Peace within your walls

May there be peace within your walls,
Peace within your walls, oh Yerushalayim.
Your time has not yet been fulfilled,
And your enemies are at every gate.
Peace, peace be at your borders and
In your hearts towards the foreigner.
May you be a city on a hill that shines
Forth in righteousness and peace; a
Light to the nations on Yahweh’s Holy hill.
May there be shalom within your walls,
And within your hearts, oh Israel.

(W)hole

There’s a hole in my road.
Not the whole road,
But a whole hole still.
The flimsy fencing, there
To prevent me from falling in,
Is wholly inadequate for
Such a hole.
As I peer into it I see the
Whole problem for which
The hole exists – some
Vital arteries for gas (I think),
Long left to decay and become
Unstable and unsafe – and
See in that exposed moment
That both the hidden pipes
And the (now) vacant hole
Are a risk of danger to me.
Wholly seen the hole now
Becomes the holy ground
On which my whole being
Stands, ready to be have
The deep, broken parts
Renewed, and the absent
Spaces filled by a Holy
Presence who will make
The hole in my road whole.

SaveSave

SaveSave

Relational Reality

We live.

This much we know, but why we live at all is not so easily known.
And yet we know that life exists because of right relationships, formed out of right conditions, and so if we know we are alive then we can also know that our life is an expression of a right relationship, behind, throughout and within the universe we exist in.

In the beginning Elohim – the one GOD who is also a community of Father, Son and Spirit – created all that is, seen and unseen, out of HIS relational reality, in order to be a relational reality; from super massive black holes, to sub-atomic particles, and everything in between.

If we are to make sense of our life, and what it means to be alive, then we need to start with relationships, because this universe exists so that we might be in relationship with the Creator as our Father.

One man in his humanity has lived in right relationship with the creator and having died and resurrected has made eternal life – that which proceeds from being in right relationship with the creator – available to all.
This man is Yeshua (Jesus) of Nazareth.

“In him was life, and the life was the light of men.”
John 1:4

Always the bad cop

Bad Cop
No one wants to grasp the nettle.
No one wants to upset the apple cart.
We fear the tears of those we love
In case it means we’re not liked.
We dance around the subject like
Jesters pretending that all is fine,
When in our hearts we know
What we know, and we know that
What we see isn’t right. And yet,
If we truly loved one another,
And truly sought the best for those
We love then we would know
And live in the truth that
“Faithful are the wounds of a friend”.
But instead we stand by, subtly and
Gently hinting them along the path
Of pain, loss, heartbreak and regret,
Because we want to be the
Good cop and never the bad cop.

I am tired of always being the bad cop.
This kind of loving is too costly.
I lay down my popularity and risk
My friendships because of a deeper love
Which is so safe you can stare into the
Abyss and fear no evil; you can be stung
By the nettles but go beyond to the
Rolling meadows that lie beyond.
I long for more of that love, and for
Stronger passions in those who love me,
So that they would rather break my arm
To save me from a broken heart;
To risk my love by telling me the truth of me
To find that my love for them only grows.

I am tired of being the bad cop, because
It is not I who is the bad cop.

Daffodil

Daffodil in pastels, Van Gogh style

Daffodil

Although she be plucked
From the world she knows,
And yet she be removed
From her nourishing roots,
Yet her splendour remains
In the appreciation of her
Humble beauty and her
Vibrant sunshine yellow
Which persists beyond
The life she knew into the
Life she now knows.

In memory of mum

[simple pastel sketch, Van Gogh style]

Unimportant

Who celebrated the day of my birth?
Was it like I was the only child,
Or was I just another one?
As I shared my life with brothers
Who had already taken their place,
Was there a place for me?
Was I ever going to make my mark
Or did my arrival go largely unnoticed?

I saw you from the start.
When two tiny cells first joined
And began a chain reaction of life,
I was there.
Your unformed body, your unthought
Thoughts, your unconscious awareness:
I was present and you knew me there.
As you grew I breathed my life-giving
Breath into you and knitted each strand
Of your DNA together until you were
Uniquely you; flesh of your parents’ flesh
And bone of their bone, but still you.
I watched you and I loved you and
I saw to it that you were safely held
Until the day you would be birthed.
On that day I sang over you and
There was joy throughout the cosmos.
I held you in those moments when
Your mother laid you down so that
You were never not held,
And my presence always with you.

Compelling

The GOD who was, and is, and is to come;
The GOD who, with forethought and foreknowledge, conceived a material universe;
The GOD whose power and dimensional reality exceeds that of what HE created;
The GOD who is personal and creates beings to reflect and relate to HIS personhood;
The GOD who is love and so creates from love, for love, and in love;
The GOD who in love made HIS creatures to know true love and to be free to receive or reject it;
The GOD who entrusts humans to care for the world HE placed us in and empowers and provides for us to do so;
The GOD who laments our destructive ways and our relationship-breaking behaviours and puffed-up pride;
The GOD who created all things from HIS uncreated reality with a plan and purpose;
The GOD who rolls up HIS sleeves to fix what we have broken and gets stuck in to help us where we are helpless;
The GOD who is not aloof in some imagined distant cloud-world but is right here: Immanuel – GOD with us;
The GOD who became like us being born as a man in poverty to a people expecting their Messiah;
The GOD who in Yeshua lived a life worthy of our humanity and embracing all people everywhere;
The GOD who experiences the deathly grip of our broken world and is entombed as a suffered servant;
The GOD for whom death has no power and who resurrects as the King of all things;
The GOD who ascends in HIS humanity to be as one with HIS Father yet remains present by HIS Holy Spirit;
The GOD who is one: Father, Son and Spirit in trinity, and who is all in all so that all things will be fulfilled and made new in HIM;
The GOD who is yet to finish the story of this world, and our fragile, mortal humanity, and to fully establish his already inaugurated Kingdom;
The GOD who will one day establish heaven on earth – both new – and dwell with HIS people in love forever in incorruptible ‘soil and spirit’;
This I find compelling, and from deep within me, an urge to enter into this truth takes a leap into the invisible light.

Advent Reflections #24 – Born, reborn

Christmas Eve is the day when many in the world celebrate the birth of Jesus. For others Christmas Eve marks the final hours of waiting until Christmas Day and celebrate the start of the day at midnight. Others wait until the morning to start the day which, if you have young children, can be very much still the middle of the night!
Whichever day you choose to mark the occasion, in a matter of hours those of us who celebrate Christmas will be doing so to remember Jesus’ birthday.

One of the most obvious yet profound realities which we mark as Christians at Christmas is that Jesus was born. Jesus didn’t just ‘appear’ in the world; he was born into it. He didn’t come to us already fully mature; he started out as we all do in life.
This is something which can be quite hard to get your head around. God becoming man is amazing enough, but to do so by starting out with nothing – that takes some coming to terms with.

What on earth is God trying to tell us by coming in this way?
Why start out with nothing? Why come in a way which would require learning everything when you already know everything? Why make yourself fully dependent on parents for all your needs when you are already entirely self-sufficient?

God did not need to be born to come into this world or to save it, yet that’s exactly what He did. We may never fully know the reason(s) why but the fact that He did is actually all that really matters.

Jesus has modelled for us what it means to be fully human; to fit perfectly the shape that we were made for and to have the relationship with the Father that we were made for.
He started where we all start and opened a way for us to have that same life. When he spoke with Nicodemus (John 3), Jesus told him that he needed to be ‘born again’ to enter the Kingdom of God. We all, like Nicodemus, need to be born again – not as a label, or a status as some would understand and express it – but as a genuine starting over to live the life that Jesus lives. To understand Jesus’ life requires that we recognise that it’s not so much about ‘who’ he is, but ‘whose’ he is. Jesus was, and still is, his Father’s child. A life lived with the certainty and security of knowing you are your Father’s child is one where your personal identity, provision and purpose are all taken care of.

Imagine living a life where you know who you are, indeed whose you are.
Imagine living a life where everything you need to live and flourish is provided for.
Imagine living a life where you know what your purpose is.
This is the life lived abundantly Jesus spoke of (John 10:10), and it’s the life we can all have because we were born in to this world and the breath of life we have is from God. But to take hold of this life we must be ‘reborn’ to know that God is indeed our Father and we have the right and the power to be His children if we follow Jesus.

The new life doesn’t start ‘then’… it starts right now, and again tomorrow and the day after that, and the one after that, forever.

At the close of this Advent may you know that you can have the same life that Jesus has.
May you see in that little newborn baby an invitation to be reborn again today.
May you live life to the full and know who you are by knowing whose you are.

Advent Reflections #23 – Womb to womb pt 2

John’s gospel describes Jesus coming into the world in a very different way to the traditional Christmas story. John does not describe Mary’s story, or the birth, or the angels and shepherds, or the magi. But he doesn’t avoid the central theme of the Christmas story altogether and instead describes it in a remarkable and curious way.

Having revealed Jesus as THE Logos and that this Logos took on skin and fat (Greek: sarx) John then includes this amazing verse:
“No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.” (John 1:18 ESV)

This is an amazing verse which reveals that Jesus was at the Father’s side and came to us in order to make Him known. Jesus swapped unlimited perfection for limited imperfection so that we might know the Father!

But this verse tells us something much more profound and amazing.
As always, when translating from the original Koine Greek into English certain words throw up a challenge which makes the task far from straightforward. In this verse the word which we read as “side” (Father’s “side”) is the word “kolpos” in Greek.

Kolpos has a number of meanings, none of which seem to be a good fit.
Kolpos is a kind of pocket which is made by creating a fold in your outer tunic and sits at your side. This is the usage which appears to have been used to end up with “at the Father’s side”. But is John really giving us an image of a pocket Jesus?
Another common use of the word kolpos is a gulf or a bay and so the image of the Father’s arms embracing to form a ‘bay’ within which He holds the Son is also used in some translations which read, “in the bosom of the Father”.

But there is another meaning which is just as common as the other two, and perhaps even more so. The other meaning is “womb”.
You can see why the translators didn’t go for this option because it wouldn’t make sense to refer to “the Father’s womb”.
But what if by avoiding what seems to be a nonsense the translators are in fact missing the point? What if John is less about a literal interpretation of his words and more about us grasping something deeply profound?

A father may not have a womb but the womb shows us something about the relationship that the child in the womb has to its mother. In the womb the child has life in itself and yet that life is entirely dependent and sustained by the mother. In order to live the child simply has to be. There is no effort required, no work, no striving, no need for the child to offer anything back to the mother in order that its life is sustained by the mother. The child simply has to be.

So if we insert “womb” into John’s words, and apply “unique son” in the right place too (see this reflection for ‘monogenēs theos’), then this is what they tell us:
“No one has ever seen God; the unique son of God, who is in the Father’s womb, he has made him known.”

The unique son of God, sustained in the Father’s womb, just being: this is the God that Jesus has come to make known.
Jesus moved from the Father’s womb as one with Him to be formed in Mary’s womb as one with us. This is John’s revelation for us.

This Advent may you know that Jesus has come to reveal a God who is a Father who nurtures us in His ‘womb’.
May you know that to be His child and to receive His life and love all you need is to ‘be’.
May you experience the effortless, life-giving kindness of the Father’s womb and, like Jesus, emerge to make the Father known.