X-mas

'X' marks the spot

where a pearl of great worth

is being buried.

I watch as

history is muted,

traditions diluted;

meaning looted,

Christmas polluted with

idols

perched on evergreen trees

in the eaves,

flashing with tinsel:

beneath all the chintz

all are dead and uprooted.

Religion's disputed

so fragments of festive 'goodwill' are recruited;

Santa Claus hangs on a tree:

Is there mercy for me?

An all-loving love

My soul follows hard after you:

your right hand upholds me.

-Psalm 63:8

The impulse to pursue God originates with God. "No man can come to me," Jesus said, "unless the Father that sent me draws him." (John 6). Because God's act of drawing happens first, he deserves all the credit if we decide to come to Him. We should be following hard after God, but he is drawing everyone, "not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance." (2 Peter 3:9): He determined the times set for all people and the exact places where they should live "so that men would seek after him and perhaps reach out for him, though he is not far from each one of us." (Acts 17:27). He specifically chose where and when you would live so you might reach out to him. Do you know who you are? You are like a miniature version of God, with your own will - created by Him. We think we are the gods of our own lives, until we realise that he made us, and where our heart's true home is - with him: so God set a trap for us. In his heart, God had billions and billions of characters and personalities that he's released into the world. Most are going their own way, but he has a way to draw every one of us back, if we will slow down and listen. God was so in love with the world that He gave his only son, that whoever believes in His name can have eternal life. All people everywhere are welcome to their gift - their gift of eternal life. (Acts 17:30)

None of our lives are the same; our experience of heaven and our relationship with God is also be unique and special. Nobody sees him in the same way!

And there is a personal and unique way that God is wanting to reach out to people - people desire God and desire to encounter his life in very personal ways, and no-one is the same. See not as man sees but as the Lord does - into hearts - and you will lead the most resistant of people to repentance.

Love,

Sam

The Christian imagination is being refreshed.

We have lived for too long with The Arts as the pretty bit around the edge with the reality as the non-artistic thing in the middle. But genuine art, I believe, takes seriously the fact that the world is full of the glory of God, and that it will be full as the waters cover the sea, and at present, (Romans chapter 8) it is groaning in travail. Genuine art responds to that triple awareness of what is true - the beauty that is there - of what will be true - the ultimate beauty - and of the pain of the present; and holds them together in tension, as the Psalms do, and asks 'why?' and 'what?' and 'where are we?' And you can do that in music and you can do that in dance and you can do that in painting. And our generation needs to do that, not simply to decorate the gospel but to announce the gospel. Because again and again, when you can do that, you open up hermeneutic space for people whose minds were so closed by secularism that they just literally cannot imagine any other way of the world being.

I have debated in public in America with colleagues in the New Testament Guild who refuse to believe in the bodily resurrection. And again and again the bottom line is when they say, 'I just can't imagine that.' The answer is, smarten up your imagination. And the way to do that is not to beat them over the head with dogma, but so to create a world of mystery and beauty and possibility that actually there are some pieces of music that when you come out of them it is much easier to say 'I believe in the Father and in the Son and in the Holy Spirit' than when you went in!

The Christian imagination is being refreshed. Down in the African gallery in the British Museum there is a tree of life. It stands about nine feet high, spreading branches and little animals around the foot. It was made in Mozambique by four local artists, sponsored by Christian Aid and by the British Museum itself. And it is made from de-commissioned weapons after the civil war. They got these piles of old rusting weapons. And part of the irony is that no-one in Mozambique makes guns: all of them are imported from everywhere else in the world for that long, long civil war. And they say, 'actually there's a piece of an AK47 that if you cut it like this and turn it like that, turns into the shape of three nice leaves.' And I stood in front of that tree and thought about the Isaiah's promise that their swords will be beaten into plowshares. And that tree of life is a way of saying to the Mozambicans and hence, thank God, to the rest of us, 'Open up your imaginations and think of the possibility of a world without guns, a world without violence, a world without barbed wire and land mines. Open up your mind to the possibility that there might be a different sort of power and a different sort of glory.' Maybe there are artists reading this who are going to do that - maybe for your country and maybe for the world - in what you write, in what you play, in what you paint and what you sculpt - in what you dream and turn into reality. We need to re-envision our worship and mission in the light of this picture which John and Mark have set before us of the Kingdom of God, so that we will be servants of God's larger project, and so that our worship will never collapse into being mere self-indulgence - just singing our favourite songs - but will be adoring the God in whose image we are made, in order that we can be renewed in His image for the world. Because the image is not simply me reflecting God back to God, though it is that: it is us being an angled mirror, reflecting God into the world.

And as we stand at the foot of the cross, and we stand open-mouthed by the empty tomb, and as we pray again for a fresh move of the Spirit, we hear God saying, 'This is my new creation. Welcome. Now go and make it happen.'

From a sermon I heard Bishop N.T. Wright deliver in 2006, and have never forgotten :)

Thank God for sending the Holy Spirit to reveal the glory of Christ in us through our art! :)

Escape

         I escape,

and listen to a dove on distant oaks

         or a lark ascending,

the many endings and beginnings

         of a harmony rising.

Those notes, so tentative at first

         begin to sing

and usher in new echoes

         more organic and sublime.

All anxiety fades then,

like the forgotten memory of a dream.

Remembering

For some, remembering the past

is like swallowing glass:

their memories stay buried in the ground

like a dead ancestor -

hated

yet somehow sacred.

My memories of childhood

are like a sugar lump.

My mother's time-worn lullaby

was like dew on tender grass.

I saw the light of dawn break through the leaves

and sparkle on the cobwebs;

when beads of moisture hung there,

crystalline and delicate.

It was my shoe that broke the ice

as I stepped into the stream,

and planted a stone.

I planted a stone -

it remains unmoved

but smoothened by the flow of time.

What once was just a trickle

is now a flooded river;

and here I stand on the riverbank,

frightened

as I watch time rush away, away.

Time is change,

progression of decay;

we delay, delay,

and turn to our own way

until the end of day.

I cannot comprehend from beginning to end

What strength has set eternity in our hearts.

God has made things beautiful in their time.

If I use all my powers to pretend

To understand where all creation starts

I cannot comprehend from beginning to end.

When night arrives, a darker air descends;

The skies display a burning mass of stars.

God has made things beautiful in their time.

If indeed you think that you can count them,

Look up at the heavens and count the stars -

I cannot comprehend from beginning to end.

Oak trees in the wind begin to bend;

A fragrance stirs our garden from afar.

God has made things beautiful in their time.

Against the pain that time beings to mend

A gentle whisper makes our fears depart.

For all the books and teaching life imparts

I cannot comprehend from beginning to end -

God has made things beautiful in their time.

One Minute Wonder

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,

for they shall be filled.

    - Matthew 5:6

I was at a restaurant recently when several respectable girls asked some guests if they could eat their crusts! Hunger cannot coexist with pride, as my friend Herbert Barbutti pointed out.

I have seen children filling their pockets with rice when their stomachs were too full to eat another morsel. I have seen them drinking from a tap and forgetting to breathe. If you are hungry enough, you will forget your manners, and eat as if there's no tomorrow.

Pregnant readers are eating for two; and so is anyone who travails for the righteousness of a friend. My friend Timo once spoke about a principle: If you wake up with a dry mouth you might go back to sleep, but there is a thirst that is great enough to drive you out of your bed to get a glass of water: it is thirst that drives me to do this - to spend time in God's presence, receiving real food and real drink from Him, our precious Saviour, our Righteousness.

Thank you.

Remain in Me, and I will remain in you.

-John 15:4