On Wings Like Eagles

The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.

He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.
He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.

Even youths grow tired and weary,
and young men stumble and fall;
but those who hope in the Lord
will renew their strength.

They will soar on wings like eagles;
they will run and not grow weary,
they will walk and not be faint.

Something of a follow-on to my earlier post, The Years The Locusts Have Eaten, although rather different in style.

Every year when I do my tax return I have to deal with 'dead weeks' - weeks when the chronic fatigue has been bad enough that admin just doesn't happen, there's nothing left. I have learnt to deal with this by ensuring that there is always enough other information available to recreate what I need, but it is a reminder that energy is a scarce resource and sometimes I run out.

The above quote, from Isaiah, has always seemed to me to be tailor-made for CFS sufferers. The promise is that one day, whether in this world or in the renewed world of the resurrection, we will once again "run and not grow weary, walk and not grow faint". Roll on that day!

But it's not just CFS which wears people out. Depression is well-known - I hope - to be not just about sadness, but about debilitating weariness, hopelessness, loss of motivation and interest, amongst many other symptoms.

Other chronic diseases also often include overwhelming tiredness, weariness, stumbling and falling amongst their symptoms ... including that most chronic of all: old age.

One of my symptoms is a fuzzy memory, and as I look back over the past 19 years I sometimes wonder whether the CFS is improving or not (actually, only over the past 17 or so years, the first couple were grim and I've definitely improved on that), and how far current symptoms are exacerbated by the fact that I'm getting older.

The reality is that all of us, at some point over our lives, go through times when just the next step is difficult, and imagining a better future feels like fantasy. At those times we all need a little hope to cling to. Maybe a picture of ourselves flying on powerful, secure wings, and imaging how that will feel, seems a strange promise and an odd thing to cling to, But I find it helps.

As a kind of a postscript, if you click on the picture above you will see that it is not just the weary who find hope in this image. God's promises are for all, whatever their need, just as his love is for all of us.

Advent Hope

"£25m Pay Deal Criticised" - BG group, headquartered here in Reading, are hiring a new CEO, Helge Lund, who wants £25 million for his first year. He may or may not get all of it, but the reality remains that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The reason is simple: the rich have the power to decide where the money goes and so they take it; the poor don't have power so they struggle to feed their families. It seems to me that there should be a reckoning for this, an accounting, a judgement if you like.

"Kassig Had ‘Calling’ To Help Syrians" - Peter Kassig was kidnapped and killed by the IS/ISIS/ISIL and a video of his death posted. What western media rarely mentions is that around 14 Syrians were also murdered on the video, an omission that seems to me to play into the hands of the IS propagandists. Nevertheless, what we have in Syria and Western Iraq is a situation where men (mostly) of violence are slaughtering people of goodwill and good intent. Surely that demands a reckoning, an accounting, a judgement.

"Rotherham: Tip Of The Iceberg" - At least 1,400 vulnerable children abused by a paedophile ring. Why the 'tip of the iceberg'? One reason is that there are now investigations into other paedophile rings operating in other towns and cities across the UK. The other is that police chiefs are now saying what the NSPCC have been saying for years: that all of these paedophile rings are only the tip of the iceberg of child abuse in this country - the vast majority of abuse takes place in or around the home, carried out by family members or family friends.There has to be a reckoning, an accounting, a judgement, and it must come soon: every day more children and young people are suffering.

What is God doing about all this?

Which brings us to Advent. Advent is not just looking back to the first Christmas, celebrating Emmanuel, God with us, and wondering about all that God was doing. Advent is also about looking forward in hope. In the church calendar, last Sunday was the Feast of Christ the King; for the next few Sundays we look forward to the return of King Jesus to earth to reign in power over a new Kingdom of justice and peace. Sounds easy?

Back in the days of the Old Testament prophet Isaiah he wrote warnings about the consequences of the injustice, greed and violence racking his nation. Many of his passages have a thick dark thread of warning, interwoven with a fine gold thread about God intervening personally to sort things out. The warnings in due course came true, back in 587BC when the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and exiled many of its people. Injustice piled on injustice, with greed, violence, poisonous politics and exploitative religion, had built up a toxic brew which eventually boiled over in death, destruction and horror. You can read about it in the Old Testament book of Lamentations.

It was several centuries before the fine gold thread took effect ... and then it was in a totally unexpected way. A baby in a manger, what is that about? The everyday miracle of a new birth, new life, imbued with the once-in-history miracle of the incarnation: God as humanity; the infinite creator of the universe as a tiny baby in its mother's arms. A wonder.

But still injustice, greed and violence continue. The Gospel writers, like Isaiah before, warn again of the consequences. Again, a thick dark thread of warning mixed with the fine golden thread of hope. There will be violence and destruction but, at an unknown time and in an unknown way, there will be change. The Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed - again - in AD70, "not one stone left on another", but Jesus, crucified by men of violence, has been raised to be king. Soon, we don't when, he will return.

Injustice, greed and violence remain - see the headlines above. They regularly boil over in a reckoning of death, destruction and horror, but that changes nothing in the long term. A new approach is needed; a new kind of reckoning. Instead of a judgement of death and destruction, the world needs a judgement of redemption and transformation. Not a reckoning of retribution, but a reckoning of renewal: a totting up, a drawing of the line, a fresh start. The point is what comes after, not judgement in itself.

We get a pointer from the apostle Paul's first letter to the young church in Corinth. Talking about Jesus' return, Paul tells them that all we have done which is wrong, which falls short, which is unworthy of Jesus, all that will be burnt up when Jesus comes, destroyed, blown away, no more. Cleansed. On the other hand, he tells us later, all that we do which is good, wholesome, worthy of Jesus' name, that will last forever. Not just a good thing for today, but Jesus will carry it over into his reign, his kingdom. Anything good we do this week will be a part of Jesus' Kingdom throughout eternity.

The point is that we are not to be afraid of making mistakes, we need to reach out and do whatever good we can.

Jesus' parable of the talents makes the same point: God has given the gift of life to us; he wants us to use it. Not to hide away in fear, in case we make a mistake, but to use it to make a difference, to make this world a better place, and so to work toward the world to come.

Because Jesus' reign and Jesus' Kingdom are not just about when Jesus returns in glory. The Advent Hope is so much more than that. Jesus' Kingdom will come fully when Jesus returns, but even now it is breaking through where Jesus' followers are at work. Even now Jesus reigns where his people do the unexpected, take risks: when we help those who would not help us, when we are kind to those who show only enmity, when we go further, look deeper, do more. That is where Jesus' Kingdom is visible, calling people to respond.

This is what the Lord's Prayer means when we say "your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven". It must never just be just words, it is to be said as a commitment: we will do all we can to help God's Kingdom break through where we are. Because the Advent Hope is not just an idea, it is actions and attitudes and a brave heart in difficult situations. It is trusting God to use all that we do for good.

And it is also saying, "Do hurry up, Lord, we're doing our best, but we still need you down here now!" Come, Lord Jesus, come.

That Farmer Again

Jesus told another parable about a farmer being apparently downright perverse. In this case it was a farmer who refused to let his wheat field be weeded, in case any wheat plants were pulled up by mistake. Yet surely if you allow weeds to grow amongst wheat they will steal the nutrients and crowd the wheat out, so what on earth is he playing at?

Jesus then told them this story:
The kingdom of heaven is like what happened when a farmer scattered good seed in a field. But while everyone was sleeping, an enemy came and scattered weed seeds in the field and then left. When the plants came up and began to ripen, the farmer’s servants could see the weeds. The servants came and asked, “Sir, didn’t you scatter good seed in your field? Where did these weeds come from?”
“An enemy did this,” he replied. His servants then asked, “Do you want us to go out and pull up the weeds?”
“No!” he answered. “You might also pull up the wheat. Leave the weeds alone until harvest time. Then I’ll tell my workers to gather the weeds and tie them up and burn them. But I’ll have them store the wheat in my barn.”

'Weeds' is a remarkably unhelpful translation here; it is very likely that the Greek word zizanion refers to darnel ryegrass, Lolium temulentum. This is also known as poison ryegrass, because it is commonly infected with poisonous symbiotic fungi, Neotyphodium. There is a factsheet on darnel ryegrass on the BioNET-EAFRINET website which advises:

Lolium temulentum is a weed of wheat farmlands. Even a few grains of this plant will adversely affect crop quality. Its seeds are poisonous to people and livestock. It is very difficult to separate the seeds of L. temulentum from those of wheat and other small grain crops as they are similar in size and weight. L. temulentum can be a host to a variety of crop pests and diseases.

If prevention is no longer possible, it is best to treat the weed infestations when they are small to prevent them from establishing (early detection and rapid response). Controlling the weed before it seeds will reduce future problems.

Although they then add:

Hand weeding can control this species although this is difficult to undertake early because of the resemblance between this weed and the infested wheat crops.

So maybe the farmer isn't being quite so daft after all; he just needs to make sure he gets his timing right.

The parable isn't about grasses though, it's about people. In particular it is about telling the difference between those people who are beneficial and those who are poisonous. It is not always easy to tell the difference.

Religious groups have a nasty habit of trying to make the distinction based on their own prejudices, traditions and rules - mostly equating to "are they like us" - but God waits for people to show their true colours. Sometimes this means getting the timing right - see the Bible story of Zaccheus - sometimes it means being able to see below the surface - see the story of Simon the Pharisee - and sometimes it is about not excluding people because of superficial matters - see the story of the Ethiopian eunuch.

The promise is that at 'the end of the age' there will be a cleansing. Those who prove themselves to be poisonous will be removed, along with all causes of harm, and those who prove to be wholesome will be welcomed into God's Kingdom, to 'shine like the sun' in a renewed world where there will be no more crying and no more pain, but God himself will comfort them.

The Wolf Will Reside With The Lamb by Loulou13

The Incompetent Sower?

Jesus' parable of the sower and the seed is fairly well known (see below for a reminder) but it always surprises me how ready people are to assume that 1st-Century farmers really were that incompetent. Jesus' teaching was full of puns, hyperbole and even jokes, but they don't always translate well (do Bible translators have a sense of humour, I wonder? Or are they too busy being reverent?).

"A farmer went out to scatter seed in a field. While the farmer was doing it, some of the seeds fell along the road and were stepped on or eaten by birds. Other seeds fell on rocky ground and started growing. But the plants did not have enough water and soon dried up. Some other seeds fell where thornbushes grew up and choked the plants. The rest of the seeds fell on good ground where they grew and produced a hundred times as many seeds."

Why did the farmer not sow all his seed on the good ground? Corn for seed is corn that cannot be eaten or sold, so no real peasant farmer would want to waste it. If it comes to that, clearing rocks and weeds is an important part of a cereal farmer's work (yet there usually seems to be a subtext to sermons on this parable that it is somehow for us - the ground - to fix ourselves, to remove our own rocks and weeds). So this is a story of one very odd farmer.

Jesus gives an 'explanation' which, like many of his explanations, raises more questions than it answers. He basically says that the seed in this parable is a metaphor for God's word (or the word of the Kingdom), and the different grounds correspond to the varied ways in which people respond to that word.

Embedded with the parable is a question about why Jesus teaches in stories and parables, and a quote from Isaiah about people hearing but not responding:

‘Hearing you will hear and shall not understand,
And seeing you will see and not perceive;
For the hearts of this people have grown dull.
Their ears are hard of hearing,
And their eyes they have closed,
Lest they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears,
Lest they should understand with their hearts and turn,
So that I should heal them.’

Isaiah spent his life warning people that disaster was coming if they didn't change their ways, but the people - especially the wealthy and powerful - mostly ignored him and listened to those with a more palatable message. Jesus was teaching anybody and everybody about God's Kingdom, yet relatively few were responding and following him. Why do that? Why not focus just on those who were interested in that sort of thing?

The point, I think, of this story is that God's Kingdom is for everyone. It's not just for the religious and the intellectual, to be spread with sophisticated theological argument, it is for all who will listen, spread in deceptively simple stories. The seed is scattered everywhere, because the 'good soil' is everywhere - even between stones and hidden amongst weeds - and because those who persistently "hear but do not understand, see but do not perceive" are also everywhere - even in fields which give the impression of being good soil.

Jesus wants people to accept his message and turn to God; anybody can do it, whatever your background, whatever your culture and lifestyle. Accept God's gift as simply as a child accepts a present from a trusted friend, turn and be healed.

NOTE:  I've noticed that I have looked at this parable before, a couple of years ago, from a slightly different angle: see 'The Sower And The Seed II' - "God is good and God is love ... sometimes we forget."
 

Acts 8: We Are The Others

I wonder how many people have heard of Sophie Lancaster? Very few, I suspect, and those mostly either part of the goth subculture or fans of a style of music sometimes called 'gothic metal'. Sophie was a young woman who was beaten to death in a park in 2007, apparently just because of her looks (her boyfriend, Robert Maltby, who she was with, was reportedly left with brain damage). She looked different, she was an outsider, she was 'other' and so she was attacked, beaten and killed.

There is a story told in the Bible:

There was an Ethiopian, a eunuch, ... He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning, seated in his chariot, and he was reading the prophet Isaiah. And the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over and join this chariot.” So Philip ran to him and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and asked, “Do you understand what you are reading?” And he said, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. Now the passage of the Scripture that he was reading was this:

“Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter
and like a lamb before its shearer is silent,
so he opens not his mouth.
In his humiliation justice was denied him.
Who can describe his generation?
For his life is taken away from the earth.”

And the eunuch said to Philip, “About whom, I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” Then Philip opened his mouth, and beginning with this Scripture he told him the good news about Jesus. And as they were going along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, “See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptised?” And he commanded the chariot to stop, and they both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptised him.

It looks like just another Bible story; I've even heard it used an example of 'how to do evangelism'. But knowing the context makes all the difference.

Here's a guy travels all the way from Africa (probably around N. Sudan) to Jerusalem to worship God. When he gets there he will have been told he's not allowed into the Temple to worship, because he's a eunuch and eunuchs aren't allowed in the Temple (strictly speaking they're banned from the 'assembly of Jahweh', Deut 23:1). He was a literal 'outsider'. So when he asks "What prevents me from being baptised," that's not a rhetorical question, more of a challenge. Baptism is how one joins this new 'assembly of God' in Jesus, and it's how someone becomes part of the Church, which is Jesus' body, which is the new Temple.

Why would this outsider, this 'other', ever think being baptised by Philip was even a possibility? The answer lies in the passage from the prophet Isaiah that he quotes; but again only in context. I deeply dislike the use of 'proof verses' - bits of Scripture ripped out of their context to 'prove' a point. One of their problems is that people then start to assume that the Bible does the same thing. Many of the early Christians will have known (what we call) the Old Testament off by heart. They would have known that the book of Isaiah is essentially a collection a passages - some short, some long - linked together. The 'sheep led to the slaughter' quote is from near the beginning of a long passage about when the Messiah comes. Toward the end of that passage it talks about eunuchs:

Let not the eunuch say, “Behold, I am a dry tree.” For thus says the Lord: “To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give in my house and within my walls a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.

So, when the Messiah comes then the rules banning eunuchs will change, and outsiders like him will be welcomed and honoured. If Jesus is the Messiah, as Philip's 'good news' claims, then Jesus changes everything, especially for the 'others', the outsiders, the excluded, the different. Now they are to be welcomed into God's people ... and they are to invite and welcome others, especially the outsiders and the excluded.

According to the Bible, that is precisely what Jesus did, and what the early Church did after him. It is sad then that today's 'churches' are better known for excluding those who are different than they are for including them. Yes, there are many churches who follow Jesus in being genuinely welcoming to all, including those who are different, whose 'face doesn't fit'; but the pretend churches - really Pharisees in disguise - are louder and more often heard.

The challenge for all of us - church-goers or not - is how to welcome and show respect to those who are 'others', in whatever way:-

The Sower and The Seed II

'Israel' in the New Testament almost always refers to the people (the descendants of Israel, aka Jacob Ben-Isaac) not to a country. This is hardly surprising, as no country called Israel had existed for more than seven centuries, and even back then it had specifically excluded Jews, who inhabitanted the separate kingdom of Judah. Jews, however, were always part of the people Israel.

The exception to the above is in the second chapter of Matthew's gospel, where he talks about the return of Jesus' family from exile in Egypt to 'the land of Israel' - as a clear reference to the old Exodus journey.

When Jesus told his parable about the sower and the seed, many in the crowd would have been familiar with the writing of the prophet Isaiah. Many years before, Isaiah had written a poem, known as 'The Song of the Vineyard', which talked about Israel as a vineyard which would only bear bad fruit. Therefore God had abandoned it and given it over to being trampled, filled with weeds, and dried out.

Why, in Jesus' parable, was the land so neglected? Because when God looked to Israel in that time for justice and righteousness, nothing had changed: He found only bloodshed and cries of distress.

Yet Jesus still came to scatter the seed. Much of it was wasted, perhaps - this was not good land. But there were still places, here and there, maybe where it was least expected, in which seed did manage to take root, to grow and to bear good fruit. Israel's leaders may have rejected Jesus and handed him over to be crucified, but there was still a remnant of Israel to remain faithful and to receive God's Spirit: new life for them and for the world.

And so it seems to continue: the seed is scattered and people respond in different ways: some with indifference, some with enthusiasm; some bear good fruit, others very bad - as a knowledge of church history makes only too clear.

But I'm not sure the story ends there. I think (after discussing the passage with others) that there is another, higher note in the chord - one which is maybe more directly relevant to our lives today.

Jesus' death and resurrection changes everything, and that change is enabled by God's Spirit poured into people's hearts. It seems to me that the farmer is at work again: clearing stones and removing weeds. God's Spirit waters and cleanses lives, allowing fruit to grow in the most unlikely places.

There are people in churches today who are sure of their own righteousness (in Jesus, of course), and of their own suitability to grow fruit for God. Maybe they are right. But there are many others, inside and outside churches, who are all too aware of their own limitations, who assume their own unsuitability to be God's garden.

The truth is that it is often those who are most aware of their need for help who will bear the most fruit, because they will let the Spirit do the work. Jesus changes everything: it is the flawed and the insecure who are the most important in His Kingdom. If that is you, then be glad. Watch out for, and celebrate, God at work within you. Be open with those around you, about your flaws and about your growth, that they may share in your encouragement.

God is good and God is love ... sometimes we forget.