Wayside Pulpit (below) - Last Up-dated: Sptember 2008
The Year's Turning
Seasons of Sadness - Seasons of Joy; Christ's Church Ever Replenishes Its People
As, Year by Year, They Travel Through "The Wilderness of this World"
Towards Their Appointed Home.
Action: Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, etc.
I used to work in an office next to a young woman who always had a List of Things to Do next to her computer. Thinking about this, recently, I realised that St. Paul was a compulsive “list maker”. You know about list-making – as in all those time-management task-oriented training days, at work, which encourage you to set out everything the boss thinks is important (and then prioritise, and “action” them); or all those lists of need-to-do things stuck to your fridge door, by friendly-looking magnetised badges; sometimes they can appear threatening – so much to achieve, so little time. But alternatively, they can be encouraging if we think to use them in another way: they can be lists of things we’ve succeeded at – like CVs, listing qualifications and experience – or lists of good, virtuous, powerful things that are on our side - or can be, if we choose to concentrate on them. Paul’s lists are of precisely this kind. In one, he seems to hint that all the good and virtuous things will develop naturally if we simply tend, properly, the seed we’ve planted. Thus love, joy, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness, and self-control (Galatians 5, 22) are the “fruit” or “harvest” of the Spirit, so that if we water the plant regularly (well, not much need for watering at the moment) they will flourish, perhaps without our realising it. Concentrate on the one essential, I’ve often considered – filling your life with the presence of God – and the rest will simply follow; here is something which does its work imperceptibly, without our knowledge or effort, as seeds bring forth shoots, or the life of prayer and worship, which can silently spread out into all areas of one’s being. But in another list, Paul suggests we need a bit of effort, thus he sets out at great length the many things that the Christians at Phillipi should be concentrating on: that which is true, noble, just, pure, lovable, gracious, excellent, and admirable (Phillipians 4, 8) and, “Think on these things”, he says (in the language of the older translations); and myself, I always take that to mean think on these things, not all the rubbish that the media throw at us all the time, most of which is rarely excellent, and never pure. Above all, it’s very hard – I consider – to discover much truth in modern life, unless you look very persistently. Ours is a world ruled by fashions, illusions, and hopeless substitutes for what is real, most of them taking the form of some kind of pretend salvation, which seductively beckons in the form of possessions, wealth and fame – the false values of the celebrity culture (worse still, authorities and powers press magic formulae upon us – isms - whereby the answers to all the world’s problems can effectively be found). We live, in C. S. Lewis’s phrase, in the City of Clap-Trap.
Perhaps the reality is a bit of both, we need effort, and inattention - working hard to practice the good things Paul lists, but also letting go of them in order to concentrate on the one priority, the source from which all will come. Actually, I think Paul had been on one of those task-management training days, for notice how good he is at the prioritising and “ranking”, in 1 Corinthians 13, 13: faith, hope, love, but the greatest of these is love.
October 2007
Wayside Pulpit
It is a long tradition, at least in Britain, that churches have external notice-boards on which Christians proverbs, mottoes or sayings ("sentence sermons") - perhaps quotations from the Bible, or a classic Christian writer - are displayed. I first remember seeing them outside one of our local Methodist churches, when I was growing up in Staffordshire, in the 1950s. I now intend to reproduce several such pithy sayings, many taken from The Complete Book of Zingers. Over 5000 Perfect One-Liners, by Croft M. Penz, Tyndale House Publishers (1990) (see my short review: Zingers in The Good BookStall) Here are my latest offerings:
We Are Ruined, not by What we Really Want,
But What we Think we Want
The Only Way to Conquer Fear
Is to Keep Doing the Right Thing that you Fear to Do
All Sin Springs from the Taproot of Self-Will
Love is the Christian's ID Card
"A man can't be always defending the truth; there must be a time to feed on it",
C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms, "Introductory".