"The living should take this to heart"

 

A good name is better than fine perfume,
    and the day of death better than the day of birth.
² It is better to go to a house of mourning
    than to go to a house of feasting,
for death is the destiny of everyone;
    the living should take this to heart.
³ Frustration is better than laughter,
    because a sad face is good for the heart.
⁴ The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,
    but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure.

Ecclesiastes 7:1-4

We’ve been talking a bit about death recently, my wife and I. Why so? Well, mainly because we have quite suddenly become conscious of our getting old (both in our seventies) with all that that means: new aches and pains, and increasing weakness and inability to do things we never even used to have to think about. You could say a sharp new reality has kicked in.

We’ve even bought what we call our “death book”. It’s a glorified exercise book in which we each jot down various practical matters which we feel the one of us who is left behind would benefit from having to hand, if they don’t already – things as varied as bank account numbers and hymns and songs we feel might be appropriate for our respective funerals. (I heard recently about the emergence of “death cafes”, where people meet to share together something of the experience of preparing for death; all very cheerful, I’m told.)

Each day my wife and I share together a few minutes with the Bible and prayer, taking turns to choose the Bible passage. This is the background against which my wife chose Ecclesiastes 7:1-7 the other day (with, I might say, a slightly wicked smile on her face), and which I thought it might be worth reflecting on.

On the face of it the writer could be dismissed as just a complete misery-guts: “the day of death is better than the day of birth. It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting”. Are we really expected to take such an outrageous saying seriously? Surely not!

Well, let’s recognise first that in the so-called “wisdom” books of the Bible (Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Job, Song of Songs) the purpose of the various writers is to stimulate thought – and to do that sometimes by throwing out provocative and controversial opinions to wake people up. We shouldn’t treat the wisdom books the same way we treat the factual, history books (like Kings, Chronicles or the Gospels), or books of reasoned argument (like the letters of the New Testament). In this case it’s as if the writer is saying: “I’ll give you something to think about, so just listen to me…!” After shaking our heads in bewilderment we hopefully might find ourselves saying, “Actually, I think I can see his point…”

Well, if that’s right, what might that point be?

I would sum it up like this: The fact is that life is a serious business, and to refuse to take it seriously is to miss the point of what really matters. Humour is a great gift, and humourless people are a drag on both themselves and those around them. But by the same token the person who is never serious, the person who refuses to get to grips with the general realities of life drives everyone around them to distraction - ”Will you please be serious for a minute!” Wasn’t there a pop-group once who used to declare to the world that “girls just wanna have fun”? Well, that’s all very well; but sorry, it simply isn’t the way things are.

If we need a bit of seriousness, what better place to go to than a funeral? A Christian funeral, of course, may be an event of great peace, hope and even joy – thanks be to God for that! – but it is bound also to be an event with a deep substratum of seriousness: we find ourselves in touch with the deepest realities of our human lives. We find ourselves also confronting questions which it’s very easy to try to avoid most of the time. And a funeral draws us together as a community: it reminds us of the immeasurable value of the people we live around, even if day by day we are tempted to take them for granted.

We are all grateful for the cheerful, funny people in our lives. No problem with that (and even Ecclesiastes recognises it: “when times are good, be happy”, 7:14). But when things are hard do we not instinctively turn to the serious people, the people with a bit of depth to them?

The Bible takes death very seriously. Paul describes it as “the last enemy” (1 Corinthians 15:26) – last, yes, but still an enemy. When Stephen was killed by the mob, we read that “godly men buried him and mourned deeply for him” (no stiff upper lips there) (Acts 8:2). Paul also assures us that after death “there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). To state the obvious, the resurrection of Jesus changes everything for those whose trust is in him.

So why not look it fairly and squarely in the face? As Ecclesiastes 7:2 says: “The living should take this to heart” (can’t you almost see the writer wagging his finger?)

An after-thought… If what I have said is right, does it affect how we should think about “assisted dying”?

My impression is that most Christians are very uneasy about this proposed change in the law, and my tendency is to go along with them. But let’s be careful. The world we live in tends to view death as the worst thing that can ever happen to us, and that the prolongation of life is supremely what matters. But surely no Christian can ever accept that.

Go back to Paul: at a time when he sensed that his earthly life was reaching its end he wrote: “For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21). That’s not just a sentiment for “super-saints”: no, that’s for every man and woman who simply trusts in Jesus crucified and risen.

We have something to teach the world by the way we live. Should we not have something to teach it too by the way we die?

Father, I don’t know when death may come for me, and I’m not looking forward to it. But just as I seek daily to glorify Jesus by my living, please grant me grace also to glorify him by my dying. Amen.

Asking the impossible?

You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? 

Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. Matthew 5:43-4

Did Jesus ever say a more radical, indeed a more revolutionary, thing than this? Indeed, did anybody ever say a more revolutionary thing than this? – it seems almost laughably idealistic in our troubled and hate-filled world.

The problem for many of us who know these words pretty much by heart is that familiarity can breed, if not contempt, then at least a kind of indifference, if not of downright cynicism.

“Love your enemies”? Well, that sounds a pretty tall order, but, all right, I’ll do my best; at least I can aim to be courteous, I suppose. “Pray for those who persecute you”? Well, again, I suppose I can summon up an occasional prayer, even if rather grudgingly; it doesn’t cost a lot, after all. “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect”? True, that certainly is a pretty big ask! But surely we must allow for a degree of exaggeration…

No! That won’t do!

We need to try and hear these words through the ears of their first hearers. To put it very briefly, Jesus is in effect inviting us to become like God: “that you may be children of your Father in heaven”. In other words, he wants to build a community of men and women who are, little by little, taking on the divine family likeness.

That’s the point of his words about the sun and the rain being given to all and sundry, the “righteous” and the “unrighteous”. Nowhere in the Old Testament are we told to “love our neighbours and hate our enemies” (though Leviticus19:18 could be taken as implying this). But nature itself makes it plain that God, the creator and sustainer of all things, is, putting it mildly, not picky about who he blesses! He loves all that he has made, however sinful and rebellious they may be. So, then, must we.

But what does it mean in practice to “love our enemies”? Surely, tolerating them should be enough?

The experts tell us that in the Greek in which the New Testament was written there were four main words for love: first, family love; second, sexual love; third, the kind of love we associate with friendship and respect; and then, fourth, a little-used word which one commentator defines as “unconquerable benevolence, invincible goodwill” – and this was the word which the church adopted as its favourite word for Christlike love (it’s the word Paul uses in 1 Corinthians 13). That definition I’ve just quoted from the commentary may be something of a mouthful! But it makes the point. New Testament love is love that stubbornly refuses to wish anything but good upon those who may hate and even hurt us.

This means, of course, that it is not so much a feeling as a conscious act of will. It means both wishing good on the enemy we feel we have, and also doing good to them in any way we can. Feelings, at first at least, simply don’t come into it.

Jesus goes on to tell us to pray for those who hurt us. If the hurt goes really deep that may seem a sheer impossibility - through gritted teeth only.

But… it’s a wonderful fact that remarkable things begin to happen when we take it seriously: among them, we start to see that “enemy” in a new light altogether – not just as a stupid, nasty, selfish, vindictive, spiteful individual who, deep-down, we have learned to hate and despise; but as a lost and helpless sinner who, by God’s grace, can be reborn and, as we have done, become part of the family of God. (It’s what Jesus elsewhere calls being “born again” (John 3) and what Paul describes as becoming a “new creation” (2 Corinthians 5).

It’s becoming the kind of person God always intended me to be. And it’s why Jesus’ parting gift to the church was the person of the Holy Spirit, the very breath and energy of God himself

And, of course, it’s what Jesus himself exemplified on the cross as he looked at his killers: “Father, forgive them; they don’t know what they’re doing…” (See what I meant when I spoke about beginning to take on the family likeness?)

Exploring these powerful words of Jesus – “love your enemies”, “pray for your persecutors”, even “be perfect” – takes some doing! But one thing we mustn’t do is water them down or try to wriggle out of them. We are all children of a sinful, fallen race: the first Adam was guilty of disobedience, and we still carry the curse that resulted.  But now God has sent us a second Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45-49) to renew the fallen creation. His name is Jesus, and in Matthew 5:43-48 he invites us join his new family. Not just a tarted up version of the old (if you will pardon the expression) but new priorities, new aspirations, new ambitions, new hopes, new attitudes… new you, new me!

Oh, Lord, help me to take seriously your call to be perfect, as you are perfect, whatever that may mean in practice. Amen!

... then the word of the Lord came...

 

Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah… 1 Kings 17:2

Then the word of the Lord came to him… 1 Kings 17:8

After a long time, in the third year, the word of the Lord came to Elijah… 1 Kings 18:1

Last time we thought about how “the word of the Lord came to Elijah” some 900 years before Christ, and I suggested that we imagine our way back into his time before there was any such thing as a complete Bible. If we today, in our very different world, want to hear God’s word, how are we to go about it? – apart, that is, from our reading of scripture and listening regularly to his preached word. I found there were various questions I needed to put to myself; I hope you too might find them useful.

First, how serious am I about hearing God’s voice?

That thought challenged me because it made me question my whole motivation. It’s relatively easy to read the Bible as an act of personal discipline. When I was a child we used to sing in Sunday School a song which contained the words, “Read your Bible, pray every day, if you want to grow…” Those words were then repeated two or three times so that they became part of our mental furniture, and still to this day they help form the shape of my daily life. No complaints there, then.

But while doing something good out of discipline, even habit, is no doubt better than not doing it at all, there is of course the danger of it becoming a purely mechanical routine, a mere ritual. I was quite an obedient child, and can remember rattling through my passage for the day, putting my Bible down, and feeling I had done my duty (“thank goodness I’ve got that done!”). But had I taken anything in? Had I (as Thomas asked the Ethiopian eunuch) “understood what I had read” (Acts 8:26)? It was only later that I really grasped that a verse or two digested, mulled over, perhaps even questioned, is likely to be of far more value than a complete chapter swallowed whole.

Second, what if I do hear God speaking – and don’t very much like what I hear?

In other words, what happens when a passage, or perhaps a sermon, touches my conscience in some tender place? (You may know the old rhyme: “Don’t get mad at the preacher, he’s not provoked at you; he only preaches the word of God, and sometimes the truth breaks through!”)

Well, there’s not much more to say about that question, is there! The Bible often speaks about people with wilfully “deaf ears” and sinfully  “hardened hearts”, so… “whoever (including you and me) has ears to hear, let them hear…” (Matthew 11:15).

Third, do I actively expect to hear God’s voice?

I heard somebody say once, “Anyone who is serious about God will hear something from him in a sermon, even if it’s not a very good one”, or words to that effect. And if that’s true of a sermon, it’s surely true also of the Bible itself. In other words, a lot depends on the reader or listener and what we bring to their seeking to hear God’s voice. If we come with a dull, half-hearted heart, that’s what we are likely to go away with also. Lord, help me to be expectant and open to your voice!

Fourth, am I open to the danger of getting things wrong?

Core truths concerning the love and holiness of God and the good news of the gospel are not so much of a problem, but if ever we feel prompted – as Elijah was - to be specific about events and circumstances, we need to be careful. My wife and I lost what would have been our first child; it died in the womb for no particular reason. Yet during the lead-up to this event, obviously a time of considerable stress, we had Christians assuring us that “The Lord has told me that the baby will be all right”. These were Christian friends, sincere and well-meaning people who we respected and loved. But… fact: they turned out to be wrong. Elijah’s predictions of course came true, but we are reminded of the warning in John’s first letter; that all things need to be “tested” (1John 4:1).

Fifth, and this really sums up everything I’ve tried to say, how God-centred generally am I?

What kind of person am I? What kind of person do I want to be? The poet George Herbert, some of whose poems were once used as hymns (sadly not much heard today) wrote these beautifully simple lines of prayer: “For my heart’s desire/ Unto Thine is bent./ I aspire/ To a full consent”. Can I even want to be able to pray those words?

Jesus, of course spoke of those “who hunger and thirst after righteousness” (Matthew 5:6), suggesting a deep yearning for God, not just a shallow “spirituality”. And also, just to challenge us even more, there is the wonderful description of Barnabas, the man who was content to play second fiddle to Paul: “He was a good man, full of the Holy Spirit and faith” (Acts 11:24). Not a bad epitaph for somebody’s tombstone!

Some Christians speak of “thin places”, meaning sites where the separation between heaven and earth is felt to be specially permeable, almost truly “heaven on earth”. Such places may be buildings or places of pilgrimage. The cunning, deceiving Jacob came to such a place at Bethel, where he had a vivid dream, to which he responded “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I didn’t realise it” (Genesis 28:16).

Perhaps we might speak also of “thin people”, odd though that sounds: men and women in whom we naturally and instinctively sense the near presence of our holy God. Elijah, I think, was such a one.

Not, of course, that we can train to somehow qualify as such men or women (it’s not something taught in Bible college!). But we can train ourselves every day to live in God’s presence – and to long for his word, in whatever form it might come.

Father in heaven, thank you that you love to speak to us - through scripture, through preaching, perhaps even through dreams and visions, through conscience or strong impressions. Give me a hunger and thirst to hear your word, even when what I hear is ninety percent consolidation of what I already know, and only ten percent something fresh. Amen.

... then the word of the Lord came...

Then the word of the Lord came to Elijah… 1 Kings 17:2

Then the word of the Lord came to him… 1 Kings 17:8

After a long time, in the third year, the word of the Lord came to Elijah… 1 Kings 18:1

The Bible introduces us to the prophet Elijah out of nowhere in 1 Kings 17:1: “Now Elijah the Tishbite, from Tishbe in Gilead, said to Ahab (that’s the evil king of Israel), ‘As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, whom I serve, there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years except at my word’”.

We know virtually nothing about Elijah’s “back-story” – just that his home town was “Tishbe in Gilead”, which doesn’t mean a lot to us. But he was, it seems, a bringer mainly of bad news, news of the judgment of God. He dominates the next few chapters in a sequence of highly dramatic events, and then is “taken up to heaven in a whirlwind”, leaving his servant Elisha to succeed him (2 Kings 2).

An enigmatic figure! He was (still is, I think) revered by the people of Israel, and his status as a major figure in their history is confirmed by the story of the “transfiguration” of Jesus told in Matthew 17, where he appears alongside Jesus with no less a person than Moses.

Listening recently to a sermon on Elijah I was particularly struck not so much by any of the dramatic events which are to come but by that little phrase “the word of the Lord came to Elijah” (three times in this first episode). It made me want to ask the simple question, “How? How exactly did this happen? In what form did the word of the Lord come to Elijah?”

In the many years I have been a Christian I have often wondered vaguely what the answer to that question might be. But the key word there is “vaguely”; it’s not something I’ve ever seriously got to grips with. One might say, of course, that since the Bible doesn’t tell us we should be content not to know. But the minds God has given us often run to curiosity, and, unless we have some sense of trespassing on sacred ground, allowing that curiosity to probe a little is surely not wrong.

As Christians we believe that God is a God who speaks, and our chief means of hearing his word is Scripture, the inspired books of the Old and New Testaments. But thinking of the people we meet in scripture, whether an Old Testament figure like Elijah or a New Testament figure like Paul and the Gospel-writers, that of course cannot apply, for the very simple reason that while they were active “the Bible” as a complete book didn’t yet exist! Most of us today probably have a variety of different versions of the Bible on our shelves; but for Elijah there was no such thing as “the Old Testament” (never mind the New!) for him to read a passage of day by day.

So, going back to where we started, the question arises: How did Elijah know about the coming drought? Did he hear an audible voice, perhaps coming to him in his own times of prayer or in a dream or some kind of trance-like state? Or did he know a fellow-prophet who passed on the message to him? Did he simply survey the disastrous twenty-two-year reign of King Ahab, who ruled over Israel roughly 874-852 before Jesus (summed up at the end of 1Kings 16) and feel a grim sense of foreboding which hardened into a conviction that the judgment of God was going to fall in the form of drought?

There is no way we can be sure. But it prompts various questions about how we as Christians can receive “the word of the Lord”.

As I’ve said, our regular interaction with the Bible is the obvious, and most important, starting-point. We read it day by day; we receive it through sermons, Bible-studies, commentaries and other kinds of literature; we may use some daily “thought for the day” on-line or even in an old-fashioned calendar. But how can we know for sure that some truth we are reminded of is particularly for us personally?

Of course, we are not an Elijah, or a Moses, or a Matthew, or a Paul. These were people with a special calling from God, people he dealt with in a special way. But God speaks to all his people, whether great or small, and that includes us. There are questions which I find myself wanting to ask – please join me next time as I try to explore some of the possibilities and to challenge us as to our hunger for God’s word…

Father in heaven, if you are indeed a God who speaks to his people, how can I possibly afford not to listen! Indeed, how dare I not listen? Please forgive my deaf ears and my hard heart, and teach me to listen better to your voice. Amen.

An unsung hero (2)

But Ebed-Melech, a Cushite, an official in the royal palace, heard that they had put Jeremiah into the cistern… They pulled him up with the ropes and lifted him out of the cistern…  Jeremiah 38:7-13

Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing so some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it. Hebrews 13:2

The prophet Jeremiah has become what used to be called a hot potato. He’s been preaching to the people of Jerusalem that they should accept the judgment of God upon them, even though they are his own special people, and yield to the mighty Babylonians and their ferocious king, Nebuchadnezzar. Poor King Zedekiah, who is destined to become Judah’s last king, doesn’t know what to do with him: should he accept his message and lead his people to surrender? or should he listen to those who regard Jeremiah as a traitor and put him to death?

He tries to find a middle way. He “gave orders for Jeremiah to be placed in the courtyard of the guard”, but he arranges too for him to be given “a loaf of bread from the street of the bakers each day until all the bread in the city is gone” (37:21). In other words, he agrees to silence him, but not to kill him; he is to see out the siege to the bitter end, though in custody.

But that’s not good enough for Jeremiah’s arch-enemies (they are named in 38:1): “This man should be put to death”, they insist. Zedekiah responds with those pathetic words we noticed last time, caving in to their bullying: “He is in your hands… The king can do nothing to oppose you”. (Rather like Pontius Pilate washing his hands of responsibility for Jesus’ death, don’t you think?)

But Jeremiah’s enemies in fact hold back from killing him (why we aren’t told); they take him instead and dump him in “the cistern of Malkijah, the king’s son” (38:6), where he “sinks down into the mud”. (It’s tempting to think that he might just as well be dead.)

But… God has other ideas! Enter Ebed-Melech who is the hero of the hour, truly an unsung hero of the Bible.

His name means “servant of the king” (apparently quite a common name), and that is exactly what he was; he is one of Zedekiah’s “officials”. He learns what has happened to Jeremiah, and he makes it his business to go to the king to protest. Zedekiah, as usual leaning whichever way the wind is blowing, authorises him to take a party of other servants and pull Jeremiah out of the cistern. The process of pulling him out seems not to have been too easy, and Ebed-Melech seems to have been especially thoughtful to ensure that he didn’t suffer unnecessarily: he “took some old rags and worn-out clothes… and let them down to Jeremiah in the cistern”. He told him (presumably shouting down into the depths, “’Put these old rags and worn-out clothes under your arms to pad the ropes’”.

And so Jeremiah was rescued: not very dignified, it’s true, no doubt dirty and smelly, but at least alive.

What do we know about Ebed-Melech? Very little; these two chapters of Jeremiah’s book (38 and 39) are the only place in the Bible where he appears. And I don’t suggest he has anything very deep to teach us. But following Jesus isn’t only a matter of profound truths; sometimes simple, small and everyday things are what matters. So what can we glean?

First, he was a foreigner in Israel, an African. The Bible’s “Cush” is generally thought to be roughly what today we call Ethiopia. How he came to be in Judah we don’t know, and whether or not he had accepted the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob likewise. How he came to be part of the royal household, again, we don’t know.

But, second, what matters is that when a crisis arose he responded to it with courage, integrity and sheer practical know-how. Whether he had become a personal follower of Jeremiah we are not told, but obviously he felt it his duty to speak and to act on his behalf. Probably that involved a real element of risk, for the little quartet mentioned in 38:1 will not have been happy. Even if his role in the palace was quite a minor one, he took intelligent advantage of it and wasn’t afraid to confront the king himself.

He can be a challenge to us in our day to day lives. When difficulties arise, including tricky moral decisions that have to be made, do we tend to keep our heads down and just go with the flow, or are we prepared to stand up and be counted?

Third, Ebed-Melech reminds us that God has his people in all sorts of unexpected places. Who would have guessed that a champion for God’s prophet would take the form of a minor official in the royal entourage who wasn’t even an Israelite? As keen Bible-readers we of course get pretty familiar with the big personalities of both testaments: Abraham, Moses, David; Peter, Paul, John. But let’s not overlook the unsung heroes – for example, the unnamed servant girl of Naaman’s wife who spoke up at just the right time (2 Kings 5); or Obadiah, King Ahab’s “palace administrator” who was also “a devout believer in the Lord” and who supported the prophet Elijah and used his influence to protect other believers (1 Kings 18); or the list of those we might consider nonentities but who obviously meant a lot to Paul (Romans 16). All, in their own ways, unsung heroes.

Who knows, in your normal routine today you might find yourself talking to “an angel without knowing it” (Hebrews 13:2)?

One detail of the Ebed-Melech episode that particularly makes me smile is his concern to ensure that Jeremiah was made as comfortable as possible during his ordeal in the cistern – that detail about the rags and old clothes to protect his armpits. People who think about things like that… you can’t help but warm to them, can you?

Thank you, Father, for the Ebed-Melechs of this world – those men and women who may strike us as complete non-entities, but who show the graciousness, the courage and the love of Jesus. Help me to notice and value them. Help me, indeed, to be one of them. Amen.