How Long?

 (Rather longer than my usual posts - but a reflection for these times - sermon based on Psalm 90 preached at Clare United Reformed Church (Suffolk) earlier today)

Psalm 90, verse 13 – Turn, O Lord!  How long?  Have compassion on your servants.  Or, as The Message version puts it – Come back, God – how long do we have to wait? – and treat your servants with kindness for a change.  That really seems like a word for today, doesn’t it?  How long?  How long is this going to go on?  How long before we can see past this virus?  How long until we get back to normal, or, more probably, move on to a new normal? 

We are all longing for some kind of settled set of circumstances, for a situation in which we are not constantly worrying whether new restrictions are suddenly going to be imposed.  We might well call on God to make a difference.  

It is interesting that this psalm, like this virus, offers a stark reminder of human frailty. 

It is a psalm that says something of the majesty of God.  God is awesome, and we do well to remember that.  The psalm speaks of the timelessness of God.  That is not inappropriate on the weekend when the clocks go back.  We are so governed by the clock.  We rush around, checking the time, ruled by our schedules.  When we were in Panama in the early nineties, I discovered that the hot and humid climate meant that my wrist reacted badly to wearing a watch, and so I stopped, and, to some extent, joined the Panamanian much more relaxed attitude to time – things happen when they happen.  Things happen when we are ready for them to take place.  To our minds, you just can’t do that.  It produces chaos.  You just don’t know where you are, or where you should be.  But, you know, actually, you can.  It does work, especially when it is the way in which everybody was operating.  You know, it was really liberating to stop wearing a watch and, mostly, not know exactly what time it was.  The real difficult was that I had to re-learn the conventional UK way when I returned, and I think it took rather longer than it should have.  Indeed, I am not quite sure that I have entirely got there yet.

Of course, we can’t ignore time, and commitments to do things at particular times, but perhaps we might make more of the bigger picture.

God, our great God, cares for us.  That is the other big thing to say here.  God accompanies us.  God sustains us.  God values us.  God loves us.  That is really important, and not least in these difficult times.  We need to know that God is with us.  We need to know that God cares about us.

This psalm is described as a prayer of Moses.  That’s there in the title.  Now, whether there is any truth in that or not, I don’t know.  I suspect not.  But what authors often did was to attribute their work to someone better known in order to add weight to it.  I want you, in your imagination, to come with me and Moses on a trip and to a place that he describes at the end of his life in a moment recorded at the beginning of Deuteronomy 34.  

We read: Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho, and the Lord showed him the whole land: Gilead as far as Dan, all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh, all the land of Judah as far as the Western Sea, the Negeb, and the Plain – that is the valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees – as far as Zoar.  The Lord said to him, ‘This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, I will give it to your descendants.’  I want you to try and imagine hearing this psalm through Moses, standing there at Pisgah, Moses, at the end of his life, having done so much for God, but just taking a moment to contemplate the immensity of God, of God’s grace and love.  And yet, realising, as he stands, looking at the promised land, that he is not going to get there.  He has been headed in his direction all his life.  Tantalizingly, he can see it, but it is just out of reach.  He is able to look.  He can see the wonder of what lies ahead.  But he is not going to get to embrace the experience.  That is for someone else.  He is content to leave things with God, but that won’t have stopped him wishing that it were different, that he would have been the one to lead the people into the promised land.  After all, that’s been the whole point of this journey. 

Now, I am not going to suggest that we are in the same situation – because I don’t think we are.  But I do just wonder if there are a few links to be made.  We wish that this thing were over, that the virus had gone.  That’s a natural wish – just as Moses wished to get into the promised land.  Unlike Moses, we do have an expectation, and a reasonable one, that we will get to the other side of it.  But, for now, we have to be patient, to accept that things are as they are, even though we look for a better day.  Do you remember those words of the queen in the speech she made back in April – “We should take comfort that while we may have more still to endure, better days will return: we will be with our friends again; we will be with our families again; we will meet again.”

The psalm accepts that there are difficult times, but it reminds us that God is with us.  As Christians, we should be people of hope.  I fervently believe that – but the hope to which we are called is not a hope that buries its head in the sand.  Jesus himself calls us to weep with those who weep.  Sometimes I think that we have forgotten how to lament and the place that lament should have in our faith and theology.  When I think of the psalms as a whole, what tends to come first to my mind is the great notes of praise that they sound.  It is good to give thanks to the Lord.  O come, let us sing to the Lord.  And so on.  But actually there are only twenty one praise type psalms, while there are 58 psalms of lament.  That is more than a third of the psalms.  So, let’s lament our situation.,  There is nothing wrong with that – and it takes us to where we started and the cry of verse 13 – Turn, O Lord!  How long?  Have compassion on your servants.  

But let that not be the whole story.  Let us mix in that our context is as a community of hope.  Because, as the rest of the psalm reads, and I am back with The Message version as, with the psalmist, I say to God: “Surprise us with love at daybreak; then we’ll skip and dance all the day long.  Make up for the bad times with some good times; we’ve seen enough evil to last a lifetime.  Let your servants see what you’re best at— the ways you rule and bless your children.  And let the loveliness of our Lord, our God, rest on us, confirming the work that we do.”

'Watership Down' and Transformative Leadership

I recently came upon a fascinating piece on leadership. At least, I found it really interesting.

It comes from Faith and Leadership work at Duke Divinity School in the United States and Gretchen Ziegenhals reflects on what we can learn from Richard Adams’ 1972 story Watership Down.  The piece itself – found at https://faithandleadership.com/rabbits-rapscallions-and-transformative-leadership - is not recent, having been written over eleven years ago, but offers some useful thinking on good and effective leadership.

 

Ziegenhals suggests that, though it might seem an unlikely source for a leadership model, Hazel, the rabbit at the centre of the story, provides exactly that. She says: “Hazel does not set out to lead. He is an “outskirter”, one of the rank and file of ordinary rabbits. He gets wounded and limps through much of the book. Yet, as the novel unfolds, Hazel learns the qualities that make him into a transformative leader: courage, humility, compassion, as well as the ability to innovate, to integrate opposing ideas and to deal effectively with change.”

 

Hazel is not looking for leadership, but he comes to exercise it effectively. Of particular note is his recognition of the importance of listening, and his ability to innovate, especially as he deals with new situations. He builds community.

 

As Ziegenhals puts it; “Like Paul’s descriptions of the church as one body with many members, the rabbits learn what it means to be a warren of individuals living and working together.”

 

These reflections have certainly got me reaching for my copy of Watership Down.

Where is God calling us to put our energy today?

I received today the report of a consultation that I attended some time ago, and was especially struck by the reminder of the first question we considered on that occasion – which was: where is God calling us to put our energy today?

It is a really good – and important – question. It is so easy for us to get caught up in all sorts of lesser agendas. We get side-tracked by a whole range of things. Many of these are important, but not more so than this critical question.

 

I wonder if we are looking and listening for where it is that God wants us to put our energy, recognising that it might well be something that we are not expecting.

Just a little task ...

Closing worship reflection at my last Synod Meeting as Moderator of Eastern Synod prior to taking ip a post as Moderator of the National Synod of Scotland.

The reading was 1 Kings 19:11-16

I feel just a little bit like Elijah.  Elijah is coming to the end of his ministry.  There are just a few things left to do to wrap things up.  And I thought those things were all in Eastern Synod; but now I discover, they are not.  They’re in Scotland.  And, as my brother said in a message to me, it’s cold up there.  But still – like Elijah, it’s important to listen to God.

Elijah had had a tough time.  There’s the encounter with the prophets of Baal, recorded in chapter 18, with its remarkable ending, but then he flees the dreaded Queen Jezebel, and now, on the mountain, he’s looking for God.  How interesting that God is so often not what you expect to find God.  Not in the great wind.  Not in the earthquake.  Not in the fire.  And then the sound of silence.  And God’s voice comes, with a few little tasks to undertake.

Actually, Elijah’s were pretty big things.  Because – what’s the task set for Elijah in today’s passage?  Well, all he has got to do is to anoint a couple of kings and a prophet.  All in a day’s work.  Actually, if we read through the rest of 1 Kings and into the first couple of chapters of 2 Kings, we find that Elijah ends up with one or two other things to do as well.  But in today’s passage he is to anoint Hazael as King of Syria, Jehu as King of Israel and Elisha as his own successor as prophet.

I am rather hoping that my task might prove not quite as daunting.  But, whatever it is, I think there are three pointers in this passage that might help me, and might just help you as well.

The first is that challenging question – what are you doing here?  I wonder how we would answer if God were to ask that question of us now, here.  What are you doing here?  What are we doing here?  What are we up to?  What are we doing for God?  Now, I am sure there are answers that we can give to those questions.  But we need also to ask whether we are doing what it is that God wants us to do.

The second thing here for me is that central comment of Elijah’s in his response – I alone am left.  And I think that comment is important because we all sometimes feel like that.  I have felt like that, here in Eastern, but it happens, and it’ll happen in Scotland – and I will think: why did I leave Eastern?  When it is really not going well, when it even seems as though God is absent, how do we carry on?  When we feel that we are the only one left, have we what it takes to continue?

But that really brings me right to the third comment I want to make which is something about whether we are ready for God to surprise us.  I have comment on that aspect several times over the last few days.  You see, I think we are pretty good at mapping out what we think God should do, and I wonder how we cope when God has other ideas.  I can’t help thinking that Elijah wasn’t expecting to undertake a trio of anointings at this point.  But that was the task for the moment.  Are we ready to do what God wants us to do without question?  We need always to be ready to respond to God’s call, just as Elisha was.

As the commentator, Walter Brueggemann, says of this passage: “The address to the prophet who is still licking his wounds is a massive imperative: Go!  Go back to the conflict.  Go back to the trouble.  Go back to the risk.”