A scandalous grace

Walking towards her house at around 2am, Ashley Smith felt the gun barrel in her back. She was pushed inside the door, the gunman following. Thus began a seven-hour hostage ordeal.

Captive, a movie starring Daniel Oyelowo and Kate Mara, just been released on DVD tells the true story of those seven hours in Atlanta, USA in March 2005. It’s based on Ashley Smith’s account in her book Unlikely angel.

The gunman was Brian Nichols, who earlier that day had escaped from the Fulton County Courthouse, in the process murdering three people and seriously injuring a fourth. Later in the day he killed again while stealing a car.

We know how the story ends. What keeps us watching is the tentative relationship, growing through both words and silence, between two damaged people, both with Christian upbringings.

Nichols, charged with a rape of which he claims he is innocent, learns that his partner has given birth, and consumed by a desperate anger breaks free to see his child. Smith has been addicted to drugs since her schooldays. She watched as her volatile husband Mac was murdered in a street fight. She has since taken crystal meth regularly and has entrusted her daughter to an aunt’s care. She wants to get her life together, but she can’t break free.

She has a copy of a Christian book, The Purpose Driven Life, and during her hours with Nichols she reads sentences from it to her captor. In her own book, she tells us that she had a powerful sense that God was in the situation and saying, perhaps to her as well as to Brian Nichols ‘Choose life or death. Which is it?’

Life has a purpose, she reads. ‘If you want to know why you were placed on this planet you must begin with God.’ ‘That’s a bunch of church crap,’ Nichols says. But later he listens in silence as she continues: ‘We were made to have meaning. The Bible says “well-formed love banishes fear.”’

Through such words she had what she calls in her book a ‘spiritual awakening’. She found  hope that change was possible, and the resolve to live differently. And both the words she read and her own words seem to have spoken to the gunman too, stirring hope in him, prompting him to give himself up rather than dying in a shoot-out.

That day, both gunman and hostage encountered God’s grace. At the start of the movie we see a verse from the Bible. ‘Where sin abounded grace did much more abound.’

I have some disquiet about Captive. It’s too much like a promotional film for one particular book. And though it is dedicated to those who died or were injured in the shootings, there is no reference to the pain of the bereaved and the traumatised survivor. It would have been a much more balanced and substantial film had it portrayed their stories, their anguish, and looked for signs of God’s presence with them in their suffering.

And many of us may have a deep-down disquiet that a man guilty of such heinous offences should be blessed by God, brought by those very crimes to the place of blessing. But isn’t this the radical message of grace – that no-one is excluded, that nothing can put us out-with the reach of God’s forgiveness. ‘It’s not fair, this indiscriminate grace,’ we complain. ‘It’s scandalous!’ Yet this grace is at work, making the world new. For all of us, grace abounds.

God is indiscriminate in how he reveals that grace to us. In Captive God speaks through the pages of an evangelical best-seller. But God speaks to each of us where we are whatever our religion, whatever our beliefs. God reaches out to us in our brokenness, our search for love and freedom and meaning, our pride, prompting us to choose the way of goodness and truth which Jesus taught and embodied.

The actor who played Brian Nichols is a Christian. As a young man Daniel Oyelowo prayed ‘Lord, if you don’t become real for me, I’m out.’ Three months later, he had no more doubts. ‘Oh, OK,’ he said to God. ‘Here I am.’ May we too not dismiss the whispers of God’s grace as coincidences or maverick thoughts.

Ashley Smith called her book Unlikely angel. God, she felt, had used her in her brokenness to reach out to Nichols. I believe God uses each of us, no matter how messed up we are. As the Spirit of Jesus prompts us, we express his grace to others in word and action, and in so doing find healing ourselves.

This week, we may be surprised to find ourselves ‘unlikely angels’, and to hear God speaking to us through the unlikely angels who surround us.

(Christian Viewpoint from the Highland News dated 25th February 2016)

Beyond the sunset

A couple of dozen folk of all ages walk in a straggling group down the field of wheat, funnelling into the lane at the bottom on their way to church. What struck me was the sombreness of their clothing – all blacks and browns – in contrast to the rich colour of the countryside and the vividness of the sky.

It’s a scene from the film of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song. The dark clothing seemed life-denying, a symbol of organised religion as it is depicted in both book and film.

Sunset Song  tells the story of Chris Guthrie, a young woman in Kinraddie, a crofting community in the Mearns, south of Aberdeen. Chris comes of age in the second decade of the 20^th century, her dreams shattered by the Great War. It’s a deep book, with a unique singing style, a passionate anti-war novel which explores Scottish identity, mourns the departure of an ancient way of life and concludes with a vision of a better future.

At one point in the novel Chris thinks that the Scots were never truly ‘religious’. ‘They never believed. It’s just been a place to collect and argue, the kirk, and criticise God.’

Whatever the author’s personal experience of religion, he portrays it in the novel as toxic. The Kinraddie minister is a hypocrite and a serial philanderer. Chris’s father John Guthrie beats his adult son for using the word ‘Jehovah’ inappropriately. He believes that the members of his family are his to do with as he pleases, and uses the theology of God’s will to justify his own lack of restraint which leads to his wife Jean’s repeated pregnancies. ‘The Lord’s my shepherd’, he sings blithely in the film, yet this deeply conflicted man shows little sign of following where the shepherd leads.

And yet there is grace in Sunset Song. Grace in the compassionate, if irascible, atheist Long Rob; grace in the kindly Christian socialism of Chae Strachan who has the ‘Blesseds’ from Matthew’s gospel on his parlour wall; grace, repeatedly, in the life of Chris herself as for example her active concern for those whom others ridicule as pro-German.

There is a yearning for meaning in the book, in deep-thinking Chris especially. Chris realises how fleeting our lives are. We live and love and wrestle with the land, and then we go to the place of the dead, and are quickly forgotten here. She resolves to live to the full in the spring of her life as Rob encourages her. ‘Sing it and cherish it; ‘twill never come again.’ Chris concludes that only the land of the Mearns, the land of Scotland endures, though constantly changing. Everything else perishes.

Hers is a Scotland where people are asking deep questions, seeking glimpses of something bigger than the physical world, and glimpsing grace in one another’s lives. Yet it’s a Scotland where religion is shrivelled and shrunken, destroying and binding rather that bringing freedom and life.

The Sunset Song novel ends with a vision. The new minister, Robert Colquhoun preaches at the dedication of the Kinraddie war memorial about a hope for the future. In the uneasy post-war world, ‘there shines a greater hope of a newer world – a world of justice, equality and peace.

It’s a world which the novel’s author hoped would come through socialism and communism, and though these experiments have failed since Sunset Song appeared in 1932, it’s a world for which we still are longing.

We too may find ourselves looking back to some Golden Age, and forward to a transformed future. This week, in Advent, I remembered that before Christ came the Jews looked back to a Golden Age when David and Solomon reigned, and forward to the future the prophet’s dreamed of, while for the present there was war and rumour of war, and an element of toxic religion.

There’s a story in Luke’s gospel of Simeon, an old man who’d had a promise from God decades before that he would not die until he saw the beginning of the future. The 8-day-old Jesus is placed in his arms. ‘My eyes have seen your salvation,’ Simeon says to God.

And a preacher in Sunset Song speaks of ‘the rising of Christ, a pin-prick of cosmic light far off in Palestine which will yet shine on all the world.’

Sunset Song warns us of the danger of domesticating God and dimishing our faith until we are shallower and less fulfilled than people of no faith.

We worship a big God of mystery and transcendence, a God who endures when the land passes, a God whose breath holds the world in place. A God who is in all beauty, all longing, all love. A God who promises a better world, who calls us through prayer and politics and poetry and compassion to help redeem the world.

A God who gives us a sign in the coming of Jesus that the future is beginning. Christ is the spring of life, the assurance that our lives will endure. This is breathtaking in its immensity – and this is the Christian gospel.

The Bible verse quoted on the Kinraddie war memorial promises that those who overcome will be given ‘the morning star.’ At times of war and trauma it may seem that a black, anguished sunset closes the day of our hope. But look – on the horizon! – the morning star. Day is coming.

And look! Down the wheat field of history people are dancing on their way to God’s house, their clothing a rainbow of glory.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 17th December 2015)

Grace on the road

I must begin with a confession. When I’m driving in town I often feel irritated at the number of bikes on the roads. It’s indisputable that their presence makes driving slower and trickier.

But I’ve no doubt that if I were riding one of those bikes I would have at least an equal sense of irritation at cars and lorries tailgating, or buffeting me with their slipstream as they pass too fast and too close.

So how do I react to this irritation? By reminding myself that these folks on bikes are every bit as entitled to be on the road as I am, and seeking to drive with calmness and grace – although sometimes, irritation trumps grace.

There’s a general Christian principle here. Perhaps in some of our lives goodness and grace flow spontaneously, but for many of us facing stressful and irritating situations its more that grace beckons us, and we have to choose to act in grace rather than being overcome by irritation.

The busy roads of Inverness, crowded with cars, cycles, vans and pedestrians remind me of the road of life – many individuals, each unique, all on a journey – and of the road of Christian life where people travel together to a shared destination.

It’s easy to focus on differences between us and our fellow travellers rather than on all we have in common. Our Christian fellow-travellers will have different personalities and beliefs, different spiritual experiences and styles of worship. We each travel at our own pace on the journey, some seeking to linger in the past, others to run and embrace the coming future. These differences often lead to irritation with one another.

On the roads, we find ourselves objectifying our fellow-travellers. Some drivers and cyclists  regard one another as ‘the enemy.’ On the roads we see car-drivers acting with a contempt and disregard for cyclists which we rarely see when people meet face to face, eyeball to eyeball as fellow human beings.

The same attitude is prevalent on the road of life and the road of church life. There is a tendency to dehumanise those who we perceive as not ‘like us’, to label them as ‘troublemakers’, ‘liberals’, ‘traditionalists’ or ‘just plain wrong.’

On the roads we can be divided by a mutual sense of superiority. The cyclist feels, with good reason, that she is contributing to the care of the planet and reducing her carbon tyre-print; some motorists (much less worthily) think about entitlement. ‘I can afford a big car’; ‘I’m in a hurry’; ‘My tax pays for this road.’

It’s the same on the road of life, and of church life. I may imagine that my views are inherently better than someone else’s, or that I have greater entitlement to have my voice heard and heeded.

On the roads, it’s easy to highlight the failures of others while ignoring our own errors. Drivers are indignant when cyclists jump the red lights, or use the pavement to by-pass obstructions. But is that indignation fuelled by an envy at the cyclists’ freedom, and by hurt pride, the knowledge that we are impotent until the lights change? Are we ignoring our own red-light jumps and our dangerous overtaking?

We must learn on the physical and metaphorical roads of life to drive with grace, respecting other travellers, quick to acknowledge our own faults, slow to judge others.

My wife’s church is developing a ‘culture of honour’ – each member encouraged to live out of a deep respect for one another while acknowledging difference and disagreements. Perhaps as we need more cycle tracks beside our roads so we need in church life to devise ways of allowing people to travel at their own speed, journeying together while remaining true to their unique personalities.

My daughters tell me I’m too hesitant a driver, not decisive enough when, for example, approaching roundabouts. And if I were a cyclist with a queue of cars behind me, I’d strongly feel like jumping on the pavement and waving them all past. We need to travel with grace, but with a sense of joy and confidence in our right to be on the road rather than making a virtue of indecisive hesitance and calling it ‘grace.’

It’s easy to think it’s gracious to give in to the view of others in church, trying to be what we think these folk want us to be. But we are God’s unique, precious children. If I’m one of God’s cyclists, then I need to learn to ride my bike with a humble pride.

And on our journeys, we need more of those 20mph limits. More time for stilling our hearts and walking slow, and finding in the God who meets us in our hearts the grace we need for that days travelling.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 7th May 2015)