Almost alone
In the sunshine
Of a Latvian summer,
We sat in the open air courtyard
Of Riga cathedral
Enjoying the oasis
That was held in there
The thick walls guarding the silence
From the bustle,
Of The town squares shoppers, and tourists and market stalls.
Behind where we were sitting
A young woman passed us.
She was with a wee boy
Who held her hand as they walked.
We watched them pause
At the entrance
Back into the cathedral
When
The wee boy did something
That spoke
Without breaking the silence,
Needing no translation,
In a simple gesture
A language spoken not from lips
But Known to Christians
Though hardly heard at all these days.
And as he spoke it
It drew tears from Ali’s eyes.
They paused together
And as the woman opened the door
That Led back into the cathedral
The boy lifted his other hand to his head
And removed his cap.
It was the language
Of reverence
We heard him speak.
And as it was spoken
So the gentle, powerful, hidden presence of God
Was made audible to us
Through a boys simple respect.
All conversation stopped
As he held his hat and his mother’s hand
And together they stepped into a world
Where for 800 years
God has been sung to in song
Spoken with in prayer
Heard in scripture,
Touched
And tasted in the crumbs of a loaf
The dregs from a silver cup.
A cap taken off by a little boy
In respect for this sacred space
A gesture in awe of who it belonged to,
Wordless commentary,
The language of reverence.
It’s the language you will find in the psalms
Spoken in the psalm we heard this morning:
“To you, I lift up my eyes
O you who are enthroned in the heavens!”
It’s the language
We shouldn’t need to be taught:
the sun warms the morning
And the stars map the night sky
speak there own reverence;
Every shower of rain,
Bird song,
Breath taken
Life ending or begun
allows the language of reverence
Speaks through the world.
And you and I
And the whole human race
Are invited
To listen
and consciously make that language our own
By learning to remove our caps
In the presence of the Holy.
For only then
Do we begin to recognize
The God who is not like you and me
Who can’t be compared
With anything we think about
Or imagine.
As Isaiah memorably describes:
“My thoughts are not your thoughts
Neither are your ways my ways,
Declares the Lord,
As the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are my ways higher than your ways
And my thoughts from your thoughts”
A human mind is no more capable
Of holding the full mystery of God
Than a cup could carry the ocean
Human thoughts ca no more capture the fullness of God
Than a butterfly net
Could catch the air.
Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens
And the militant atheists they represent
May huff and puff all they like
But they will never enter into the house
Of understanding God,
never mind blow it down,
For we must stoop down reach understanding
And enter by the door
marked Reverence.
Reverence
Is the door
That opens into Gods presence.
Notice the posture of the psalmist:
He doesn’t look down
Or look beside
He looks up:
“To you I lift my eyes,
O you who are enthroned in the heavens!”
The psalmist’s words
Are not I think
An attempt at locating the position of God
As if to answer the question “where is God”
The answer would be “up there, somewhere.”
To say that God is enthroned in the heavens
Is a way of celebrating
That all life,
All death,
All sorrow
All joy
All hope and fear
All that is ultimately real
Is lived in the presence
And under the authority of God.
Reverence
Introduces us to God in the world
And according the psalmist
Reverence
Allows us to partner that God.
The psalmist’s song
Makes an important
If easily forgotten point,
That Christians ignore at their peril:
“As the eyes of servants
Look to the hand of their master,
As the eyes of a maid to the hand of their mistress,
So our eyes look to the Lord our God,
Until he has mercy on us.”
Whatever we seek to do for God
In what we call service
Isn’t something that starts with us.
But whatever we seek to do
Must take its lead from God’s authority:
God decides and employs
According to his will and purpose.
And that’s exactly what we find in Jesus
Someone who seeks
Not to do what he thinks might be helpful
Or a good idea
But someone
Whose reverence for God
is such
That by prayer and worship,
He allows his service and sacrifice
To be guided
By God’s hand.
And from that point
Everything and anything
In a human life
Is capable of being used by God
Even a death
That comes by crucifixion.
Reverence
Puts us in the place
Where we can be used by God.
There’s a famous sketch
That’s sometimes repeated
From the early days of comedy
in, "that was the week that was".
In it John cleese’s 6 foot five
Towers over Ronnie Barker
And the tiny Ronnie corbet.
It’s taking the rise out the class system of the time
And about “knowing our place”.
From a Christian perspective
What is knowing our place
In the world
Made by a God
So utterly unlike us?
It is to be open
To holding the mercy of God
In the life we know as our own
With all its rough edges
Selfishness
Creativity
Care and cruelty.
But what is mercy?
And how does God’s mercy
Work in our lives?
Well some Christian commentators put it like this:
God’s will and purpose for your life and mine
Is always done for our good,
So to ask for mercy from God
Is asking God to give us
The good he wants to give us.
"Have mercy on us O Lord,
Have mercy on us"
Sings the psalmist
And what that means
Eugene Peterson helps desribe when he says:
To ask God to have mercy on us:
“Is not an attempt to get God to do something he is unwilling to do,
(It’s) an expressed longing to receive what God is doing in us and for us in Jesus”
In other words
To ask God for mercy
Is to ask him
To give us all that the good has done for us
In Jesus death and resurrection.
For Christians, Jesus is the mercy of God.
To ask for mercy is to ask for Christ.
As the mercy of God
Written into a human life,
Jesus is the bridge
Between who God is
And who we are
In Jesus
The God
Who is so unlike us
Stoops down
To make himself one with us.
And if that story is true
And it doesn’t induce awe in us
Then something’s gone badly awry.
To ask God for mercy then
Is to allow Jesus to be for and in us
All that God intends him to be.
As Karl Barth says:
“this is faith: that I let Jesus Christ be for me what I cannot be for myself:
My truth, my goodness, my righteousness, my salvation”
I wonder
Is it time this morning
For some of us
For all of us
To remove our cap
To meet God through the door of reverence
That we might open our hands
And receive the mercy
That comes to us in Christ.
For by reverence
And the mercy of Jesu
God wants to make a home for himself
In the frail, heart that is yours
In the stained heart that is mine
and through our reverence
he will come in.
Saturday, 19 April 2008
Saturday, 12 April 2008
psalm 120
We don’t get to see the face of the old woman
Headscarfed
And sat on a bed.
She faces the closed net curtains
And ponders what, I wonder?
What goes on
Headscarfed
And sat on a bed.
She faces the closed net curtains
And ponders what, I wonder?
What goes on
in the mind of an old woman
Whose years carry memories
Like water in a jar.
Whose years carry memories
Like water in a jar.
If we could see her face
Would the lines, the lips, the eyes
Speak of the daughter
She hasn’t seen in 20 odd years
And the grandchild she was carrying
Whom she never saw born or grow up
But whom she never gave up looking for
And whom despite the lies and deception of the authorities
She finally found.
She looks worn out
By a world
That could make
So many Young woman and men
In the Argentina of 1978
Just Disappear
Under a cloud of political deceit.
Her experience alone
Should be enough to make us understand,
If we didn’t already know it
That there is something deeply wrong
With the world of human beings.
Something politics can’t fix,
Something advertisers can’t camouflage
Something money can’t buy off
Something entertainment can’t block out
Something travel can’t escape.
From Beijing to Khandahar,
From mortgage boom to credit crunch,
Be it on the plastic swamped beaches of Bali
Or the bullets fired in the backstreets of Basra -
There’s something deeply wrong with our world.
From the madness of medical doctors
Who want to destroy democracy
By driving 4 by 4’s into Glasgow airports terminals
To the insanity of an American president
Who wants to defend democracy
By torturing information out of people -
The world we live in is far from right.
From the struggle the western world has
With obesity
To the struggle most of the world has with poverty
From the squabbles we have in our families
To the selfishness we struggle to stop
Eclipsing our own heart
Something in the way of being human
Is badly broken.
For those of us
Tired of the cynical rhetoric employed by politicians
For the person who knows
That however beautifully they say it
The Billboards only lie,
Psalm 120
Offers itself like a protest song
Sung by a people moving in another direction
Taking an opposite way.
We sing it when we can no longer stomach the deceit
At the heart of the world we live in;
The sham that we can make our own peace
As though God does not exist,
As though God has not come into the world
In the life of Jesus Christ
To offer us the only peace worth making.
The peace that’s formed on a cross
The peace that escapes from a tomb
The peace that makes
Forgiveness,
Friendship,
Truth,
Grace,
Blessing,
Welcome
Acceptance,
Courage,
Hope
More than just words on our lips
But realities growing out of our living.
The peace of Jesus Christ.
Psalm 120
Is a song for those
Ready to begin a new journey,
Away from the pretence
That with a little more education,
With a higher standard of living,
With greater honesty among politicians
With more time to travel
Or indulge our pet hobbies
It can all be fixed.
“Woe is me that I am an alien in Meshech
That I live among the tents of Kedar,”
Says the psalmist.
Whenever we are fed up with the life
We see on TV
Whenever
We read the paper
And say to someone can you believe that,
Whenever the truth dawns on us
That the world we have pitched our tent in
Seems like a world full of strangers
Intent on biting and scratching until they get what they want.
Then we are ready
To make psalm 120 our own.
It has been said
And it’s usually the case
(It certainly was for me)
That until we get fed up with the world as it is
We won’t develop an appetite
For the world of God’s grace.
Until we realise
The world as it is
Just isn’t right
That no amount of human ingenuity
Will make it better in the future,
We are reluctant
To give up the falsehood
Of trying to make our own peace.
The psalmist says:
“Too long have I lived among those
Who hate peace.”
But who in their right mind
Hates peace?
Well that depends
On how peace comes.
In our house, among the children
The price of peace depends
On who says sorry first.
And even then, sorry's are only grudgingly given,
They would rather hold onto their little resentment
Than make the effort to be at peace.
A sorry is not the road either willingly wishes to take.
True peace
The bible claims,
Is only made in relationship
With the God who made and loved me,
And for some
That’s not a truth they are willing to hear.
And so a world is often made
Where God is kept outside
From work desk and playground
Holidays planned, homes bought, meals eaten.
And any peace to be made
Will be sought without the help of God
I once got tired of that world.
And left it.
Have you?
Maybe
If we are to find God’s peace
We each of us
At some time
Need to reach the point of the psalmist
Whose experience in this world leaves him feeling
Like a stranger
In a hostile crowd.
“Lord”
The psalmist says
“Lord”
God is addressed here
Not as an idea,
Or a vague possibility
But is spoken to
As a person who is there.
The psalmist speaks the name he’s always known
As if he is also known to that name
He says it
With a deep, intense, sore, sustained longing
In the way a child shouts out
For her mother in the next room
Knowing she will be heard by the one she calls.
And under the burden
Of what life has become
The psalmist cries calls out:
“Deliver me, o Lord
From lying lips
From a deceitful tongue.”
Christians have a name for that deliverance.
A name
For the specific journey
Of leaving behind the life
That tries to make its own peace
Swapped For the life
That receives God’s peace instead.
We call that journey repentance.
Repentance
Is the way we leave the fantasy
Of the life we are fed up with
For the peace and truth
We find in God.
If you want to get to the Allen’s farm
Then you have to go along manse road
There’s no other way to drive there.
No other road that will take you there.
If we want to embrace
The truth of God
That brings us to peace
We must go by the way of repentance
No other road
Will take us there.
But what is repentance?
Well Eugene Peterson puts it best for me
And I’ll quote it at length:
“Repentance is not an emotion. It is not feeling sorry for your sins. It is a decision. It is deciding that you have been wrong in supposing that you could manage your own life and be your own god; it is deciding you were wrong in thinking that you had or could get the strength, education, training to make it on your own; its deciding you have been told a pack of lies about yourself, your neighbours and the world.
And it is deciding that God in Jesus Christ is telling you the truth.
Repentance is the realisation that what God wants from you and what you want from God are not going to be achieved by doing the same old things, thinking the same old thoughts. Repentance is a decision to follow Jesus Christ and become his pilgrim in the path of peace. It puts a person in touch with the reality God creates.”
If we want to say with the psalmist
I am for peace
That is the peace of God
Then we are invited
To walk along the only road
That leads to that peace
By the way of repentance.
Repentance invites us
On the kind of Journey Kallistos Ware describes
When he writes:
“To repent is to look, not downward at my own shortcomings, but upward at God’s love; not backward with self reproach, but forward with trustfulness. It is to see, not what I have failed to be, but what by the grace of Christ I can yet become.”
Would the lines, the lips, the eyes
Speak of the daughter
She hasn’t seen in 20 odd years
And the grandchild she was carrying
Whom she never saw born or grow up
But whom she never gave up looking for
And whom despite the lies and deception of the authorities
She finally found.
She looks worn out
By a world
That could make
So many Young woman and men
In the Argentina of 1978
Just Disappear
Under a cloud of political deceit.
Her experience alone
Should be enough to make us understand,
If we didn’t already know it
That there is something deeply wrong
With the world of human beings.
Something politics can’t fix,
Something advertisers can’t camouflage
Something money can’t buy off
Something entertainment can’t block out
Something travel can’t escape.
From Beijing to Khandahar,
From mortgage boom to credit crunch,
Be it on the plastic swamped beaches of Bali
Or the bullets fired in the backstreets of Basra -
There’s something deeply wrong with our world.
From the madness of medical doctors
Who want to destroy democracy
By driving 4 by 4’s into Glasgow airports terminals
To the insanity of an American president
Who wants to defend democracy
By torturing information out of people -
The world we live in is far from right.
From the struggle the western world has
With obesity
To the struggle most of the world has with poverty
From the squabbles we have in our families
To the selfishness we struggle to stop
Eclipsing our own heart
Something in the way of being human
Is badly broken.
For those of us
Tired of the cynical rhetoric employed by politicians
For the person who knows
That however beautifully they say it
The Billboards only lie,
Psalm 120
Offers itself like a protest song
Sung by a people moving in another direction
Taking an opposite way.
We sing it when we can no longer stomach the deceit
At the heart of the world we live in;
The sham that we can make our own peace
As though God does not exist,
As though God has not come into the world
In the life of Jesus Christ
To offer us the only peace worth making.
The peace that’s formed on a cross
The peace that escapes from a tomb
The peace that makes
Forgiveness,
Friendship,
Truth,
Grace,
Blessing,
Welcome
Acceptance,
Courage,
Hope
More than just words on our lips
But realities growing out of our living.
The peace of Jesus Christ.
Psalm 120
Is a song for those
Ready to begin a new journey,
Away from the pretence
That with a little more education,
With a higher standard of living,
With greater honesty among politicians
With more time to travel
Or indulge our pet hobbies
It can all be fixed.
“Woe is me that I am an alien in Meshech
That I live among the tents of Kedar,”
Says the psalmist.
Whenever we are fed up with the life
We see on TV
Whenever
We read the paper
And say to someone can you believe that,
Whenever the truth dawns on us
That the world we have pitched our tent in
Seems like a world full of strangers
Intent on biting and scratching until they get what they want.
Then we are ready
To make psalm 120 our own.
It has been said
And it’s usually the case
(It certainly was for me)
That until we get fed up with the world as it is
We won’t develop an appetite
For the world of God’s grace.
Until we realise
The world as it is
Just isn’t right
That no amount of human ingenuity
Will make it better in the future,
We are reluctant
To give up the falsehood
Of trying to make our own peace.
The psalmist says:
“Too long have I lived among those
Who hate peace.”
But who in their right mind
Hates peace?
Well that depends
On how peace comes.
In our house, among the children
The price of peace depends
On who says sorry first.
And even then, sorry's are only grudgingly given,
They would rather hold onto their little resentment
Than make the effort to be at peace.
A sorry is not the road either willingly wishes to take.
True peace
The bible claims,
Is only made in relationship
With the God who made and loved me,
And for some
That’s not a truth they are willing to hear.
And so a world is often made
Where God is kept outside
From work desk and playground
Holidays planned, homes bought, meals eaten.
And any peace to be made
Will be sought without the help of God
I once got tired of that world.
And left it.
Have you?
Maybe
If we are to find God’s peace
We each of us
At some time
Need to reach the point of the psalmist
Whose experience in this world leaves him feeling
Like a stranger
In a hostile crowd.
“Lord”
The psalmist says
“Lord”
God is addressed here
Not as an idea,
Or a vague possibility
But is spoken to
As a person who is there.
The psalmist speaks the name he’s always known
As if he is also known to that name
He says it
With a deep, intense, sore, sustained longing
In the way a child shouts out
For her mother in the next room
Knowing she will be heard by the one she calls.
And under the burden
Of what life has become
The psalmist cries calls out:
“Deliver me, o Lord
From lying lips
From a deceitful tongue.”
Christians have a name for that deliverance.
A name
For the specific journey
Of leaving behind the life
That tries to make its own peace
Swapped For the life
That receives God’s peace instead.
We call that journey repentance.
Repentance
Is the way we leave the fantasy
Of the life we are fed up with
For the peace and truth
We find in God.
If you want to get to the Allen’s farm
Then you have to go along manse road
There’s no other way to drive there.
No other road that will take you there.
If we want to embrace
The truth of God
That brings us to peace
We must go by the way of repentance
No other road
Will take us there.
But what is repentance?
Well Eugene Peterson puts it best for me
And I’ll quote it at length:
“Repentance is not an emotion. It is not feeling sorry for your sins. It is a decision. It is deciding that you have been wrong in supposing that you could manage your own life and be your own god; it is deciding you were wrong in thinking that you had or could get the strength, education, training to make it on your own; its deciding you have been told a pack of lies about yourself, your neighbours and the world.
And it is deciding that God in Jesus Christ is telling you the truth.
Repentance is the realisation that what God wants from you and what you want from God are not going to be achieved by doing the same old things, thinking the same old thoughts. Repentance is a decision to follow Jesus Christ and become his pilgrim in the path of peace. It puts a person in touch with the reality God creates.”
If we want to say with the psalmist
I am for peace
That is the peace of God
Then we are invited
To walk along the only road
That leads to that peace
By the way of repentance.
Repentance invites us
On the kind of Journey Kallistos Ware describes
When he writes:
“To repent is to look, not downward at my own shortcomings, but upward at God’s love; not backward with self reproach, but forward with trustfulness. It is to see, not what I have failed to be, but what by the grace of Christ I can yet become.”
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