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The hour went back on Sunday morning. Time in reverse, as it were. Snatching a free hour from the jaws of the inexorable forward march of time. But of course it’s a virtual step backward. Like crossing the International Dateline. A longer lie in and brighter early morning run by the river is what it meant for me.
Time, much like life itself, keeps moving forward. You can’t undo the past, you can only add to it, learn from it, adapt to it, in spite of all of those science fiction “back to the future” dreams. Which makes the idea of the gospel and God’s grace so healthy and healing. because it has a way of dealing with the past while looking forward positively and definitively to the future. As it says in the book of Hebrews “Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and the finisher of our faith ... we throw off everything that hinders and entangles...”
Most of us live their lives with a whole pile of regrets, unfinished business and unfulfilled hopes, and there are always things we wish we had never done, relationships we wish we had never entered into. But few of us have a sure way of deal with the baggage of the past, other than moving on and trying to put it all behind you. Most couples would rather “unmarry”, if that could be possible, than divorce. The process of undoing that which you have entered into is messy and difficult, a tearing and torn edges are always painful to look at and to touch. It would have better, we think, if we could put the clock back to our previous life and try again
Jesus, through his cross, is able to heal our past - not to change it, or make it go away - but heal it, and, in fact, grow something better and stronger out of it, so that we can move on to more positive futures.
A quiet night in Lisbon. The gentle sounds of laughter and clinking glasses mingle with the lapping of the water along the riverfront. I’m on my way to meet an old man in a hat and a grey suit. To hear him sing. He’s been singing and writing poetry since I was in school. The man in question is Leonard Cohen, and the occasion is a concert in the Atlantic Pavilion - a birthday present from my three kids. I’m going on my own. I know that’s a bit sad, but in some ways it’s fitting too, to drown in the melancholy of that gravelly old voice. Well, it’s not really gravelly, much smoother than that. Tom Waits is gravel. Cohen is more like a smooth grey shale, sliding down the mountainside. But it is an old voice.
Cohen, along with Dylan and Van Morrison, were the principal voices in my head, growing up in the sixties in Northern Ireland. I’m always a bit wary, however, about the prospect of seeing them perform in their old age. Don’t want to be disappointed. But this was great. Really great. Superb, in fact. Probably because, not only was he on top form, but his band - each own was a superb musician in his own right - and the backing singers - well, that’s a slight to call them backing singers. The Webb sisters, Charley and Hattie, ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1gu4YdA6tE ) and Sharon Robinson were amazing and sang wonderfully.
Lisbon packed out the arena, and as I looked around the hall at so many fiftysomethings just like myself, I realised how, while I was lying there in my bedroom in Coleraine as a 14 year old, drifting off to “Suzanne” and “Sisters of Mercy”, in the midst of all the political reality that was unravelling in the sixties in Northern Ireland, these men and women were going through their own personal nightmares as children during the Salazar years of dictatorship and through the 1975 revolution. Poignant then, when he sang those lines at the end of “The Partisan”
“Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing,
Through the graves the wind is blowing,
Freedom soon will come; Then we'll come from the shadows.”
Portugal is different now. Northern Ireland is different. But in some ways, we’re all still waiting for our freedom...
Well, Tesco managed to mess up the delivery of a box of groceries to Colin’s latest address in Bristol. It was supposed to be a welcome box, as he has just started a new job and settled into new accommodation out there in the west country, and to remind him of parents in far distant Lisbon who were thinking of him.
But such is the lot of students and the recently graduated. To be “of no fixed abode” for months on end and to move from pillar to post before eventually settling down into some semblance of routine, and have a place to sort of call your own.
I was reminded of this transitory lifestyle recently, by a quote I read from a German theologian, Helmut Thielicke, of the last century in an article in the Evangelical Alliance’s online magazine “Idea”.
“The Gospel must be constantly forwarded to a new address
because its recipient is constantly moving house.”
Even back in the 1950’s, he recognised how rapidly the goalposts were being shifted, and how the way we communicate the eternal truth about Jesus Christ to one generation will not work for the next. And here we are in 2012. And I don’t think we’ve learnt an awful lot in the evangelical churches, how we need to keep on re-addressing the package, so it gets to it’s destination.
And, by the way, Colin did get the groceries!
http://www.eauk.org/idea/is-there-a-theology-for-pioneering.cfm
