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Blessed art thou,
O Christmas Christ,
that thy cradle was so low
that shepherds,
poorest and simplest of earthly folk,
could yet kneel beside it,
and look level-eyed into the face of God. (Anon)
From a story told by a colleague working with churches in Latin America. One farmer said: ‘A single star for the well born and wealthy wise men compared with a whole host of glorious singing angels on the hillside to warm and welcome the poor and scruffy shepherds. That’s how we know how much God loves the poor. He gives them his very best.’
Written on 24th December 1974 by Oscar Romero: ‘No-one can celebrate Christmas without being truly poor. The self-sufficient, the proud, those who have no need even of God – for them there will be no Christmas. Only the poor, the hungry, those who need someone to come on their behalf, will have that someone. That someone is God, Emmanuel, God with us. Without poverty of spirit there can be no abundance of God.’
Seen for the first time 24th December 1968 from Apollo 8 as the spacecraft looked for possible future landing sites, and giving us something to marvel at, and something to worry about. ‘The most important environmental picture ever taken.’
Now playing Barry Louis Polisar: All I Want
It’s the 50th birthday of the Lego brick. I’d read somewhere that originally Lego did not make green or brown bricks so that no-one used the bricks for tanks or war toys. Now that weaponry’s more sophisticated there are a good number of Star Wars, Batman or alien battles to be had – ‘though still no tanks.
Batman doesn’t make it to the Brick Testament (unless there’s a reference in The Boy’s Bible with its strapline, ‘Finally a Bible just for boys’) but there are a few jokes.
We looked at Mark 10 on Sunday which included the camel and eye of the needle trick. The answer to the camel and needle seems to be either to grease the camel and invest in a large liquidiser and a big syringe – or when that doesn’t work, go, sell, give to the poor and follow the Rabbi Jesus.
I had 31 verses to get through on Sunday so it was definitely a case of less is more. I remembered afterwards that there was a good camel-
shoving quote from Richard Branson in 1994 when he was asked why he wanted to run the lottery franchise for charity and not for profit and he said:
Well, I hope to make the eye of the needle a little bit larger when I come to the end of my days.
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Now playing: Pete Seeger – Little Boxes
via FoxyTunes
Geoffrey Stephenson ran an event on preaching yesterday. There was a great quote from Barbara Brown Taylor on the place of imagination. Imagination is not only permitted, it is required in living the story we’re trying to tell. Taylor writes:
Imagination has no point to make, no axe to grind. It’s more like a child roaming the neighbourhood on a free afternoon, following first the smell of fresh bread in an oven, then the glint of something bright in the grass- led by curiosity, by hunger, by hope, to explore the given world from its highest branches to its deepest roots because it is wonderful and terrible and because it is there. When imagination comes home and empties its pockets, of course there will be some sorting to do. Keep the cat’s eye marble, the Japanese beetle wing, the red feather, the penny. Jettison the bottle cap, the broken glass, the melted chocolate with lint. But do not scold imagination for bringing it all home or for collecting it in the first place.
And it’s from the messiness that order and shape in preaching might emerge – rather than the other way round as it so often is. The quote is from The Preaching Life. (Barbara Brown Taylor’s also the author of Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith, which might give the flip side to her preaching advice.)
Taylor’s quote about preparing to preach – however she feels about it now – reminded me that preaching is like writing just about anything – prose, drama, music, poetry. (Well perhaps not anything, although some of my report writing and income tax returns have been fantastical.) One of the best books ever on anything is Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird where she quotes a preacher as saying hope is a ‘revolutionary patience’. ‘Let me add that so is being a writer. Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.’ Just like preaching.
The light through the woods was great too, and there was the non smokers’ equivalent of a fag break to nip out and roam the neighbourhood.
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Now playing: Amy Winehouse – Tears dry on their own
via FoxyTunes
