One

Seven Occasional Meditations on Lent #7 One God

One love
One blood
One life

One life
With each other
Sisters Brothers

One life
But we're not the same
We get to Carry each other
Carry each other

Last weekend I decided to run in the mini-marathon, or rather, I was egged on by my wife, and our good friend, Maria. What compelled me to go for it was the thought of being allowed to set foot on that amazing structure of the 25th April Bridge that traverses the Rio Tejo with startling vistas of the city of Lisbon in front of me, than any personal ambition to break records!! At 7.2 km it hardly deserves the term marathon, but it was still a tough old run for me. The neat part of it was that the half-marathoners started and finished at the same place as the mini-marathoners, so you had this awesome experience of puffing and blowing up the finishing straight, as this engine of a man, Haile Gebraselassie, the world record holder, passes you in a whisper like some graceful antelope, having completed the 21 km in the time it took you and the 20,000 other runners to complete 7!!

But out on that bridge the experience was amazing. It was fun being in such a vast crowd of people intent on one goal. It was exhilarating to sense the physical health and strength that God has given. It was awesome to see above wisps of cloud against a blue sky, and below tiny boats on the Tejo, and ahead the sparkling yellows and whites of Lisbon’s waterfront. But most of all there was such a strong sense of the One God. One God over all and around all and underneath.

One God who from time eternal has planned and purposed in Jesus Christ to connect with this world He has made – to communicate, and to live in relationship with ordinary men and women like this crowd of 20,000 mums and dads and brothers and sisters, boyfriends and girlfriends, crossing the bridge with me. And for this to happen, there was the cross and the empty tomb, and the constant knowledge that Jesus Christ is living and alive and will live forever more.

Hallelujah, Jesus is alive

Death has lost its victory

And the grave has been denied

Jesus lives forever

He's alive, He's alive

Sometimes You Can’t Make it on Your Own

Seven Occasional Meditations for Lent #6 Holy Spirit

In my case it’s most of the time that I can’t make it on own. There was a time in life, when I guess I thought I could, when the grand vistas of the future seemed to beckon, and I felt myself to be master of all that lay ahead. It all came crashing down on a calm summer evening in 1976 sitting on a rock outside Helsinki. The clear blue of the Baltic below, and the realisation of a great and mighty God whom I did not know, and to whom my soul from deep inside cried out. I was a bit like the guy who sings in Green Day’s “Boulevard of Broken Dreams”

"I walk a lonely road
The only one that I have ever known
Don't know where it goes
But it's home to me and I walk alone

My shadow's the only one that walks beside me
My shallow heart's the only thing that's beating
Sometimes I wish someone out there will find me
'Til then I walk alone….”

One of the profoundly amazing aspects of the cross story is the continuity through it all and the focus that the dying Christ brings to His relationship with us, fallen broken men and women. The drama unfolds gradually through the in the hours leading up to his exit from the world and finds expression in the words between Jesus and his followers.

“Having loved his own, he loved them to the end…..”
................“ I am going to prepare a place for you, and if I go, I will come back and take you
.......................... ..so that where I am there you may be also.”
........................................“I won’t leave you orphans, I will come to you…. “
......................................................“Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again
........................................................and you will rejoice and no-one will take away your joy”
.....................................................................“Father, I pray that all of them may be one,
......................................................................just as you are in me and I am in you.” (1)

Even on the Cross, His thoughts turn to those He loves, that they might not be confused, scattered, left empty and uncomforted. And now down the centuries, the wonderful, amazing, powerful, dramatic Presence of God’s Holy Spirit continues to be the one that comforts, invigorates and strengthens, since the moment He swept through the gathered believers at Pentecost, down to the moment when he wakened a desire for God and truth and reality in the heart of a lonely student on a rock in Finland.

It is he who then communicates all the reality of what the Cross is about deep inside of us, who helps us walk this “boulevard of broken dreams” and helps us make the choices that guide our lives onward and upward to God, and keep us from the downward spiral.

You don’t have to go it alone. You don’t have to put up a fight. The grandest most human thing that each one of us can do is to bow down before the reality out there, and admit that we can’t make it on our own and that we need Him to come in and sort out the mess we're in. And the amazing thing is ...... HE WILL!

(1) John 13:1, John 14:3, John 14:18 John 16:22 John 17:21

Sweetest Thing

Seven occasional Meditations for Lent # 5 Forgiveness

My favourite U2 music video has to be “Sweetest Thing” (1) when Bono gets up in the horse drawn carriage with his wife Ali Hewson in Fitzwilliam Street in Dublin and tries to make it up to her (apparently the song was written by Bono as an apology for forgetting her birthday while he was on tour one year), even enlisting the help of the lads from Boyzone, and the cast of Riverdance among others!!

Whether it’s his gormless face, or just that he encapsulates what every man feels when things have gone a bit haywire, and you just want to somehow put things back the way they were, it cracks me up every time I see it.

Come to think of it, an awful lot of the sentiments expressed in our popular culture have to do with the business of forgiveness, the longing to set things right, and that horrible feeling that there’s not going to be a way back, and you've just gone one step too far.

“It's sad, so sad
Why can't we talk it over Oh it seems to me
That sorry seems to be the hardest word” (Elton John)

“It's too late to apologize, it's too late........ I said
it's too late to apologize, it's too late” (Timbaland)

Lately, we saw the movie based pm Ian McEwan’s book “Atonement” with Keira Knightley and James McAvoy. Apart from the fact that it should have been awarded the Oscar and is an excellent film, it somehow touches the heart of how it feels to need forgiveness for some wrong done in the past and not to find it, and how that can eat someone’s life away.

How amazing then in the run up to Easter to know that its all there in those two pieces of wood nailed together and raised aloft on a distant hill. That all that we ever need in the way of forgiveness, either because of what we have done to someone we love, or against the God who made and created and loved us, it’s all dealt with in the cross. Not the shiny dangly thing that hangs around a hundred thousand necks, nor the dark images that cast shadows in a hundred thousand cathedral naves. It’s in that cross that stood as the harsh sadistic symbol of Roman capital punishment and was used to dispose of God’s own son.

And He does what we find we can’t do. He forgives. He puts all the sin and the pain and the hatred behind him. In the words of Psalm 103, “As far as the East is from the West, so far has He removed our sins from us”. Amazing Love. Amazing Grace.

Gretchen Peters is an American songwriter in the “alt-country” tradition, and I heard a song of hers recently, "Revival", in which she sings, (as they often do) concerning a broken relationship that can't seem to get fixed :

"Now I have done everything that I know to do
But you left a hole that I just can't fill
And If God can forgive me baby why can't you
But I guess you never will" (2)

If God can forgive us so completely, so constantly and so utterly, how come we find it so difficult to put behind us the petty upsets and annoyances that we get from others.

(1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wfv3lJs5qE
(2) "Revival" by Gretchen Peters from the album "Trio Live" (2005)

Grace

Seven Occasional Meditations for Lent #4 Grace

There’s a little known piece from the “All that you can’t leave Behind” album simply called “Grace”. I listened to it first driving through Slovenia in Diederick’s car some months back. Maybe it was the incredible scenery we were passing through, or the good chat along the journey, but it started me thinking about the nature of grace – what it is and what it does for us. And a lot of the time, if we do think about it at all, it seems to belong in the world of religion, to high vaulted cathedrals and soft spoken bishops. It doesn’t seem to have much to do with the here and now, the messy lives we live, and how I am I going to manage to get through the day

The U2 song brings the idea of Grace down to street level. It imagines her as a girl and follows her through the streets. Something along the lines of how the book of Proverbs treats the idea of “wisdom” and personifies it as a woman - Sophia.

Grace

She takes the blame

She covers the shame

Removes the stain

It could be her name

Grace

It's a name for a girl

It's also a thought that

Changed the world

And when she walks on the street

You can hear the strings

Grace finds goodness

In everything

Because grace makes beauty

Out of ugly things

Grace finds beauty

In everything

Well, that might not suit everyone’s theological cup of tea, but you get the picture. And there’s a form of grace that does indeed walk the streets. Grace that you encounter in the lives and responses of people around you. A kindness, warmth, a readiness to overlook the wrong that’s been done. A willingness to believe the best. A Grace that looks for goodness and beauty in everything.

But the Grace you encounter in the person of Jesus is something totally other. Deeper and higher than anything you’ve encountered before in the way if human kindness, it leaps from the pages of the Bible.

It’s a Grace that loves unconditionally and without expecting anything in return.
…………It’s a Grace that overlooks but does not ignore the wrong that’s been done.
………………….It’s a Grace that says, I’ll pay the price, let him go free.
…………………………………..It’s a Grace that doesn’t stop until it meets death
………………………………………....and then passes through it to the other side.

Jesus! the name that charms our fears,

that bids our sorrows cease;

'tis music in the sinner's ears,

'tis life, and health, and peace.

He speaks, and listening to his voice,

new life the dead receive;

the mournful, broken hearts rejoice,

the humble poor believe.