Recently in A surprising God Category

Update: Link to read the full assembly now works!

It's rare, you'll know I suspect, that I have a script to reproduce for any of my talks or sermons, but there are occasions when I make doubly sure I know what I'm going to say by at least writing it down beforehand... even though I don't go on to read from it up front.

This week saw one such occasion - very sadly, the tragic death of a pupil who should have been returning to Year 10 at a local secondary CofE school where I'm part of the clergy team (with a particular responsibility for Yrs 10&11).

Here's a portion of the words I used, taken from the middle of the assembly... you can read the rest online, should you wish, here.

"It's odd, isn't it, how we think God won't be interested in our emotions - that he might even look down on how we feel.

I wonder whether we think that way because of how we see the Bible - that it's a quiet and respectful book, talking about religious themes, in a religious way, for religious people... But it's not!

In fact it's a bluntly noisy read, noisy with people's feelings - full of the sound of weeping... and of laughter... you hear shouts of pain, and cries of triumph; the sounds of friends partying together and of families mourning aloud.

It's written by real people, living out real lives alongside the very real God who made, loves and walks with them.

And so those who wrote the songbook of the Bible, the Psalms, were convinced that God, far from being uninterested in their feelings, held them as absolutely precious... listen to these remarkable words from Psalm 56:

You keep track of all my sorrows.
You have collected all my tears in your bottle.
You have recorded each one in your book.

An amazing picture of God : collecting our tears in a bottle - each one precious, not a single one lost or wasted - and taking the painstaking time to write our emotions down in a book? What was true for the Psalmist all those years ago is, I believe, true for all of us as we miss [name] today."

Sometimes Twitter has its uses... John Piper (U.S. preacher and prolific writer) has just started 'tweeting', giving his justification here (deliberate pun - if you've been following the Piper vs Wright debate!) - and his twitter feed from a few days' ago carried a link to the pdf of a famous C.S.Lewis piece, The Weight of Glory [links to pdf download] - one we looked at briefly in a short course last year.

That first paragraph, which Piper describes as "One of the most important paragraphs I ever read...", ends like this:

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward ...in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday by the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
[C.S.Lewis, The Weight of Glory, publ. 1942 in Theology]

It's a paragraph I remember us dwelling on at the short course - enjoying the unexpected and powerful imagery (classic Lewis) and the surprise of finding that the Christian faith is more about "desire" than "denial" - the crucial, life-changing question being "What do I desire?".

The question reverberates about my day today - what do I desire from it for me: merely comfort, or success or approval? - as much as around the whole of my life-before-God.

Bishop Tom Wright has prime space in the Times today (and available to read online too) to talk about Easter and - no surprise - grabs the opportunity with both hands.

It's a wonderfully concise and stirring piece on the significance of a bodily resurrection for a world that "lurches between anarchy and tyranny" and a church that needs to take up the tasks of "beauty and justice".

Here's a flavour from the last few paragraphs - do go and read the rest.

Easter is about a new creation that has already begun. God is remaking His world, challenging all the other powers that think that is their job. The rich, wise order of creation and its glorious, abundant beauty are reaffirmed on the other side of the thing that always threatens justice and beauty - death. Christianity's critics have always sneered that nothing has changed. But everything has. The world is a different place.

Easter has been sidelined because this message doesn't fit our prevailing world view. For at least 200 years the West has lived on the dream that we can bring justice and beauty to the world all by ourselves.

The split between God and the "real" world has produced a public life that lurches between anarchy and tyranny, and an aesthetic that swings dramatically between sentimentalism and brutalism. But we still want to do things our own way, even though we laugh at politicians who claim to be saving the world, and artists who claim "inspiration" when they put cows in formaldehyde.

The world wants to hush up the real meaning of Easter. Death is the final weapon of the tyrant or, for that matter, the anarchist, and resurrection indicates that this weapon doesn't have the last word. When the Church begins to work with Easter energy on the twin tasks of justice and beauty, we may find that it can face down the sneers of sceptics, and speak once more of Jesus in a way that will be heard.

Thanks to Maggi Dawn's blog, I'm once again reminded how little G.K.Chesterton I know - and nudged (again) to go read him and drink deep.

She posts (in the context of yet another day with snow in Cambridge) a wonderful quotation which captures the infant joy in repetition that we've long-since lost - as any parent who's played "garages" or "tea party" twenty times in a single morning will testify.

I love the sense Chesterton picks up of God the creator's intimate involvement in each day - we don't believe in a Deist, distant, "wind it up and stand back 'til it's all over" creator, but in a God who's attention is focused on that which he has made, is making and continues to remake - and will one day make utterly new.

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.

But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.

It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.

It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

We think of "growing up" as a completely and unarguably good thing - what if we find that, in our sin, growing up loses us something so precious, Jesus' calls us to rediscover it - is there something of that in Matthew 18?