MEDITATIONS ON ECCLESIASTES 9:7-10: FOOD

The food is good, so we don’t need to pray the evangelical prayer of “Bless this food to our bodies” – the food is blessed already, as are our bodies. So we bless not the food, but the one who has blessed us with this blessing of his grace. As we eat, we bless the one who blesses us, as we take into these blessed bodies the sign of blessing – a blessing that is real despite the curse that hangs over all the earth. The food is good.

Yesterday I drove to Shaftesbury, to Cann Mills, for bags of flour – wholemeal and white and rye; stoneground and organic. Snow had settled on the hills, and deer and hares raced over the white slopes of Win Green. That flour will be used for good bread – sourdough and yeast; kneaded, proved and baked.

The food is good.

BOOK REVIEW: THE UNDERTAKING

The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade by Thomas Lynch

This is a wonderful book.

Firstly, it is wonderful because it is so beautifully written. I don’t make New Years resolutions, but one of the little half-promises I made to myself a few weeks back was to allow myself to simply read books that would be enjoyable. My reading slowed considerably last year, and part of this was due to the fact that much of the time I was reading books I felt I ought to be reading and so much of the time those books were either not especially gripping, and/or (far too often it is ‘and’) badly written. So I am cutting myself some grace and reading things simply for the pleasure of reading, and as a result am back up to two books a week. And The Undertaking is very well written indeed.

Lynch is an award winning poet, as well as an undertaker, and writes with a poets sensibility and love of language and ability to connect with the emotions. As an undertaker he writes as someone very familiar with the intimacies of the dying and death. This is a very Ecclesiastes type book, which is helpful as I am currently preaching through Ecclesiastes. Lynch made me laugh out loud, and cry, and think.

It is a wonderful book. I have had it in my Amazon basket for a few years, having seen it reviewed somewhere else, and when I saw I could now get it for a mere penny I pressed the button. A penny well spent.

Lynch is brutal about the finality of death, the reality of decay that sets in as soon as the final breath departs. But he is also lyrical about the significance of the dead body that remains for those not yet dead (“The bodies of the dead are really important. We want them back to let them go again – on our terms, at our pace, to say you may not leave without permission, forgiveness, our respects – to say we want our chance to say goodbye.”). He faces head on our embarrassment about death and draws interesting cultural observations about the ways in which we deal with death (“There seems to be, in my lifetime, an inverse relationship between the size of the TV screen and the space we allow for the dead in our lives and landscapes.”). He riffs about the potential of combining golf course and cemetery in a money spinning ‘golfatorium’ and (in a section I found almost unbearable) describes a colleague stitching back together the wrecked body of a girl smashed to pieces by a murderer-rapist. And he offers what is I think the most sustained and powerful polemic against euthanasia I have ever had the pleasure to read.

This is a wonderful book. A book about death might not be the obvious place to go simply to read something for the pleasure of reading, but read this and I think you will be surprised.

PREACHING FOR THE POLLSTERS

Last night I got a call from Nebraska.

Actually, it was a call from Gallup, doing a survey about health and happiness in the UK; I came away from it feeling pretty good about life. As it was a series of Yes/No questions it was not possible to give the nuance, qualifications, and caveats that I would normally offer in response to a question like, “Do you feel safe walking alone in your city at night.” So my answers tended towards the positive rather than negative and I guess I sampled as someone who is healthy, happy, prosperous, educated and optimistic – and when the results of the “best places to live in the UK” survey are next published I expect Poole/Bournemouth to feature even higher up the rankings than it normally does!

Rather than an inconvenience, this phone call was thus a rather helpful reminder about the many ways in which I experience God’s grace on a day to day basis: “In the last 30 days have there been any days when you have not been able to afford enough to eat?” No. “Is healthcare affordable in your city?” Yes. “Do you have cancer?” No. Man – I’ve got a lot to be grateful for!

It is easy to lose track of how much grace we receive. It is so easy to be more aware of the things we lack (or think we lack), of the things that annoy us, of the constant drip of bad financial news in the media, than it is of the things that make life good. As a Christian pastor I believe that one of my primary tasks is to keep reminding people of this – to keep pointing them to all the blessings we enjoy by the grace of God alone. Our default position should be one of gratitude. If it is not, we are likely to become miserable ingrates who do little to glorify the name of Jesus.

Yet at the same time I also believe that part of my task is to keep pointing out the reality of the bitterness of life – that stuff happens that stinks, that there is much injustice in the world, and that the sound of war and famine and disaster should rattle in our ears. Without this reality check we are liable to become superficial or sentimental. We are likely to get knocked off course when the day of trouble comes, or to fall for the illusions of the ‘health and wealth’ gospel. And we are unlikely to be motivated to live with generosity and compassion towards those in genuine need.

Perhaps the most helpful Bible book that wrestles with this tension of grace and sorrow is the little oddity of Ecclesiastes. I spent fourteen Sundays preaching through the thoughts of the Teacher seven years ago, and am now picking it up again at Gateway. (Although this time round I am only giving it half the number of sermons.)

Because he recognises the realities of both life’s pleasure and its pain the Teacher is able to make the apparently contradictory statements that, “I hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is vanity and striving after the wind…There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil.” (Eccl. 2:17, 24) The Teacher is quick to commend joy and pleasure, but also brutally honest about the transitory nature of even the most satisfying human pursuits.

Ecclesiastes, then, is a book that helps provide an accurate assessment of life. Or, as Eugene Peterson puts it, “It is an exposé and rejection of every arrogant and ignorant expectation that we can live our lives by ourselves on our own terms.” And as Luther advises, “We should read this noble little book every day because it rejects sentimental religiosity.”

It is a book that helps make sense of many a Gallup poll.

TALKING ABOUT THE WEATHER

One of the national stereotypes of the British is our obsession with the weather. The theories explaining this obsession are that our weather is terrifically varied; unlike many other parts of the world we don’t have dry or rainy seasons – we just have weather. At the same time our weather is rarely truly noteworthy, as it swings within a fairly narrow range – we don’t get hurricanes, it is never really hot or really cold, it just kinda muddles along. And this is the ground of another theory about why we discuss it so much – that we are a muddling along kind of people, and are easily embarrassed by social interaction, so discussion of the weather is a good foil for more challenging conversation.

Well, let me make some observations about the weather.

The other day it felt like spring, because it was fairly warm, and the bulbs are popping through the soil and buds forming on the bushes. It also felt like summer as I found a couple more raspberries in the garden. And it also felt like autumn, as the leaves have only in the past couple of weeks released their hold on the trees, so I was raking them up from outside my front door. The only season that was missing was winter, which was the season it is meant to be.

Odd.

Not that I want to obsess about it, but it is odd. It’s just not British, somehow, and yet somehow it is. I guess we’ll just keep muddling along.

IN PRAISE OF PARKRUN

The other day megachurch pastor and health freak Bill Hybels tweeted, “I wonder why so few leaders take their physical conditioning seriously when it dramatically improves their concentration and energy levels?” Well, I’m training for a marathon, and I think it’s just making me tired!

This is the time of year when many people make resolutions to get in shape, go on a diet, take out gym memberships, and after a couple of weeks misery give it all up again. I think the only realistic basis for taking regular exercise is doing something that one finds in someway enjoyable; otherwise it is just a painful schlep. My marathon training is painful, yet at the same time it is something I am enjoying, which helps me to keep going with it.

One of the things that can make taking exercise more enjoyable is to do it with other people. Obviously, this applies in team sports, but for individual sports like running it can also be true. And this is where Parkrun comes in.

A Parkrun started in Poole last year, and I have taken part a few times (and between now and marathon day – 15^th April, Brighton – need to be doing it every week). It is a well organised and properly timed 5k event which (unlike other well organised and properly timed events) is free to enter. Just show up, run, get your barcode swiped at the end, and your result is emailed to you within a couple of hours. I think it is fantastic. There were 241 of us running this morning, with a very wide athletic spectrum represented (fastest 16:08, slowest 45:17). This is a great example of a community event – sociable, catering for all ages and abilities, free, brilliantly administrated and fun.

There are Parkruns in many locations in the UK, and an increasing number overseas (see here for details). So, if you’re looking for that kick start to the 2012 ‘new you’, you could do a lot worse than toddle along to your nearest Parkrun.

HAPPY EPIPHANY!

Those truly wedded to all the rites of Christmas can today take down their decorations, on this, the twelfth day of Christmas. Most of us will have done so already though – by January 1^st, certainly, the Hosiers want to get the house clear and a new year underway. And we were pretty sick of the pine needles!

I like Epiphany though, or at least the idea of it – it is not a festival I have ever consciously celebrated. If nothing else, epiphany is one of those lovely sounding words that is somehow satisfying to say, but it also has considerable theological meaning. Epiphany means different things to different Christian traditions (Wikipedia offers a pretty comprehensive summary of these) but for the western church it is the day when the visit of the Magi to the infant Jesus is commemorated. This is a day which represents the sudden comprehension of new knowledge – of knowledge that makes the world a very different place from what one had previously thought.

Of course, this expansion of knowledge is reflected in our other use of the word epiphany – not one that refers to spiritual enlightenment, but to a new idea or understanding of something. This is what we call “having an epiphany.” One of my daughters found this a frustrating concept over this mornings breakfast table discussion – “How can it mean two things?” She needed an epiphany about the English language to see that.

Or, rather, about the Greek language, as this is the word used in the Bible to describe what happens when God “manifests” himself to someone. So, although we use the word in two ways, epiphany means the same thing in both cases – it means something is made known to us, and the most important thing of all that we can come to know is God himself.

So, again, happy Epiphany – and may this be a year when the knowledge of God is to you truly enlightening, and satisfying.