The blog of Richard Hall, a Methodist Minister in Wales.

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Some of them, of course, are consistent in arguing for a blunt instrument approach for everything. These types have always been readily available to us. We give them the hammers and everything looks like nails. So, they smash their world up in the name of their ideologies, personal slights, and hatreds. I especially enjoy it when they work to demonize those with whom they disagree.

These have always been our useful tools, and they are dependable because we can count on them to never, ever deviate from their hidebound ways. They howl for action and force. “Something must be done!” they scream. One of the reasons this is so helpful to us is that in their blundering stupidity, they forget that it is usually the case that they caused the situation in hand.

How many times have we watched them engage in some action with the purpose of “promoting liberty” or “protecting freedom” or even “serving God” when they had not even thought to question whether their much-loved freedom, liberty, and obedience had died at their hands?….

If they realized that evil met head-on is one of our greatest goals, they would change their tune. Meeting evil head-on puts them on our ground and, once there, we will always win. This is how we want them to think. We don’t want them to consider how resistance to evil early on would snuff out the flame we seek to fan. What would Germany (or the rest of Europe for that matter) have looked like if its citizens had refused to hate the Jews? True resistance to evil never comes from weapons; it comes from a heart that refuses evil’s call to hate, or fear. By the time they get to the guns and knives it is too late for them. They are already in our hands.

The ones that really bother me are the ones that don’t become obsessed with eradicating evil. They don’t become fixated on the evil of those they oppose to the point that we can use them so broadly. There are those who recognize the evil in a particular situation, take it seriously even, but they don’t allow it to absorb them. They move by other means to blunt our impact and keep us from the space that is rightfully ours.

When the BODY showed up, well, that scared the hell out of me, I must say. He understood that the real world is, in fact, an illusion that they grasp like dying persons holding on to life. I am not surprised they wanted to kill him. They realized what a threat he was to true evil. If they lived like the BODY desired, we could not exist. I could not exist.

Jeffrey C. Pugh, Devil’s Ink: Blog from the Basement Office (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), pp. 45-48.

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The hope and charity may go
A moment but the faith that’s you,
You I can’t feel and never see,
Yet feed on my identity.
O Christ, can it ever be just
To make a burden out of trust?

Love does. I mean our human love
And you are man but spoken of
As God. To make life simplified
You were a little child who died.
O take my unlove and despair
And what they lack let faith repair.

Elizabeth Jennings, Collected Poems (Manchester/New York: Carcanet Press, 1986), p. 160.

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Father of Jesus Christ — my Lord,
My Saviour and my Head –
I trust in thee, whose powerful word
Has raised him from the dead.

Thou know’st for my offence he died,
And rose again for me,
Fully and freely justified
That I might live to thee.

Faith in thy power thou seest I have,
For thou this faith hast wrought;
Dead souls thou callest from their grave,
And speakest worlds from nought.

In hope, against all human hope,
Self-desperate, I believe;
Thy quickening Word shall raise me up,
Thou shalt thy Spirit give.

Faith, mighty faith, the promise sees,
And looks to that alone;
Laughs at impossibilities,
And cries, “It shall be done!”

Obedient faith that waits on thee,
Thou never wilt reprove;
But thou wilt form thy Son in me,
And perfect me in love.

Charles Wesley

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Come, let us use the grace divine,
and all with one accord,
In a perpetual covenant join
ourselves to Christ the Lord;

Give up ourselves, through Jesus’ power,
His Name to glorify;
And promise, in this sacred hour,
for God to live and die.

The covenant we this moment make
be ever kept in mind;
We will no more our God forsake,
or cast these words behind.

We never will throw off his fear
Who hears our solemn vow;
And if thou art well pleased to hear,
come down and meet us now.

To each covenant the blood apply
which takes our sins away,
And register our names on high,
and keep us to that day!

Charles Wesley

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This is probably very unfair, but it started my day with a laugh.

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Strong stuff from Jason Goroncy

While the context demands some different ‘rules’ (These are basically common sense. For e.g., never sit on the bed, check with the nurse first if the patient wants to go for a walk outside with you, etc), hospital visiting is at core simply a more disinfected version of any other form of pastoral ministry. In other words, it is best approached as merely another form of the ministry of the Word (Calvin is very good on this). If you are ‘the minister’, remember that you are there neither to be a friend, nor to be a collared version of a Hallmark card. The former needs to bring fruit or flowers or the iPod charger and need not necessarily witness to anything beyond the friendship itself. And the latter is nothing more than expensive and/or pretentious BS. So resist the temptation to speak only of ‘happy’ things, leave your Mr Collins impersonations in the carpark, and try something oddly different for a change – tell the truth about things. Hospital patients, like most other human beings, don’t enjoy verbal debris. And those few who do will find no shortage of such from others in the hospital setting who like to keep both reality and the outside world at bay.

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Actually, they’re not mine, they’re observations of the late, great George Carlin which become particularly pertinent during an election year. Here they are:

In America, anyone can become president. That’s the problem.

The IQ and the life expectancy of the average American recently passed each other in the opposite direction.

Have you ever wondered why Republicans are so interested in encouraging people to volunteer in their communities? It’s because volunteers work for no pay. Republicans have been trying to get people to work for no pay for a long time.

Conservatives say if you don’t give the rich more money, they will lose their incentive to invest. As for the poor, they tell us they’ve lost all incentive because we’ve given them too much money.

Once you leave the womb, conservatives don’t care about you until you reach military age. Then you’re just what they’re looking for. Conservatives want live babies so they can raise them to be dead soldiers.

Bipartisan usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.

The reason they call it the American Dream is because you have to be asleep to believe it.

When you’re born you get a ticket to the freak show. When you’re born in America, you get a front-row seat.

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When ‘Anti-Semitism’ Is Abused

…when anti-Semitism is falsely applied, we must also stand up and decry it as defamation, as character assault, as unjust. That is why when we debase the term by using it as a rhetorical conceit against those with whom we disagree on policy matters, we have sullied our own promises to our grandparents. For if we dilute the term, if we render the label meaningless, defanged, we have failed ourselves, our legacy, our ancestors, our children.

Doodlings unrelenting

Theological persuasion is a necessary but not sufficient condition for most Christians who resist the inclusion of LGBT people in the church. Even personal contact may not lead to holistic metanoia. Psychotherapy may be necessary. Even, as a last resort, exorcism.

Blogging and the curse of coolness

Blogging may have been superseded by new and inferior innovations, but the medium need not die. Indeed, bloggers should treat the rise of alternative forms of online communication as a liberation, rather than a disaster. Freed from the curse of coolness, blogging can now develop as a literary and artistic genre, or set of genres. Blogging may have lost some of its old practitioners, but it should be able to attract writers, artists, and political thinkers dissatisfied with the short attention span of twitter and the ritualised onanism of facebook. Blogging may become an act of resistance against the dumbing down of culture and political discourse in the twenty-first century.

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You may wonder why I am starting this blog….

I debated whether to start a Facebook page, but there are so many who are doing the heavy lifting for us there it would be merely redundant. I am also thinking about a Twitter acount, but am still trying to figure out what the point is. Their celebrities and politicians are increasingly making use of it, so anywhere politicians are found, I suspect we will find something useful to extending our domain as well. As far as tweets go, the instant gratification part is something we certainly understand, and the constant self-absorption is, of course, our stock and trade, but how much use could Twitter possibly be?

I know, we had a huge success with PowerPoint, but you can’t possibly get lucky all the time. Perhaps Twitter will turn out to be another way they endlessly amuse themselves, right into our loving embrace. Of course, they don’t see true problems until it is too late. For example, they create technologies of social interaction, but they bleed away the empathy from actual relationships as a result. Just think about how the hive mind functions to change the meaning of the word friend.

I must confess, I see the benefit of technology in ways I could not see before. This is one reason why I love the humans so. They create things that end up creating them instead and then don’t see problems down the road. They run ahead of their ability to reflect morally about where their creations take them and then seem shocked when things blow up in their faces. We have extended ourselves deeply into their world through the words, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we could …?” You can complete the sentence with almost anything.

Jeffrey C. Pugh, Devil’s Ink: Blog from the Basement Office (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011), pp. 1-2.

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Christmas and New Year,
now they are over;
but all the good cheer –
is it now past?
Yes, the big question –
facing the future:
was it suggestion,
or will it last?

Babies grow bigger,
they become children;
boys in their vigour
turn into men.
Will our love likewise
grow to adulthood?
Can we the baptised
answer “Amen”?

Child in the manger,
safe and protected,
soon there’ll be danger,
conflict and loss.
We will go with you,
Advent to Easter,
and we will stay true,
cradle to cross.

(Tune: Bunessan)

Kim Fabricius

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Although the scribes could explain where the Messiah should be born, they remained quite unperturbed in Jerusalem. They did not accompany the Wise Men to seek him. Similarly we may be able to explain every article of our faith, yet remain spiritually motionless. The power that moved heaven and earth leaves us completely unmoved.

What a contrast! The three kings had only a rumor to go by. But it spurred them to set out a long, hard journey. The scribes, meanwhile, were much better informed, much better versed. They had sat and studied the scriptures for years, like so many dons. But it didn’t make any difference. Who had the more truth? Those who followed a rumor, or those who remained sitting, satisfied with all their knowledge?

- Søren Kierkegaard

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via the Sign of the Cross

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I wonder if at the root of the defection [of pastors from their vocation] is a cultural assumption that all leaders are people who “get things done,” and “make things happen.” That is certainly true of the primary leadership models that seep into our awareness from the culture — politicians, businessmen, advertisers, publicists, celebrities, and athletes. But while being a pastor certainly has some of these components, the pervasive element in our two-thousand-year pastoral tradition is not someone who “gets things done” but rather the person placed in the community to pay attention and call attention to “what is going on right now” between men and women, with one another and with God — this kingdom of God that is primarily local, relentlessly personal, and prayerful “without ceasing.”

I want to give witness to this way of understanding pastor, a way that can’t be measured or counted, and often isn’t even noticed. I didn’t notice for a long time. I would like to provide dignity to this essentially modest and often obscure way of life in the kingdom of God.

Along the way, I want to insist that there is no blueprint on file for becoming a pastor. In becoming one, I have found that it is a most context-specific way of life: the pastor’s emotional life, family life, experience in the faith, and aptitudes worked out in an actual congregation in the neighborhood in which she or he lives — these people just as they are, in this place. No copying. No trying to be successful. The ways in which the vocation of pastor is conceived, develops, and comes to birth is [sic] unique to each pastor.

The only modifier I can think of that might be useful in honoring the ambiguity and mystery involved in the working life of the pastor is “maybe.” Anne Tyler a few years ago wrote a novel with the title Saint Maybe. How about Pastor Maybe? That would serve both as a disclaimer to expertise (that if we could just copy the right model, we would have it down) and a ready reminder of the unavoidable ambiguity involved in this vocation. Pastor Maybe: given the loss of cultural and ecclesiastical consensus on how to live this life, none of us is sure of what we are doing most of the time, only maybe.

Eugene H. Peterson, The Pastor: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2011), pp. 5-6.

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[Scene: a dump of a New York tenement.
Characters: White, a college professor in suicidal despair; Black, an ex-addict, ex-con who -- who lives ...]

Black
Suppose I was to tell you that if you could bring yourself to unlatch your hands from around your brother’s throat you could have life everlastin?

White
There’s no such thing. Everybody dies.

Black
That aint what he said. He said you could have life everlastin. Have it today. Hold it in your hand. That you could see it. It gives off a light. It’s got a little weight to it. Not much. Warm to the touch. Just a little. And it’s forever. And you can have it. Now. Today. But you dont want it. You dont want it cause to get it you got to let your brother off the hook. You got to actually take him and hold him in your arms and it dont make no difference what color he is or what he smells like or even if he dont want to be held. And the reason you dont want it is because he dont deserve it. And about that there aint no argument. He dont deserve it. (He leans forward, slow and deliberate.) You wont do it because it aint just. Aint that so?

Silence

Cormac McCarthy, The Sunset Limited (London: Picador, 2006), pp. 78-79.

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Blow ye the trumpet, blow!
The gladly solemn sound
let all the nations know,
to earth’s remotest bound:
The year of jubilee is come!
The year of jubilee is come!
Return, ye ransomed sinners, home.

Jesus, our great high priest,
hath full atonement made;
ye weary spirits, rest;
ye mournful souls, be glad:

Extol the Lamb of God,
the all atoning Lamb;
redemption in his blood
throughout the world proclaim.

Ye slaves of sin and hell,
your liberty receive,
and safe in Jesus dwell,
and blest in Jesus live:

Ye who have sold for nought
your heritage above
shall have it back unbought,
the gift of Jesus’ love:

The gospel trumpet hear,
the news of heavenly grace;
and saved from earth, appear
before your Saviour’s face:
The year of jubilee is come!
The year of jubilee is come!
Return to your eternal home.

~ Charles Wesley

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What else is there to say?

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From the BBC

Provisional figures show that only 2006, with an average temperature of 9.73C (49.5F), was warmer than 2011’s average temperature of 9.62C (49.3F).

This year saw high temperatures for lengthy periods; including the warmest April and spring on record, the second warmest autumn and the warmest October day.

Early figures suggest 2011 is ending with a “close to average” December.

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