the adventures of retirement
Not such a special day for H & T … COVID scuppers the best of plans.
As Jesus broke bread with his disciples,
so be known to us, God, in the ordinary things:
in simple acts of sharing,
in simple words of hope,
in unadorned love;
all intimations of your Spirit’s life.
God our maker,
from the smallest of seeds
grow the kingdom of heaven
in me,
in my friends,
in my enemies,
in people I barely know,
in this country,
in this world of humanity,
on this whole planet,
in all of the created universe:
kingdom where the last are first
and the least are the greatest.
And may your will be done
on earth as in heaven.
From the Lectionary, Romans 8:38-39 … “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Is this about blithe certainty, or an act of the will, the courageous commitment to live trusting in God’s love? Whichever, it inspires me.
Time to walk this morning in a slot between the rains.
The story of Rachel, Leah, Laban and Jacob in the Lectionary is about a different world. And I’m glad it is. For all the kind descriptions of their beauty, Leah and Rachel seem to play no part in deciding their futures. They might as well be possessions. Therefore it is hard to know what lessons to take from this account. Though perhaps it might be as well when welcoming a stranger to explain the local customs at an early stage!
Meanwhile, according to the radar there is rain all around us, and it seems, above us, but I got a walk in without getting wet. I guess the snow/rain is evaporating before it reaches the ground. It does that kind of thing sometimes. You can sometimes see virga/fallstreaks hanging out of the bottom of clouds and not reaching the ground. Often that is because the relatively opaque mass of snow has melted into a less opaque mass of rain on the way down. Sometimes, though, it has evaporated completely. And ISTR Janet had the opposite experience last year on the north coast of Sutherland/Caithness. The radar showed little evidence of the drizzle which drenched her. Forming in the low cloud I guess.
A pleasant morning today…
A fair morning, with one or two small bits of rain in the offing.
The Lectionary for Sunday includes Jesus’ references to a mustard seed and yeast. These are things that grow. The Kingdom of God is like small things that have a big effect. The seed contains the genes of the plant/tree. The yeast contains the genes of the organism that will divide and grow exponentially. The Kingdom of God, I believe, is founded on memetic, not genetic, information – the ‘word’ which can change everything.
A beautiful morning today….
Nice to see yesterday that the football team belonging to the town where I last worked beat the high-flying Baggies to ensure they escape relegation (barring a spectacular goal-difference accident). Also they did their West Yorkshire neighbours a favour by making sure they go up. I guess some of the fans will be less chuffed about that.
In competitions like this, when one side wins another loses; when one side goes up, another goes down. In life, with limited resources, it’s the same – the more land I have, the less you have. But it’s not quite as simple as that. Wealth an also be created – human ingenuity and labour working to convert natural resources into goods and services that benefit people. … although it seems to me that many people who claim to be creating wealth seem only to be reallocating existing wealth to themselves. And then there’s the Kingdom of God, in which the last shall be first and the first last. Are there losers in the Kingdom? Read the Magnificat with a bit of anger in your voice and it would seem so. However, there’s also the imperatives of love, forgiveness, justice and mercy – building a community in which everyone has something.
Dear God,
I often feel like a loser,
I often want to be a winner.
Then I feel ashamed that someone else has lost.
I am glad that now (at least) my country has
ventilators, PPE.
But I am sad that many nations go without,
and many people will die.
God forgive us the mess we get into
and inspire us to navigate a way out.
From Isaiah in the Lectionary, “I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god.” People of all the monotheistic religions earnestly assert that there is no god but God. But how seriously do we mean it? It’s hard to live in a society which has to sell stuff in order to continue working, without worshipping money at least a little bit, or aspiring to be rich. Just saying…
Returning from this morning’s walk I passed a house with a bright yellow car parked outside. Noticing the reflection of the car in the window, I instinctively looked in the window; then felt a bit ashamed to have invaded someone’s privacy. This is the third, maybe fourth, time this has happened. It is the same every time – I was just working on autopilot. It can sometimes be hard to get out of routines, especially if you are thinking about something else. This example is trivial, but what about those whose tramlines lead them into seriously destructive behaviour? It’s not that the people are not responsible, but sometimes habits need serious effort and maybe help to get out of. Otherwise you may need to go all the way to Bispham before you can turn round.
A theme in the Lectionary for Sunday (in Romans) is ‘freedom’ – a slippery word if ever I heard one. Never trust anyone who promises freedom. Last night we watched on catch-up an episode of Alan Bennett’s funny and serious ‘Talking Heads’. Remembering roughly, I think the speaker said how free she felt gardening with her friend in prison, compared to being at home in her marriage. Hooray, we are free from the EU, free to do whatever Trump and Putin tell us to do.
And yet there is a sense of freedom in feeling that God’s love is not conditional on us fulfilling every strictest part of an impossible set of rules. At the same time, that love itself binds us. We love, as we have been loved. We forgive, as we have been forgiven.