Espresso Scriptures

I have been reading Ben Norton's Espresso Scriptures. It's a bit like a thought for the day, or for the week - and something any of us could do.

The book - published by Proost - started with Ben sending a daily email to a bunch of folk interested in spirital things.  There is a brief quote from Scripture, and then a brief reflection - a bit like a Bible study in brief, to put it another way. Ben himself calls it 'guerilla qorship'.

I think it's a great idea. Let me cite just one.

The Scripture is from Luke 10:39-42, quite a bit longer than many Ben uses -

She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.’ But the Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’

But Ben's comment on this one is very brief -

Stillness is a lost art. Do you make time to do nothing but be still? Try seeking out some silence this week. It will be interesting to find out what you hear ...

God and the Pandemic

“The world is weeping right now. The initial calling of the Church, first and foremost, is to take our place humbly among the mourners. Grief, after all, is part of love.”

Tom Wright’s “God and the Pandemic” takes a realistic and helpful look both at what we might make of the pandemic, and at what we might say into the situation in which we find ourselves.

Rightly, in my view, he avoids both easy answers, but also blaming God. The most important thing for the moment is indeed to weep with the world. Pandemics and other major traumas are not there to be explained. In many ways what matters is to look through what is happening to what might be, whether that be reverting to life as we used to know it, or, as seems far more likely in the current circumstances, some kind of ‘new normal’ (though not one that we can yet define). Wright uses the Israelites facing famine as a model – “when the famine strikes the Middle East, they don’t say ‘Ah, this is because we’ve sinned’. They say, ‘We’ve heard there is corn in Egypt.’ They are not looking backwards at what might have caused the problem. They are looking forward to see what needs to be done.”

There is a lot to be said for such an approach. There is no doubt that we have messed up the creation. That is not a lead-in to saying that we have caused the pandemic. That doesn’t fit my theology at all. But what does work for my understanding is to look and see how we can grow the Kingdom, how can we more nearly make things be as they should. As Wright puts it – “one of the great principles of the kingdom of God – the principle that God’s kingdom, inaugurated through Jesus, is all about restoring creation the way it was meant to be. God always wanted to work in his world through loyal human beings. That is part of the point of being made ‘in God’s image’.”

The essential thing is to stand with the world. That is what Jesus did. As Tom Wright would encourage us to recognize – “Jesus does not need church buildings for his work to go forward. Part of the answer to the question, ‘Where is God in the pandemic?’ must be, ‘Out there on the front line, suffering and dying to bring healing and hope.’”