Month: May 2021

Psalm 1 is in Sunday’s Lectionary. It begins, “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers; but their delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law they meditate day and night.” It’s great, but contrary to much experience, in the short term, anyway. Liars win. Mockery gets you friends. We take no interest in doing right.

But what we see around us is not all there is.

Meanwhile, the air is full of interesting clouds. It’s dry at the minute, but I suspect that today the weather is best viewed from indoors. I’ve already been out for a walk and a grocery shop, 13 miles in all. Janet has an outdoor meeting to come this afternoon!

God give us faith,
to keep going in easy times
and hard.

Right now, the world lifts up its sighing,
men, surveying their bloodstained deeds,
mothers, sobbing over their hungry children,
teachers clambering in the ruins of schools
destroyed by those who hate learning.

Right now, I forget, and continue a different life,
in a different world…
…which is the same world.

God forgive us all.
Sow in us the seeds of a new beginning.
Make us hard enough to act,
and soft enough to love:
give us the Spirit of Christ.

Our east window is covered in raindrops. This is not usually a good sign, as rain carried on an east wind is often reckoned to last longer than the sort that comes on a west wind. The east wind counteracts the normal west-to-east progress of the weather, which would otherwise push it through at a reasonable pace. Or to put it another way, we would be towards the north side of a depression, which would be spinning one way and moving the opposite way. Naturally, it’s not always as simple as that. Depressions can be steered in different directions, for instance.. But the forecasters do seem to expect rain for quite a while today.

Being neither brave nor 100% well-equipped I’m planning to stay in today, having done the morning shop. I’m told some vegetables will come to the door.

I’ve added something to the ‘Prayers for Places’ website to make it possible to print out a map and list of prayers near a specified location. I’m going to try out the printouts tomorrow on someone who has no internet or devices. I’ve not linked to the URL yet, because it needs to be a bit friendlier – for instance letting the user specify a location by postcode or What3Words. To do that I need to use callback functions which requires a cool head from me and a good run at it.

Living God, we pray for the nations
of these islands.
Give us peace and justice we pray.
May these islands be a good place to live,
where everyone is respected.
May the love of Christ,
and Christ’s call to do right
be known here.

According to Sunday’s Lectionary, Jesus tells his disciples, “You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit…” But they kind of chose as well – they could have said ‘no’. In this context, the idea that they were chosen makes them truly a part of this big project, to ‘bear fruit’. They need not worry about not being up to the task – Jesus (and the Father) will give them what it needs. Those words may help us at a time when God’s way (locally anyway) seems further than ever from human hearts; and justice and truth and mercy seem like some kind of anomaly.

But let us not forget that ‘choice’ is a slippery idea. From the kind of ‘persuasion’ that helps a powerful man convince a young woman to let him use her body, to consumer ‘choices’ only available to those with spare money, to the five-year choice we all make, which needs accurate information to be truly democratic, ‘choice’ is something inevitably never totally free.

Another cold day with the high sun blazing down – and one or two showers later. Time will tell whether my lack of head protection will have any consequences.

From Sunday’s Lectionary, in 1 John… “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ has been born of God, and everyone who loves the parent loves the child.” On the whole, great, but not understanding Greek, I don’t know what the second half of the sentence means. Is the writer arguing that because everyone who loves a parent loves their child, we should love Jesus? Yes we should love Jesus – but it’s not true that everyone who loves a parent loves their children! It seems to be going to the right place but by a funny route. It’s like the Pentecost story when the disciples were filled with the Spirit of God … These people are not drunk as you suppose, because it’s only nine o’clock in the morning. Being drunk at nine o’clock in the morning is quite a frequent occurrence in some places I can think of.

Anyway, so is a beautiful but late spring – a frequent occurrence.

Although many ash trees look as though the leaves may never arrive. Although it doesn’t have the same human consequences as COVID, ash dieback is creating it’s own kind of devastation in the landscape.

Well, have you? The Psalm is in next Sunday’s lectionary, and the writer expresses the feeling of praise by putting it into the actions of nature – “Let the floods clap their hands; let the hills sing together for joy…” – and so on. Sometimes I feel like that (today for instance) – you hear the wind rustling in the trees, and the birds singing, and it’s seems to be that these things are adding to your voice of praise. Actually the wind is rustling in the trees because the movements of the air and the branches and the leaves are setting up small pressure waves in the air. And the birds are singing because they want a mate or want to defend their territory. But somehow that doesn’t make it any less the sound of praise. These are kind of orthogonal meanings of the same thing.

From next Sunday’s Lectionary, the way John’s Gospel has it, Jesus says this… “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.”

There’s a lot in that little bit from the Last Supper story, some of which is hard to understand. But there’s a real change signalled here, in what Jesus says about his disciples’ relationship with him. They are ‘friends’. Sure, he has issued commands, but the disciples are ‘friends’. They are close to him, they know his mind. And therefore they are also ‘friends’ with one another – signifying relationships of equal status if not always the same roles.

The Quakers make this explicit in naming themselves the ‘Society of Friends’ – and in practices like making everyone’s gravestone alike. I wish all Christians could be ‘friends’.

A wet day coming,
a cold, slate-grey novelty
that will soon wear off.

Teddies and bunnies;
cutouts dance round the lampshade,
but we have grown up.

God of love, I pray for all forgotten people,
for all whose stories of hurt and injustice
never come to light,
for all who labour on daily, weighed down
by poverty and debt,
for all who struggle to feed their families
and themselves,
for all who look like being left behind
as politics and popularity
trundle inexorably on.

God save them.
God, give me, give us
the grace to do what it takes
to unforget them,
to make their lives the measure
by which all our lives are known.

The weight of a sun
curves space. My sister’s hurt curves
all our happiness.