with no hands, the mysterious Gulf War syndrome sufferers, who have to live with not being believed, on top of their debilitating condition? The wives without husbands, sisters without brothers, fathers without sons... Some live out lives of unrelenting bitterness and anger, some lose their minds, some lapse into despair... but some realise themselves as Biblically poor, the ones who have given all they had, lost all they’d longed for, laid down their lives for their friends...

When we sign up, or are called up, to serve our country in wartime, we lose the freedom to decide our own lifestyle. We are no longer “masters of our fate, captains of our souls...” to misquote William E Henley. We are men or women under authority, frail in the face of fate we cannot master... and our only strength lies in our ability to do our duty, to obey other captains entirely... we are suddenly anawim... and God is with us, if only we will know it.

So today let us remember all the poor, all the anawim – yes, especially those who gave their lives in war that we might know peace – but also all those who have nothing, those Jesus said he had come for, when he unrolled the scroll to Isaiah 61 and read:

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me,
because the Lord has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.

He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted,
to proclaim freedom for the captives
and release from darkness for the prisoners,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour
and the day of vengeance of our God,
to comfort all who mourn,
and provide for those who grieve in Zion—

to bestow on them a crown of beauty
instead of ashes,
the oil of gladness
instead of mourning,
and a garment of praise
instead of a spirit of despair.

They will be called oaks of righteousness,
a planting of the Lord
for the display of his splendour.

Isaiah 61:1-3 (NIV)

Don’t let us ever forget the poor, whether poor in economic fact or poor in spirit – or both – and never ever let us forget that they, not the fortunate successful, are the ones God will call his “oaks of righteousness”. God knows their deeds. He has placed before them a door that no-one can shut (Rev. 3:8). It is through them he will display his splendour – it was on Jesus at his poorest, as he hung on the Cross, that God’s glory fell – and still falls today.