Theological lurv

Cribbed from CT.

advice that preachers can learn from?

An economist writes about writing.

not demands, but desires

The Holy Spirit uses a man with converting power when the people see in that man not demands of them but desires for them.

Raymond C Ortlund, from this series of addresses on preaching:

Power In Preaching: Decide
Power In Preaching: Desire
Power In Preaching: Delight

A preacher learns from Alistair Cooke

There are so many ways in which one might learn from the late Alistair Cooke but, whilst reading his piece of the recently-deceased (when the Letter was written) Duke Ellington, the following occured to me:

i. The authority with which he seemed to speak came, at least in part, from his personal knowledge on the people & places he was referring to. Commenting on the Duke's funeral service, he compares the sound of the huge congregation rising to its feet to "the several million bats whooshing out of the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico at the first blush of dawn". Within a few short paragraphs he is referring to obscure American towns such as Four Forks, Arkansas and New Iberia, Louisiana with easy recall. He had been there. He had heard the bats and tasted the obscurity. There is no substitute for personal knowledge. And it shows as a person speaks.

ii. His words were carefully chosen for the time in which he lived and the audience to which he was speaking. They would not all remain appropriate today. For example, in this letter he refers many times to Negroes; I'm sure that as his letters continued and as times changed he went on rather to refer to the same people as 'Blacks'.

iii. He was clearly fallible in his judgements and not without a degree of self-interest and self-promotion in what he said and how he said it. As sons of Adam do.

hands-on intimacy

New Testament scholar Robert Yarbrough was interviewed about his forthcoming commentary on 1-3 John (here). During the interview, he was asked how computer technology has contributed to our understanding of those letters. Here is his extremely wise response (emphasis mine):

One can also do word analyses and various grammatical and syntactical searches of the New Testament or related writings with a speed, ease, and comprehensiveness previously undreamt of. Ease of access to reference works eliminates tedious book hunting and page turning. A downside is that every decade we move farther into computer technology, the greater the danger becomes that younger scholars will lack the hands-on intimacy with the text that pen and paper demanded, and the ingrained, deeply intuitive grasp of the text that a trained memory can arrive at. Voluminous information easily accessible can not only obscure but actually stunt creative and historically responsible scholarship.

I'm not so young any more, nor a scholar, but I think those comments could be helpfully applied to pastors, too, whose calling is to be faithful servants of God's Word.

The dying of 'Richard'

Is this article sad? Or is it simply inevitable? You decide.

Someone I know

...has got herself a Blue Peter badge.

Well done, Iola!

Mary Oliver: Messenger (from 'Thirst')

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird -
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

Mary Oliver: Thirst

For some time, the volume 'Thirst' by Mary Oliver has been on my Amazon wish list. I don't remember how I first read about these poems but whatever I read made me wish for them, in that Amazonian way. I searched online and found her poem 'A Visitor' and felt this was a poet I could happily spend time with.

Well, today, I bought the slim volume of poems (in Borders, not Amazon) and have been astonished at my good fortune: seldom, if ever, have I felt such immediate rapport with a poet and with poetry.

Drinking good coffee in the Borders' Starbucks, reading the first poem or two, was an absolute delight, a luxuriating moment.

Here are poems to savour slowly.

ambidextrous

She said
I was wrong;

I thought
I was right.

So I
left her

to choose
the way.

Time to choose

Can Sundays
be fun days
if they precede
Mondays?
I'd rather choose
Tuesday
as follow-on to
Sunday.
But what then
of Monday?

Wednesday
needs its
own space
and Thursday
its own grace
in the race
to Saturday.
It ought not
be replaced.

Try next to
Friday
but grieve not
that the weeks
seem simply
to fly by
these days.

A different take

on the Beatitudes from Scot McKnight:

The Beatitudes are normally misunderstood as a list of virtues. The Beatitudes are not, however, a virtue list: they are a list of the kinds of people in the society Jesus maps for his listeners. Those who are responding to his kingdom vision are the poor and the hungry, those who weep and those who are despised by the powerful - and those who are not responding are the rich, the well-fed, the party-prone and those who are approved by such powerful folks. No, this is not a virtue list but a sociopolitical statement:the work of God in Jesus and through the kingdom is to include the marginalized, to render judgement on the powerful, and to create around the marginalized (with Jesus at the centre) an alternative society where things are (finally, by God) put to rights. Here we come into a vision of the kingdom of God on the part of Jesus that is an extension of the Magnificat and the Benedictus and Jesus' inaugral address.

McKnight, A Community Called Atonement, p.12

Best teacher meme

I got tagged by Alan Davey to report my best 5 teachers. Here we go:

1. All-time tops would have to be Mr Curwen who taught us Latin in Ysgol Penrallt and Ysgol Glan-Y-Mor in Pwllheli. He achieved the impossible: gave (me, at least) a love of that dead language. He used to throw pieces of chalk about the room and shout at people a great deal but was deeply-liked and respected by us.

2. Staying with Glan-Y-Mor, I have an abiding affection for Mr Maldwyn Jones, our Maths teacher. He insisted we used ink pens and is therefore solely responsible for the way this leftie's handwriting style developed. I loved Maths and I loved the way he taught it.

3. Mr Trevor Kelk, English teacher at Hutton Grammar School, Preston. I had Trev for English 'O' and 'A' levels and he was a breath of fresh air (quite a feat for a man who smoked as much as he did). He encouraged us to explore the meaning and the power of the literature we studied and to experience it for ourselves. Thanks, Trev.

4. At ETCW we had a bunch of great lecturers - Iwan Rhys Jones, whose description of the furtive pathach will live in the memory forever; Dr Gibbard and his delight in all things Welsh; Dr Gledhill and his wearied distrust of cant (I have no idea what he thought of Kant, however); Tom Holland, who taught me to ask questions and rightly gave me my lowest essay mark at college; Trevor Burke, who exemplified humility and showed its attractivness and indispensibility. Naming one would be unfair, so please forgive me: from Peter Milsom, at ETCW and then together in ministry: the ways of grace.

5. Last, but certainly not least, Mrs Janice Montague who taught Law at Coventry (Lanchester) Polytechnic in the 1980s. She was stunningly beautiful and wore the most attractive spectacles; Tim Gray and I used to sit mesmerised through her lectures and seminars. She was the sole reason I chose to take the Law module in my final year.

a happy holiday

Unbroken blue skies for the whole week - what an amazing gift from God!

Spent time in and around Harlech, Porthmadoc, Beddgelert, Borth Y Gest, Portmeirion and Llanbedr (where my Dad worked during the 70's).

Here's our snaps....

the shame of sin

We read Graham Greene's The Power and The Glory for 'A' level English Literature. I just picked it up again today at the library, in readiness for a week's holiday. Skimming through it briefly, this passage caught my eye and made me glad for the opportunity to re-read this book about the compromised whiskey priest and the calloused lietenant. Greene's sense of the struggle that sin is was acute.

He lifted little pink eyes like those of a pig conscious of the slaughter-room. A high child's voice said, 'Jose.' He stared in a bewildered way around the patio. At a barred window opposite three children watched him with deep gravity. He turned his back and took a step or two towards his door, moving very slowly because of his bulk. 'Jose,' somebody squeaked again. 'Jose.' He looked back over his shoulder and caught the faces out in expressions of wild glee; his little pink eyes showed no anger - he had no right to be angry: he moved his mouth into a ragged, baffled, disintegrated smile, and as if that sign of weakness gave them all the licence they needed, they squealed back at him without disguise, 'Jose, Jose. Come to bed, Jose.' Their little shameless voices filled the patio, and he smiled humbly and sketched small gestures for silence, and there was no respect anywhere left for him in his home, in the town, in the whole abandoned star.

taking it whole

Have it your way, someone said. And you can. Take albums, for instance. No longer do we have to suffer the weaker tracks, the songs that bore us and leave us drifting. No need to lift the stylus and replace it gingerly, hoping not to scratch the precious vinyl. No need to press ff and guess where the next track starts. No need to press 'skip' on the CD remote. Just don't bother downloading the track in the first place. Don't rip it; don't burn it. Just ditch it.

But those tracks are part of the treasure because they give the context for the songs you love more than anything else. They help to tell the story, the whole story, even if you aren't listening to a concept album from the heady days of the 70's. We need the fullness. That struck me again whilst listening to Ohio by Over The Rhine. It's a sprawling double-album that is studded with songs that are more than fine; there are also weaker pieces that I often skip over. But taking it whole I realised that mixing and matching was robbing me of the larger canvas of ideas and the need and opportunity to respond to lesser material, even while being drawn more tightly into the finer moments.

Of course I'll still listen to isolated tracks and maybe even play them shuffled. But maybe I need to make time, too, to listen to the whole artistic expression because the artist has something to say. And I won't get it by ipodding them into a parody of Norman Collier.

And listening to the whole might do other things, too. Teach me patience and tolerance. Allow time to uncover gems that only surface on repeated listenings. Gems of rare quality that instant karma cannot yield. To learn the rhythms of life where moments of joy are couched within the lesser. Diamonds in the dark and in the gloom and in the partial light of days undawned.

credit where it's due?

I think that I can safely say that the Judeo-Christian Bible is a self-help book that has probably enabled more people to make more extensive and intensive personality and behavioral changes than all professional therapists combined.

So said 'strident atheist' and pioneer-psychotherapist Albert Ellis in 1993.

Source: Mark McMinn, Psychology, Theology and Spirituality in Christian Counselling, Tyndale 1996.

Two

years passed
since your
passing;
since the moment
your life
ceased
with a final
lunge;
since the loosed
departure
into a void
not seen
and your presence
lost.

Two years of days
and hours
and minutes
and seconds
and breaths
and beats
that never belonged
to you.

Too long
years.


(for Dad)

writing about grace

I have spent a good deal of my adult life trying to understand grace. Most of this has been through the routines of life - marriage, studying, prayer, parenting, worship, reading, and friendship. Many years ago I devoted some of my routine to writing a book about grace. No one has seen or heard of the book since, and though I have quite a knack for authoring books that no one ever hears of, there is a good explanation in this case. The book was never published. I sent my two-hundred-fifty-page manuscript to several different publishers, and each of them responded with a permutation of the standard "thanks, but no thanks" letter.

Fifteen years later, I am grateful that book was never published. It was a book produced by an overachieving young assistant professor who was committed to routine but had not yet had enough moments of insight to write about grace. It was a book written before I began to grasp the depth of brokenness and sin in our world and in my own heart. Understanding grace cannot be done without understanding sin. Sometimes I ponder what that unpublished book, with its anemic view of grace, would have been titled if it had been published. Perhaps, Grace Lite or Grace: Because I'm Worth It or Grace: I'm Good Enough, I'm Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me.

In the intervening fifteen years I have continued to experience occasional punctuating moments - windows of insight - that have brought fresh glimpses of grace. They are not altogether pleasant moments because they are always accompanied with a weighty, breath-stealing awareness of my sin and my desperate need for forgiveness. But they are motivating. It is the second of two such punctuating moments that finally gave me the courage to write this book.

(Why Sin Matters by Mark McMinn, pp.2,3; Tyndale 2004)

When the big boys come calling....

Mike Rohde, we salute ya.