Doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly

We live in a rich area. You can tell by the clothes the children wear. You can tell by the way the roads and the lawns are kept tidy. There are all the tell tale signs of prosperity around us.

On discovering that this week was a special campaign of the Micah Challenge movement here in Portugal and that yesterday, Saturday October 17th was the Global Day of Eradication of poverty, we wondered what do with our regular Saturday morning activity in the square. How can we inspire our little “Lusitos” who come to us every Saturday morning for crafts and colouring in to think in terms of need, and hunger and pain.

How do you communicate to four and five year olds these harsh realities that are so much a part of life for the half of the world they know nothing about. This was the result. A simple do-it-yourself little cardboard hut. It was easy for them to cut out and put together and provided a talking point. “How do you think it would be to live in a one-roomed hut with your mum and dad, brothers and sisters, grannies, cousins uncles and aunts. How would you all sleep? Where would you all go to the toilet?”

I think the message got across. It’s a constant challenge, knowing how to inject what we do (plasticine and colouring pencils) with the values of the Kingdom. But as Micah himself says.

He has shown you, o Man , what is good,
And what does the Lord require of you
To act justly
To love mercy
And to walk humble before your God.
...............................................................................Micah 6:8

In all that we are doing and trying to be, I think that has to be the key thing. It’s at one and the same time, a simple thing to follow, and yet a profoundly difficult balancing act to maintain.

What does it mean for me to practice justice and righteousness in my relationships with my friends. What is mercy and how do I show mercy to the people down my corridor. And when do I find clear time to walk humbly with my God.

http://www.micahchallenge.org/

http://www.desafiomiqueias.com/www.desafiomiqueias.com/DM.html

Who's Getting your Best

Does God sometimes speak to you through rock songs? Well, probably not. But I don’t know. The lyrics sometimes come from human experiences born out of deep pain and frustration.
So when Dave Grohl of the Foo Fighters screams out

“Is someone getting
The Best
The Best
The Best of you?”

Do I not sometimes feel God shouting at me in the same terms. Am I giving Him my Best? In the morning when I wake up, does he get the Best part of my day? When I receive my income for the month does He get the Best of my money? When I’m working does He get the Best of my time, the Best of my energy, the Best of my concentration?

Dave Grohl growls out what any lover feels. Jealousy! And the Book of Exodus (34:14) looks at God and calls him Jealous.

“Do not worship any other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God”

We like to have all sorts of other names for God. Good, Loving, Merciful, Kind. But this Jealousy is as much a part of His character as the others. He wants us all of us all for Himself. Not just a bit. He’s not about to share us with anyone else..

And while on the subject of being faithful to one person, doesn’t it strike you as odd that, in an age when monogamy is history and lifelong commitment to one person is out of date and everything is swinging, the huge number of song lyrics we listen to every day of the week on our car radios long for, yearn for, commitment to the One, possession by the One, and life long love for the One

"I could hold you
For a million years
To make you feel my love" ........................Adele

"No one, no one, no one
Can get in the way
of what I feel for you" ................................Alicia Keys

"No, they don't know who I really am
And they don't know what I've been through
but you do

And I was made for you..." ......................Brandi Carlile

"Just like a tattoo, I’ll always have you" Jordin Sparks

It seems like people are crying out for something that will last, something that won’t involve the shame of lying, the wretchedness of leaving, and the pain and frustration of rebuilding. Amazing, isn’t it, that we already have that in God. And when we have God, we have everything else besides.

"Since he did not spare even his own Son

but gave him up for us all,

won’t he also give us everything else?"

* Romans 8:32

A Sense of Wonder

I don’t even pretend to be a literary buff but there was a poem by William Wordsworth that always caught my imagination. And it wasn’t “the Daffodils” either. “Intimations of Immortality in Early Childhood” was composed at Grasmere in the English Lake District aroud 1803. It is a long philosophical ode describing among other things, the “sense of wonder” that children instinctively have in all that is around them. As an impressionable 15 year old, the title itself of the poem was enough to intrigue me.



THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparell'd in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen
I now can see no more”.

Let's learn to look at stuff more with the eyes of a child. Today in our Saturday morning kids programme “os Lusitos”, we did autumn and falling leaves, and it was cool watching kids’ imagination run wild as they coloured in autumn leaves fantastic shades of purple and vermillion. Us adults, we would say, oh yes, the leaves change colour and fall to the ground. There's a simple scientific explanation. More than that it becomes someting of a nuisance to drivers. Children, on the other hand, possess that elusive “sense of wonder” that enables them to perceive the magic and the grandeur of their planet in a way that we have somehow lost as we deal with the prosaic.

Of course I have to quote Van the Man at this point. Anyone who reads my blog will know of my attachment to the music to my compatriot and his longings for East Belfast and the lost world (for him) of the Castlereagh hills. He describes Autumn and the passing of the seasons thus in “A Sense of Wonder”

.........................................“…I said I could describe the leaves for Samuel and Felicity
..........Rich, red browney, half burnt orange and green.
..................Didn’t I come to bring you a sense of wonder
....................Didn’t I come to lift your fiery vision bright

Didn’t I come to bring you a sense of wonder in the flame.

It’s easy to describe the leaves in the autumn

And its oh so easy in the spring

But down through January and February
It’s a very different thing.

On and on and on, through the winter of our discontent.

When the wind blows up the collar and the ears are frostbitten too

I said I could describe the leaves for Samuel and what it means to you and me….”
(Van Morrison "A Sense of Wonder" 1985)

And so the song goes on. The point that I am making is this. Let’s never lose that sense of wonderment at life and love and creation and redemption and us and God. I like to feel that I continue to nurture that sense as I look around me, at nature, at the lives of my friends and neighbours, at marriage and childbirth, sunset and high tide, and a whole host of other daily miracles that we can so easily miss out on, and never see the wonder of it at all.

God of the City

Over the summer we have been blessed through listening to a powerful song “You’re the God of the city” . It was introduced to us as one of Chris Tomlin’s but later we discovered its origin lies with a group of guys from Belfast, Bluetree. It speaks so powerfully to us of God’s hand over this city, Lisbon, and gives us hope that He is powerfully working here, and that great things will happen when we serve Him here

You're the God of this City

You're the King of these people

You're the Lord of this nation

You are

You're the Light in this darkness

You're the Hope to the hopeless

You're the Peace to the restless

You are

For greater things have yet to come

And greater things are still to be done

in this City

Isaiah 26 talks also talks about the city, God’s city well protected on every side, with salvation for its walls and ramparts. As I thought about that, and Jericho, Jerusalem and all the other cities of ancient times, it struck me that one of the biggest differences between old cities and new ones is the way in which they are defended. Thick walls, battlements, gates and ramparts is what made you sleep peacefully at night in the days of wild Barbarians, Huns, Vandals and Visigoths who roamed medieval Europe at night. Or, in Portugal’s case, the threat of the Spanish. The eastern border of the country is dotted with a line of fortified cities.

But now you can enter any city without problem. There is no need for walls and moats and portcullises. We live at the north end of Lisbon and as you drive north from there leaving the city through mile after mile of straggling suburbs, its hard to tell when you’re in and when you’re out. That’s because the defence of the city in modern Europe no longer lies in the thickness of its walls or the height of its towers. But rather in its bank balance and its stock market. That’s where the shield and the fortress is. That’s why, in our day, many are reeling. But

You will keep in perfect peace

him whose mind is steadfast,
because he trusts in you.

He humbles those who dwell on high

He lays the lofty city low;

He levels it to the ground

and casts it down to the dust.

The Lord, the Lord is the Rock Eternal. Isaiah 26

Masterpiece

The Bible says of us that “We are God’s masterpiece, created anew in Christ Jesus, so we can do the good things he planned for us long ago”. Now that’s in the second chapter of Ephesians which has all sorts of other wonderful stuff about passing from death to life and being incorporated into this amazing body of people, this community we call the “church” in which we are no longer foreigners and aliens, trying to make it through life it all on our own.

The word “masterpiece” strikes me as very important. It’s “God’s workmanship” in other translations and is actually “poema”, in the original. That’s the Portuguese word for poem. I’m a unique work of art, a poem written by my Father God, the creative expression of His heart! Now, I was going to upload a picture of a Van Gogh or a Rembrandt to illustrate what’s going through my mind, but then above my desk is the “Old man of Stour” in the Isle of Skye looking down at me in glowing colours of the setting sun. So I’ll let you look at that instead. It’s the September page on the Scotsman calendar that my brother sends to me faithfully every Christmas. So, before I turn over to October, here it is. Now there’s a wild work of art, a masterpiece in granite and heather, in light and shade.

All of the wonderful fine art down through the centuries has been just men and women repeating in a lesser way what God has been doing all along - creating form and beauty out of rough raw materials, out of ochres and pastels, and setting it forth for others to wonder at and respond to. It strikes me that, if art and creativity is so much a central part of the Creator’s relationship with what he has made, then why is that so much of what we do as “church” tends to become routine and run of the mill? We repeat a tried and tested format every Sunday, but where is the imagination, the creativity? A good sermon should be a true work of art, a painting in the air made of words, a conception of the God we can’t see, formed out of the pages of the Bible. Singing and praising and praying should be art in motion, emerging from vibrant, imaginative souls caught up in a passionate relationship with their Lord.

That’s why we’re His “masterpiece”. So that we can explore fully all those wonderful things that He has already planned for us to do in our lives, and in so doing create our own personal “masterpiece”. For His Glory.

Pó

Pó is the Portuguese word for dust. Powder. Two little letters that indicate something infinitesimal, insubstantial. Something that you would brush off your coat sleeve, something that you might blow out the window. And the Portuguese Bible says :

“lembra-se de que somos pó”

.... ..“He remembers that we are dust”.

I like it. Two simple letters. Reminding me of my total insignificance in the light of eternity. In the light of anything, really. We think we are something and we’re really not. The title of an early Chemical Brothers track was “In Dust we Trust” and it sometimes seems like that. That everything created adn fored and fashioned by humankind, this tottering edifice, is nothing more than so much dust. And as such, without God in the picture, it is all built on insubstantial crumbling foundations. This month, with elections in the air here in Portugal, and with so much bluster along the corridors of power, it is good to be reminded that theres a lot more to life and reality than our human dust.

Getting back to the psalm, its the juxtaposition of the two phrases “we are dust” and “He remembers” that makes it so amazing. It tells me that the One, the Eternal One, knows me. He knows who I am. He knows how I am formed, and how easily I fall apart sometimes. But, more than that, it communicates to me His, (and here’s that hugely significant Bible word), “COMPASSION”. He has compassion on me, my being, this dust bug. He showers me with His love, and has such a huge personal concern for all that I am and hold dear. Truly amazing stuff, and no matter how often I read it, still can’t fully take it in.

But there it is in prophetic print for all to read.

The LORD is compassionate and gracious,
........slow to anger, abounding in love.

For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
........so great is his love for those who fear him;

As far as the east is from the west,
........so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

As a father has compassion on his children,
........so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him;

For he knows how we are formed,
.........he remembers that we are dust

Psalm 103

Jesus Shows the Way

We have just finished a weekend retreat in Carcavelos, down where the river meet the ocean. The combination of a nice place to stay, good company and fellowship and the fresh September air by the sea has been extremely restful.

Our theme for the weekend was “Jesus and his team” looking at the way in which Jesus developed teamwork among his disciples. The funny thing is that when I went to the internet to look for an appropriate image to introduce the theme, I plugged in the phrase “Jesus e a sua equipa” (Jesus and his team) into Google and came up with something completely different.

“A Bola” is one of the three daily newspapers here exclusively dedicated to football (it gives a measure of how seriously Portugal takes its football) and this headline was the response to my search. Benfica’s manager Jorge Jesus saying, of his team, that we’re on the right path, after a good start to the season! Yes, we have more than one “Jesus” here in Lisbon. And it’s another interesting aspect of Portugal’s ambiguous relationship with its religious heritage, that the press love to make a play on this manager’s surname, in creating their headlines.

But back to the teamwork, and Simão Silva, one of the speakers at the weekend, pointed out how Portugal can produce such world class players in Deco and Ronaldo and yet a team that can barely manage to qualify for the world cup finals (time will tell). Jesus (not the Benfica one) took a bunch of nobodies and created a team that turned the world upside down. Its amazing how being connection to this person, this Jesus, can change a person. Not just individually, but also as he relates to others. I can do all things, says Paul, through Christ who gives me strength. And WE can also do ALL THINGS, as a group of believers, followers, disciples, bound together in love and commitment to Him.