This one is for the artistic Hermiones out there (gold stars awarded).
Please discuss the following photo in relation to today’s sermon in Dunoon. Those of you from elsewhere, please discuss feely in relation to Ascension, Salvation, Deification, or the phraseology of Newton’s third law of motion.
Go on. Show off.
I had an interesting lesson in communication today. I was meeting with a woman who has been deaf since childhood. She is very good at lip reading and also ‘speaks’ quite successfully. But still, I was worried. How does communication work when stripped of voice tone and mediated by hand gestures, notes and frantic typing on a laptop? (plenty of creative spelling on my part, I can tell you…)
Well, it was extraordinary. We had something specific we wanted to talk about, which meant that there was a focus that is sometimes lacking in pastoral visits. But the difficulties in communication meant that we were careful not to waste words. There was no dithering, no beating around the bush; just straightforward conversation that went as far as it could (for now) into the topic at hand.
It was liberating to be able to stay so focused. It seems that the challenge to communicate is such that there is neither time nor need to second guess. Life would feel very different if conversation were always so purposeful and direct, with a cup of tea afterwards once the business is done.
This was the one place I saw in Sweden that I really didn’t like. The people I spoke to claimed not to notice how very Masonic it was. So, I offer you a photo of one of the more subtle Masonic influences.
There was also a tetragrammaton over the West door; an early painting of Stockholm that seemed rife with numerological signs; a thoroughly dualistic George and the dragon; and a stunning lack of anything to do with Christ.
Update: I’ve added a wee beastie beneath the fold on request of the Mistress of Dragons.
Today was not the best of days. A worrying pastoral situation or three… Awareness of things done and left undone. A sense of exhaustion when I was trying to prepare tonight’s bible study and a quite legitimate worry that this time I would not get away with it and could not fake my way through.
But then, God caught me off guard. Amos, unexpectedly, came as grace.
There is nothing like a bit of righteous anger, underlined by God’s deep constancy and love to unravel the knots of a bad day.
During the bible study, someone drove to the heart of it: the faith of remnant Israel is remarkable. To go through all that, to be scattered to the wind, broken and torn, and to come out proclaiming the constancy and compassion of God is a remarkable thing.
So there is grace in working through the text: getting carried away on a wave of righteous indignation, purging the need to blame, being pushed into the place where God turns the tables, and says ‘and you? are you really any different?’. And then being offered the space to grow, the invitation to seek God, the promise that God will not utterly destroy but will raise up life.
A more cowardly people would have burnt Amos’ prophesies and denied them. But somehow they realised: there is grace here. If we face our failure, our people’s failure, and learn to tell a new story: there is grace.
But to find it we need to cling together in exile; to face anger and disappointment till we can name God again.
wonderful exchange 