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)

Messianic

As election day approaches, are we still secretly longing for a Messiah who can save, protect, unite the nation and lead us forward? I don’t think any of the party leaders has what it takes – although Nicola Sturgeon certainly generates a messianic fervour among supporters.

My daughter Bethany and I will be exploring the roots of the word ‘Messiah’ when we go to Eden Court this Sunday to hear Inverness Choral perform George Frederick Handel’s work of the same name.

Handel’s Messiah consist entirely of texts from the Bible set to the most wonderful music. It describes the Jewish people’s longing for the Rescuer (Messiah) they believed God had promised. It tells the story of the coming of Jesus, who didn’t at first seem to fit the messianic model.

Jesus had a clear, but perplexing agenda devoid of military bravado and political shenanigans while embracing love, justice, humility and service. And he had the misfortune, fatal to messianic expectations, to get himself killed. Another Messiah bites the dust?

Well, no. ‘I know that my Redeemer lives’ says one of Handel’s arias. Jesus lives, now recognised as a bigger Messiah than anyone had expected, the saviour not just of one nation or ethnic group, but of the whole world.

In a recent sermon, Kelvin Holdsworth from St Mary’s Cathedral in Glasgow, imagined Jesus’ followers, after his death, setting out to look for another saviour, another Messiah.

It strikes me that when we turn our backs on God as our Rescuer and Defender our hearts draw us to embrace other Messiahs – science, technology, psychology, the political process. Who will save us?

But as Kelvin puts it pithily, there’s no need to look for another Messiah: ‘One was always enough and he’s still around.’

So we’ve got our Messiah then.  No need to bother voting next week? Wrong! Some Christians have taken the view that because we’re citizens of God’s spiritual dimension we should keep our hands clean, not becoming too involved in the world. This is so wrong! God entered the physical universe in Jesus in order to be Messiah to this messy, material world. This world matters to God.

Some Christians say ‘It’s too messy and confusing. There are Christians in all political parties, and even a separate Christian Party for heaven’s sake! Who am I supposed to vote for?’ And they opt out. Wrong!

God is far too big, far too subtle, far too imaginative, far too liberating to govern our lives with a thousand rules about how we should vote. God calls us to love, creativity and justice, and gives us passion and freedom to get involved in the world – and that includes voting with discernment.

But it’s not enough to vote. The Messiah seeks to make the world a better place with us, not as casual supporters of the God party who cast our votes for God in the offering plate each Sunday, but as active campaigners, on the streets, partnering with Messiah.

Perhaps we’ll get involved in projects to make our communities and world better places – including faith-based initiatives and those with strong faith-based leadership. Street Pastors, Foodbanks, New Start and Calman Trust, for example, are making a difference here in Inverness.

Perhaps we’ll become involved in politics. It’s not enough just to fish people out of the river – we need to understand why they’re falling in and prevent this happening.

And, most important, we’ll have confidence in the power of the Gospel – not the empty, desperate words of politicians, but a life-transforming message that God is real, God loves us.

This message is for all of us. It’s not necessarily a question of acquiring skills and techniques or of adding more to already busy lives. It’s simply about being thoroughly Christian in our daily living, open to God’s creative prompting.

Kelvin Holdsworth said in his sermon ‘The Christian gospel is spread by kindness, good humour, by people who bear the marks of Christ in their souls to reach out to a world that needs to know more about God’s love. It is spread by the enthusiastic witness of those who know the love of God to be true and to be the most wonderful thing in the world.’

Donald Boyd

Donald Boyd of the Scottish Christian Party complains about parties with an agenda, but no vision. Christians have a vision. A vision of a better society and of a future perfect society. A vision which brings life and power to political parties whenever it is embraced. A vision which on Sunday night at Eden Court the choir and soloists will be belting out.

For the Messiah, no mere party leader, is God of all parties, God of the universe. ‘He shall reign forever and ever. King of kings, and Lord of lords.’

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 30th April 2015)

Is a little chaos a good thing?

‘Heaven shall be here!’ says French monarch Louis XIV in the trailer for Alan Rickman’s new movie A little chaos. He’s talking about the gardense he's developing at the Palace of Versailles under the management of head gardener André le Nôtre, a historical ficgure who in the film appoint a fictitious assistant, Kate Winslet's toubled Sabine de Barra.

Heaven shall be here? Gardens seem to be close to God’s heart. ‘This is your Eden?’ says le Nôtre to Sabine of a garden she personally tends. He’s referring of course to the story of the garden at the very beginning of the Bible where man and woman walk with God. The Bible ends with a vision of heaven, seen as a garden city of life and joy. And the fulcrum on which the Christian story centres is Jesus’ return to life in the resurrection garden.

Gardens are powerful symbols. Our lives are gardens – what actions and attitudes do we allow to flourish there? How zealous are we about weeding? The church is a garden – each of us, with our distinctive qualities planted together to create an environment of peace and healing.

 Louis XIV was an autocratic king. He had le Nôtre create the garden for his own pleasure and delight at vast expense, and at the cost of hundreds of lives This colossal arrogance was typical of the man who took as his emblem the Sun, the source of all life

How different from God’s garden which we experience both as a spiritual dimension and as the material universe we live in. It was not created to make God appear wonderful, but because God is wonderful. It was not created for an elite but for all. And we are all gardeners helping in our lives and actions to tend and nurture, develop and heal the garden.

But is there room in the garden for a little chaos? That’s the question facing André le Nôtre in the film. The gardens he has designed have hitherto been formal in design, based on geometric patterns and shapes. Sabine has a different approach – on her way to her interview for the post as his assistant, she moves one of le Nôtre’s flower pots out of line in a spirited reaction to his rigid formality. It’s her view that the greatest beauty will be seen when freedom and randomness and unpredictability play their part in the creative process.

When he sees Sabine’s own ‘Eden’, le Nôtre describes it as ‘an adundance of chaos.’ Certainly she brings more than a little chaos to his ordered personal world as under the nose of his wife André feels, and acts on, a growing attraction for Sabine.

We would be well to be rid of moral chaos in the garden. I believe every problem we mourn in our world has as its root moral ambivalence and moral chaos as, Louis XIV-like we seek our own flourishing at the expense of the flourishing of others. Grief and sadness blight the flower-beds of our world.

But there’s another kind of chaos in the universe as scientists have discovered in the last 60 years. God’s universe is not a great orderly machine, utterly formulaic, completely predictable. Flexibility and randomness and sheer chance play their part in the on-going development of  the universe and life.

God likes the joyful unpredictability of this kind of chaos. God works with chaos and chance. One Christian, D. J. Bartholemew has written ‘Since chance is such an integral part of creation, it must be part of God's plan.’  Chance should be seen as ‘grist for the providential mill rather than as an obstacle to providential action.’

There must be a lesson here for those of us who like to run our lives and our work and our churches like le Nôtre ran his gardens – with total control. Perhaps we need to lighten up, to relax, to make room for a little chaos. Perhaps we are so intent on our own plans for God’s garden that we do not listen to the whispers of the Holy Spirit who keeps moving our plant-pots out of line, or hear the Spirit’s playful laughter when we push them back into place.

In real life, le Nôtre came from a humble background, and yet was close to the Sun King. It was said of him ‘the king liked to see him and talk to him.’ Jesus Christ is the true Sun King, the source of all life. He likes to see us. He likes to talk to us. Yet we are too busy to notice him sometimes, too busy to put our tools aside, and let the peace of the garden reign in our hearts, as we walk with our creator in the cool of the day.

(Christian Viewpoint column in the Highland News issue dated 23rd April2015)