Praise from the Pit

A lovely spring morning. I put the soup on, and, secateurs in hand, I popped outside to do an hour in the wildness that is our garden. After uncovering the parsley struggling to survive beneath a pile of last autumn’s leaves, I noticed the ivy stretching its grippy fingers every which way. Over the dyke in both directions, up the greenhouse wall and round the damson trunk and clawing its way into the black bagged leaf mulch waiting to enrich the veggie patch.

There is something extremely satisfying about clipping and pulling up the roots of hungry ivy. I didn’t have much time. I didn’t get it finished. But I’ve made a start.

I’ve been hugely impacted these last few days by a programme about Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War. I’ve been shocked and dismayed. Gutted. That I grew up believing lies and half-truths. That I thought the Civil War decided it: African Americans are equal. Now I know there were many deliberate campaigns and decisions by white men at the turn of the 20^th century which caricatured the noble African Americans and libelled and slandered them. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, I learned of the execution last week of an African American convicted of a murder someone else confessed to. He was executed anyway.

It seems that white supremacy is hungry, insidious, and active. It obscures the truth and strangles the facts and perpetuates injustice of the most reprehensible kind. I am appalled and left on my knees asking God, ‘What can I do? What can I say? How can I help? How can I make a difference?’

It turns out that I don’t know very much. I am not finished, but I’ve made a start.

In the pits of slavery, the African Americans looked up to God. They sang and they praised him and their music continues to have a powerful influence in sacred and secular society. Praise is a weapon.

As I stand at the edge of this massive injustice in which I have been an unwitting player, there is nowhere to look but up, nothing to do, at this point, but praise. Praise the God who brings what is done in the dark into the light. Praise the God who loves the weak and the marginalised, the voiceless and the oppressed. And listen for his guidance, and then obey.

Meaning

Splashes of colours and shapes covered the huge canvas. Abstract design: abstract thoughts, or cohering through the viewer’s perceptions? I gazed for several minutes and began to see things. A bridge. A lighthouse. A cityscape. The shape of a face.

It drew me in. Perhaps in a way that a more realistic painting wouldn’t. I’m not sure I’m a fan. But for the first time I began to see a point to the abstract.

The paintings lack titles, so the viewer is not conformed to the artist’s imagination but is free to explore her own.

Issues. Maybe we are too conformed to what we’re being told about the political scene. It looks a mess. The environmental crisis is a mess. On so many levels, our world appears to be in a mess.

We need a visionary who can step outside of the rhetoric and imagine. Someone who can perceive a path through the confusion.

God didn’t get angry when things were going wrong in Noah’s day. He grieved, grieved for his creation, and extended the time in case people could turn things round.

May he enlighten us in our days, so that we can step into the high calling he has for us all. May he call forth leaders in our day, leaders with humble hearts and open ears and compassionate souls, who long for justice and truth to prevail.

May we, through our prayers, be part of the solution.

Father, Forgive

Forgive. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing. Forgive us ... as we forgive them ... him ... her...

But we cry out for justice! Why should ‘they’ get off scot-free?  

Yet holding on to unforgiveness does not mete out punishment to those who trespass against us. Instead, holding a grudge metes out punishment to the one holding the grudge, in terms of physical, emotional, spiritual sickness.

There is evidence that nursing a grudge is sometimes connected to heart attacks, rheumatoid arthritis, even diabetes! Not that everyone who suffers from these and other ailments does because they are holding on to grudges, but just that these illnesses occur in a higher prevalence among people who haven’t been able to forgive.

It is just emerging that the co-pilot of the German plane which slammed into the French Alps Tuesday and killed 150 people deliberately crashed it. As the relatives of the dead gathered today in the nearby town, the parents of this co-pilot were among them and were there to grieve and mourn. Suddenly they have been separated from the other mourners and their own grief has been ratcheted up. Rather than mourning together with others, they now bear a lonely guilt and no doubt a hurt and an anger and a disbelief. And grief. Gut-wrenching grief.

Forgive, for they don’t know what they are doing. Jesus prayed that prayer as the Roman centurions nailed him to the cross. He prayed it not just for the soldiers doing the hammering, but for all those involved in bringing him to this point – Judas, Pilate, Herod, Caiaphas, the Pharisees, the mob. Sinners. You and me.

There was no justice for him. Not at that point. Not ever. He paid the price of sin though he was sinless. He took my punishment. And yours. Voluntarily. 

Forgiveness comes at a cost. But so does unforgiveness. To allow unforgiveness to fester is to extend the offence against you. 

Some offences are so horrific, though, that it takes an act of supernatural grace to free us to let go. It needs prayer for God’s intervention to enable us to forgive, to move on, to continue to live a life in grace, through the power of God.

My prayer tonight is for those affected by this tragedy. May they be given the grace and the power – immediately or over the next days, weeks, and years – to forgive. May they be comforted tonight, held close in the arms of our Saviour.

Greedy Guts

I wasn’t expecting the big black horse to be a bully. I thought that as he shared a field with the smaller, older white horse, they would be friends – or at least happy to share with one another.

Wrong.

When I reached their paddock today, two apples jammed in each pocket, the big black one was right there at the fence. I proffered an apple and his big loose lips rippled round it on the palm of my hand until he had it firmly between his (rather large) teeth. 

Naively I extended the next apple to the wee white one, prompting an aggressive lunge from Big Blackie. I dropped the apple in surprise and it fell out of reach, within the paddock but within Big Blackie’s domain.

As he was munching I thought it would be safe enough to lob the biggest apple over to Wee Whitey, but alas, no, that just resulted in yet another aggressive pounce at her, causing her to shy behind him. 

Finally, he was distracted by his wealth of apples and I was able to give my remaining one to Wee Whitey, whose old teeth didn’t seem able to handle an entire apple at one go. She chomped in and half of it fell to the ground between the stone dyke and the barbed wire – out of both of our reach. 

It wasn’t her day for apples I guess. 

I left the paddock, remembering a time when I, a small five year old city girl, visited a great uncle on a farm and shared an exciting half hour with my sister feeding a pen of pigs. We were dismayed that the big pigs grabbed all the cobs of corn, leaving the smaller ones without anything. Finally my great uncle removed the big pigs and gave the little ones a chance.

What kind of spiritual lesson can I draw from all that? I’ve been thinking all day about the world’s needs and humanity’s great weakness, greed. Maybe greed exists in the animal kingdom, too.

Jesus told a story once about separating sheep from goats. The difference didn’t exactly lie in who grabbed the most ‘stuff’ ... or did it?

‘For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in. I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ 

We live in a world of such gross imbalances between rich and poor, starving and obese, homeless and home-rich. It would be divine to see some self-starting generosity from some of those who have more than they need.

I count myself among them.

Justice, mercy and humility

So the EU election results reject the status quo and bring in those espousing extreme views from right and left. Is anyone surprised?

During these last several years of economic crisis, we’ve been voicing lots of outrage over fat cats and bonuses, only to watch the disparity between rich and poor continue to grow. Politicians, a class of people who used to command respect, fiddle and fudge their way through their terms of office. A few get caught and pay a price but many continue to act as if they are above the law.

It’s seemed amazing that there hasn’t been more civil unrest. Of course there has been some, but maybe not as much as I would have anticipated. And maybe that’s the strength of democracy and even of the EU; where there might have been revolutions or wars before, now outraged citizens take to the ballot boxes and vote in the most outrageous candidates just to make sure the powers that be recognise the depth of the populace’s discontent.

Where are we going with all this? I don’t know, but this morning on my walk I was reminded of a bit of Scripture from Micah: What does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

To act justly. I guess the Germans don’t feel it’s very just for them to be working hard in order to bail out the southern nations whose work ethic isn’t the same. 

To love mercy. I guess the Greeks don’t feel it’s very merciful to be stripped of their income (and their extremely early retirement packages!!) by the powers that be.

To walk humbly with your God. Well, there’s few enough of us Christians who manage to do that, let alone politicians who are out to line their own pockets.

But I think this is the challenge. As secularisation gains in strength and power, fewer people are going to make an effort to live by God’s guidance. Does that matter? Do people have an inherent sense of goodness and fair play which will still seek a high ethical standard?

No. 

The only way to succeed in acting justly, loving mercy and walking humbly is by living as close to God as is possible and allowing him to be Lord of one’s life, to listen to his voice and swallow one’s pride and love God and neighbour before self. 

People deride Bible-believers because so many of them focus on the trivial – arguing for a literal seven days of creation, for instance, when actually, does it matter how long it took God to make the world? Real Bible-believers should be recognisable by the way they behave in a just, merciful, and humble way. 

Not many of them on the political scene, but there are some. But before I worry about them, I think I better check my own life’s choices.

Is Evil Metastasizing in this World?

Praying for a new friend this morning, a young woman who is newly diagnosed with breast cancer and now undergoing treatment. That led me to pray for so many others I know with this dread disease. 

Cancer is insidious. It lurks in all of us, we are told, waiting for a catalyst to awaken it and get it going. The catalyst can be any number of things: diet, stress, environmental pollutants, whatever.

My prayers widened to include the world. So many areas of horror and pain: Syria, Ukraine, Sudan, Nigeria, Iraq, North Korea, Afghanistan ... So many places where corruption and violence have erupted as evil has metastasized. 

The catalysts for turmoil in the world are many and varied: conflicting religions, territorial claims, historic instability, injustice.

Cancer is treated by removing the tumour and then blasting the body or at least the area with radiation and chemicals targeting any evil cells still lurking behind and preparing for another assault on the body. Sometimes human treatment works. Sometimes it doesn’t. And sometimes God intervenes and brings about full healing. I’ve known some people who have received such grace.

How do we treat the evil which is overwhelming our fragile world? Sometimes we try to remove the ‘tumour’ by getting rid of the prime mover in a wicked situation. Sometimes we try to starve the evil out through sanctions. Sometimes we launch a full-blown assault on the tumour of evil. 

I’ve heard it said that as soon as surgeons operate on a cancer patient, the cancer seems to spread. I’ve seen how launching a full-on military strike on Iraq has caused the cancerous evil of extremism to spread.  

We need to figure out how to treat the causes of the cancer, be it human physical illness or evil spreading through the world. If we can address the causes – fewer additives in our food perhaps, less crop spraying, harmonious living – we will have fewer cases to treat. 

There is something called the Micah Challenge which comes from the book of Micah in the Old Testament.  ‘What does the Lord require of you?’ Micah wrote. ‘To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.’

If we were able to pursue justice and mercy while remaining humble, we might have a bigger impact on the outbreaks of evil in the world. 

And beyond that: Lord, I don’t know what to do, but Lord my eyes are on you. Our Lord is a good God, a loving God, compassionate and full of grace and mercy and ready to heal, both the individual and his world.

‘As for me, I watch in hope for the Lord. I wait for God my Saviour; my God will hear me.’ (Micah 7:7)

No reason to be Bored ... or is there?

Dusty is bored with our walks.

We live in the middle of a rural paradise. Our nicknames for some of our walks are ‘The Enchanted Forest’, ‘The Haunted House’, ‘The Forest of Endor’, and ‘The Fort’. 

Dusty’s no longer impressed. She’s smelled all the rabbit holes a zillion times. She’s sniffed after the deer and picked up their ticks. And she’s bored.

Now, invite her into the car, and it’s a different story. She’s eager, excited, ready to repeat some of the other great walks around here which we’ve not done as a daily routine.

It reminds me of our worship in churches. We may have the best organist or praise band. We may have the most challenging sermons and enlightening prayers. But if it’s too repetitive, people – we – can become bored. We can become so bored we turn around half way there and go back home. 

Well, I’ve not done that, and actually, I’m not bored with our church services. But I think it’s a danger we need to be aware of, that we don’t become stuck in a rut and start going through the motions of worship. Sometimes that challenge comes in shaking up the order of the service, or in changing the method of delivery, or in learning new songs and listening to the young people.

I’ve just read a book in the Bible, Amos chapter 5, in which even God shows he gets fed up with people going through the motions without really engaging in worship. He blurts out, ‘I hate all your show and pretense – the hypocrisy of your religious festivals and solemn assemblies.’ ... ‘Instead, I want to see a mighty flood of justice, an endless river of righteous living.’

Now that puts a whole new slant on ‘doing church’. It’s not so much where we go, or what we do, as who we are. And how we demonstrate ‘whose’ we are.

So I’m going to go out today with that in mind. Where I can make a difference today in terms of justice and righteousness, please help me God to do it.