Sabbath rest

 2 June 2024 - Trinity 1: Deuteronomy 5:12-15, 2 Corinthians 4:5-12 and Mark 2:23-3:6

Before we set off for church this morning, how many of us checked that our phone was charged? 

We know the anxiety of hitting the red bar, switching to power saving mode; carrying a charger or battery pack ‘just in case’. 

Image Barnes & Nobel website

When it comes to recharging, some of us might be more mindful of the health of our phones than our minds and bodies.  Like our electronic devices, if we’re left on, if we keep going, we gradually run out of strength, energy and capacity.

There’s lots of advice out there for how to recharge: good sleep habits and eating well; taking time for exercise, getting out into the natural world as well as patterns of meditation or prayer.

Recharging feeds into what we need to rest. 

At a fundamental level we need rest and connection: it’s part of the created order. The writer of Deuteronmy reminded God’s people of that - 6 days of labour and 1 of rest, not just for individuals but whole households. Human lives were to echo the divine pattern of creativity.

This commandment, this call to holiness, is in invitation into the rhythm of sabbath: of life lived with God and each other was rooted not only rooted in creation but in the call to freedom from slavery. It expresses liberation from labour not just symbolically but in concrete terms: for immigrants, dependents, employees and creatures

Loving God and neighbour includes a practice or rest - regardless of economic status.It has within it a concern for social justice and the fair treatment of others; remembering and protecting those who’re marginalised, rebalancing social and economic power. 

The scholar Walter Bruggeman calls the sabbath an act of resistance and alternative. 

In the face of the rat race of anxiety and pressures he says  it is resistance because ‘it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods’. 

He says that it is an alternative to ‘the demanding, chattering, pervasive presence of advertising’; an alternative to all those things which ‘devour our “rest time”.’

In our Gospel reading, Jesus underscores that sabbath is a principle for just, dignified and humane relationships. It takes us to the heart of God’s will for us - loving God, neighbour and self with all that we are is shaped by the substance of this call to rest. Rest is an expression of being faithful in love. 

Rest is a gift from God; a sign of faithfulness and justice. Within it, there is the freedom not just to recharge from what we refrain from doing, or good habits of sleep and exercise. It also includes those restful goods of rejoicing, being present, hospitality, living lightly - relying on divine grace and delight not human force or coercion. It includes perhaps the gift of compassion as something sacred.

‘The sabbath was made for humankind’, says Jesus, ‘not humankind for the sabbath’.

Like all of us, the Pharisees in today’s gospel have their own values and convictions, preferences and commitments they regard as absolute. Like them, we might find that those things, however well-intentioned - can get in the way of compassion. 

To be human means that sometimes we will set things in stone which block that channel of love. We will sometimes preserve those things which sustain or shape our faith, our habits and preferences, and miss the call to honour what is sacred. That might be the appropriate rest and care for ourselves; it might be the compassionate response to another. 

Perhaps here in Hendon, we are acutely aware of the holy disruption of sabbath: streets quieter, shops closed, cafes falling silent as our Jewish brothers and sisters make space for worship, rest, households and food. 

But what can we relearn from that pattern?

In a world where life runs 24/7, where work is both zero hours and every hour, where what we want is often but a click away; where news, filtered by algorithms, scrolls across our phones, how do we seek what is just? 

When we face the pressure to juggle the demands of work, friends, interests, exams, family, chores can feel overwhelming or paralysing, where are our intentions met by rest and compassion?

When fear fragments and a lack of hope chills our hearts, how do we return to love? To that which is truly sacred and which shapes our lives?

There is something unsettling about the gospel story: as Jesus walks through fields and into the temple and challenges us about what we hold dear - or what we’re too holy, prideful, selfish or judgemental to notice.  

It’s a story about being present and wholeness, about reaching out and the risk of hope. It’s a story which reminds us of the just rhythms of sabbath which will disrupt the relentless expectations - of rest and compassion, of love that notices what is around us.

As Bruggeman explores the traditions of interpreting Sabbath, he says this: it ‘is not simply a pause. It is an occasion for reimagining all social life away from coercion and competition to compassionate solidarity. Such solidarity is imaginable and capable of performance only when the drivenness of acquisitiveness is broken. Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms.’ 

There is something more to sabbath than following a human instruction manual - a physical plugging in waiting for the battery to top up. Rest is necessary for us, allowing exhaustion and grumpiness to be replaced by love; but there’s depth of solidarity too, a reimagining of what relationships and communities might be like as we attend to God and to ourselves and our neighbour.

Our Sunday worship is one such moment of pause: as wanderers through life we come ‘Nearer, my God, to thee, nearer to thee!’ Our anthem speaks of rest and mercy, and walking a path that allows us to rise upwards. God does indeed come near to us - in the words of blessing, in the bread of life and the wine of joy. God comes so near to us here that as Paul puts it we carry in ourselves the body of Jesus - so that his life might be visible in us. 

However afflicted or perplexed, despairing or tired we are, we carry in us light and life and love. We have that treasure in clay jars - because this power comes from God, not us. It’s a power that, as our anthem reminds us, raises us up - may we take that song into our working week and our times of sabbath rest. 

© Julie Gittoes 2024

The long and winding road

 Monken Hadley: Acts 8:26-end, 1 John 4:7-end, John 15:1-8

In 1970, The Beatles released “The Long and Winding Road”. Written by Paul MacCartney, and inspired by the sight of a road stretching up into remote highlands of Scotland, it’s a sad song: wind and tears, waiting and loneliness. Decades later, he told his biographer that it was ‘all about the unattainable; the door you never quite reach ... the road that you never get to the end of’.

Album cover from The Beatles Bible website

Roads occupy a kind of in-between space in our lives - literally and metaphorically. Children straining to see the first glimpse of the sea; the rocky roads of adolescence and ageing; the familiar tedium of a commute; the seasons of joy, celebration, waiting or grief. The roads that lead to doors and threshold moments - the many times we’ve cried and the many ways we’ve tried, as the song puts it.  

In his commentary on Acts, the black American theologian Willie Jennings describes a ‘road-embedded life born of old and fresh memories of migration, mobility, transition, upheaval and hope’.  Naming the particularity of the road from Jerusalem to Gaza, he talks of a road where we are searching for what he calls  ‘life possibilities or at least running away from the forces of death’.

For the peoples of Israel and Palestine, those roads continue to hold the fear and horror of the forces of death - the stories shared across the faith networks and fora across this borough; the stories of hostages, destruction and starvation. Yet somehow, stories of life possibilities are still being told - life free from prejudice and complicity - stories told at community Iftas and around seder plates, at vigils and also at every Eucharist we share.

Today we hear that God is found on this road between Jerusalem and Gaza: found there to transform lives with an expansive love, which embraces every soul, every identity and border. 

Philip is sent on that road to find the Ethiopian eunuch - to join him, to respond to the invitation to be his guide, as reading the next becomes a communal activity.  On that long and winding road, there’s an echo of MacCartney: 

Why leave me standing here?

Let me know the way

They begin reading and interpreting a text from isaiah: about a person in pain, a body suffering and humiliated; a body subject to the forces of death.  It is this body, explains Philip, that God’s love has been revealed among us.

The Son sent into the world because God’s response to all that wounds and separates us -  what we call sin - is to love us.  The Son sent into the world to lay down life that we might live; laying life down in order to take it up again; dying to rise and bear fruit. This is the sacrifice that makes one all that was torn and divided.

There is no greater love than this - says Jesus elsewhere in John - than to lay down life for friends. God’s love made flesh calls us friends, calls us beloved; love that invites us to love. 

As a result of this intimate, one-to-one sermon, the winding road becomes a borderland, a door to life. The Ethiopian eunuch is brought close to the joy of this extraordinary divine love. He matters in his difference and complexity, his ethnicity and sexual ambiguity. The one whose body is enslaved and put to use, who has responsibility but little power, finds a new future of light and life. 

The Ethiopian wants God as much as God wants him: what is there to prevent his baptism, this joining of water and spirit? 

Baptism makes visible the depth of God’s love and its redemptive power. By the power of the Spirit, his life is redirected to this love - like us, he is found in the body of Jesus, wounded, risen and glorified. He is in Christ and Christ is in him. He abides in love. 

It is this relationship of love and mutual indwelling that Jesus is drawing us into in John’s Gospel. Horticultural imagery is stretched to expand upon the joy and risk, demands and potential of this life.

Abiding is such a rich word: speaking not of the winding road, but the door we open, the threshold we cross and the place we call home. The place where we can dwell long term: it speaks of the relational indwelling of the Spirit and it expresses our life together as friends seeking to be true to Jesus.

And bearing fruit is what we are called to do.John speaks of this with vibrancy and abundance throughout the Gospel - of doing greater works and washing feet, of bread that feeds a multitude, and water turned to wine when our own resources run out. 

In all these images, John gives us a way of understanding how we are to live out a pattern of life shaped by the Eucharist. He teaches us about the bread of life - and how we improvise on the command to ‘do this in remembrance’ by our own embodied acts of service.

Today he gives us the image of vine and vineyard - and image of how we abide together. It is an image of stability and trust, of faithfulness and utter commitment to God and others. It is an image that reminds us not only of the last supper, but of the blood shed for us on the cross and the promise of the new wine of the kingdom.

As David Ford writes in his commentary: ‘together the image of abiding, offers readers a way of understanding, deepening and living both eucharist and covenant, centred on who Jesus is, and the call to abide in him.’  It is a call to be faithful in prayer, to face the truth of who we are - and when and where we need to be pruned to be fruitful. 

Here as we celebrate this Eucharist, we are pilgrims on the long and winding road of our earthly life: we find abundance in the fragility of a wafer of bread  and the richness of wine, bread broken and blood shed so that we might live. 

Here the possibilities of life are named - a renewed vision of justice and peace and of love for each other even in, especially in, our difference. Here we name the ultimate victory of love over the forces of death - we are reminded that love casts out fear. Here we are restored and recalled - invited to love the brothers and sister, the strangers and friends we do see. 

We love because love is from God and because God loved us first. 

Therefore, like Philip we should be confident in speaking and living the gospel of Jesus. Therefore, as John reminds us, we should be compassionate in serving communities with the love of God the Father.Therefore, we should be creative in reaching people with the gospel - walking that long and winding road with them - in the power of the Spirit.

If all that sounds a bit familiar, it is because it is your own hope and commitment set out in your mission action plan. There will be others, who we are drawn to as Philip was called to the Ethiopian. We might not know them yet; they might be close neighbours already: the ones who say to us - don’t leave me standing here, let me know the way. 

God is love and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Bear fruit that will last. Abide. Love one another. 

© Julie Gittoes 2024

Somewhere over the rainbow

 Easter 4 - 21 April  2024: Genesis 7:1-5, 11-18, 8:6-18, 9:8-13; Acts 4: 5-12 and John 10:11-18

Eva Cassidy, Frank Sinatra, Pink and Rufus Wainwright are amongst those who’ve covered Judy Garlard’s Oscar winning song from The Wizard of Oz. 

Somewhere over the rainbow

way up high

A song about wishing upon a star and dreaming of dreams coming true; of blue skies and trouble melting like lemon drops.

Somewhere over the rainbow… 

there’s a land that I heard of 

once in a lullaby.

A still from film of Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz (1939)

In the film, Dorothy wonders out loud to her dog Toto if there’s ‘someplace where there isn’t any trouble’ and concludes that there must be; but that it’s far, far away. She wants to get away from Kansas and, as the lyricist Yip Harburg put it, ‘she had never seen anything colorful in her life except the rainbow’. 

And so, the famous song was born: a song which, depending on who sings it, evokes hope or sadness:

If happy little bluebirds fly

beyond the rainbow

why, oh, why can’t I?

Our first reading today ends with a rainbow set in the clouds - as a sign for future generations of God’s covenant with the earth, humanity and all living creatures. 

Until that point, Noah and his companions may have identified more with the words of a little known intro that Garland only sang once. In a 2009 cover, Jewel all but whispers it: 

When all the world is a hopeless jumble

and the raindrops tumble all around

heaven opens a magic lane.

Raindrops tumbling, pouring and flooding. The hopeless jumble of a world destroyed by human greed, ambition and carelessness. The waters and the ark become an icon of that ‘magic lane’; a way of safety. There are no bluebirds beyond the rainbow; but a raven flying to and fro before it. And the dove - returning once, and then a second time with an olive leaf, before flying free.

There is a promise of a world beyond the rainbow - of restored relationship and renewed hearts; of hope, justice, mercy and righteousness; of love embodied and enacted - fully, faithfully. 

It is no lullaby, designed to soothe us to sleep; the promise of a world that evaporates when we awake. 

Instead it is a vision of the world as God intends it to be; a world that our hearts long for.

Yet, like the judges judging Peter and John, power and its misuse can create dividing lines. Lines that evaluate others based on their status as social or economic status: based on health, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, education, age. 

No wonder that the rainbow has become a sign of liberation and equality! It is a sign of hope, forgiveness and life - it stands against the destruction of life, and for the commandment to love God and neighbour as ourselves.

The alternative is literally deathly.   When human beings are evaluated as socially or economically useful, we see not only division and competition. At its extreme something  life-limiting and life-denying is unleashed. As Matthew Parris wrote last month in a world of inputs and outputs, some lives - the vulnerable,  frail or elderly - are worth less than the energy of the young or more nimbler. 

His column on assisted dying was published on Good Friday.

An irony which highlights the radically alternative view which we hear running through our scriptures: a pulse of love that carries us through life and breaks the bonds of death; a pulse of love that speaks of communion, healing, compassion and peace.

God set that bow in the sky as a promise that the world would not be destroyed; that the response to our tendency to selfishness or harm would not be a deathly waterflood.  When we see the colour of that bow, caught as sun hits rain clouds, we are reminded of an alternative view of humanity; and of God’s ways of loving.

In Jesus, God became one of us - flesh of our flesh. Jesus is love with us, laying down his life for us. In John’s Gospel, he describes himself as the good shepherd. It’s an image that evokes the shepherding of Moses and David before they responded to God’s call to be agents of freedom or leadership. 

It reminds us that God is the true shepherd - gathering together and  binding up, leading by still waters; taking us through the valley of death to a rich banquet.  

Jesus, the good shepherd, knows us and we know him. However much we wrestle with doubts, fears, distractions - we are reminded that we belong to God and each other; that we are known and loved. 

Jesus contrasts himself with the hirelings - who do not have our interests or wellbeing at heart: those who attention and love is thin and unsafe; who abandon others in the face of danger because they do not want to carry the cost of life together. 

Instead Jesus lays down his life for us - rescuing us from death and inviting us to look after others in the flock. He calls us - and others we may not see as part of our flock, but who are known and beloved. 

When Peter speaks to those judging him in Acts - his story is an improvisation on this narrative of love he has known and witnessed; the love that recalled him from denial to renewed faith; the love that invited him to feed the sheep.

That love was known in Jesus of Nazareth: crucified by human beings, raised by God. 

In him, claims Peter, is the power to heal the broken. The one who was rejected is the cornerstone, the one on whom we can build life, together; the one who enacts a different social order.  

His words create a moment of silence. A silence that is broken: the judges judge the judged - a tragedy that means they miss an opportunity to rebuild their own lives. They do not see the good news of the judgement made by God in Christ - the burden of sin condemned and released; life given over instead to the generous and peaceable movement of the Spirit. 

We and every disciple come to this palace of sacrifice and abundance: receiving the gifts of God in bread and wine; remembering the story we are called to improvise on in our lives. Here, we are invited to connect our faith to the world's need - to echo the divine love for creation.

Here we are fed, rested and carried by the good shepherd who’s boundless love assures us that we belong and invites us to follow. 

How will we share the love of a shepherd who is patient, bold, determined: long nights and dangerous days in the pastures and the mud? It is an invitation to share goodness in the valleys and wild places of the world, amongst the wolves and with the flock.   

Somewhere over the rainbow is now.

That place that we’ve heard of is here.

© Julie Gittoes 2024

Cat ladies

 Sunday 28 July, Trinity 9: 2 Kings 4:42-end, Ephesians 3:14-end and John 6:1-21

Derogatory comments about cat ladies, and the pushback, turned my mind to two of my favourite 'cat lady' theologians: Julian of Norwich and Evelyn Underhill!

Cat ladies are back in the news thanks to Donald Trump’s running-mate JD Vance. 

Back in 2021 he told Fox news that the States was being run by, amongst others, 'a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable in their own lives and the choices they’ve made' [from X]. He went on to imply that they didn’t have a direct stake in the future or the nation. 

Push back has included social media being flooded with pictures of cats and cat ladies including Dolly Parton and Taylor Swift.  

The cat lady has been a stereotype for years, including The Simpsons: sometimes as an insult or way of diminishing women; other times as something embraced with humour or affection. 

However, cat ladies - or cat lovers - have their own informal patron saint: Julian of Norwich. 

Julian of Norwich image here

Born in 1342 she lived a life of prayer and solitude as an anchoress. Confined to a simple cell attached to a church, she would have devoted herself to the life of spiritual contemplation and giving others counsel; nourished by the sacrament and food that was brought to her. 

Like many mediaeval anchoresses, she would have been allowed to keep a cat - serving a practical purpose as a mouser but also a source of companionship. In stained glass windows and in icons, she is represented with a cat at her feet or in her arms. 

We might speculate about why she entered this life: turning to it in grief, having lost family to the plague; or choosing it to avoid an unequal or loveless marriage, or the risk of death in childbirth. 

What is certain is that far from being miserable in her life and choices, she delighted in the intimacy of God’s love for us and trusted that we are known and protected in that love whether in despair or joy. Far from having no stake in the future or in the lives of others, she had a vision for how love sustains the world, without end. 

Her wisdom and insight flowed from an experience of divine love at a time of critical illness. At the age of 30 she found herself close to death. For three days, her life was in the balance. During that time, she glimpsed what she called ‘showings’ - visions, which she recorded after she recovered. She then devoted the rest of her life to meditating on them, pondering their meaning. 

The result was her book - the first written in English by a woman - called ‘Revelations of Divine Love’. Her most famous saying ‘all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well’ was rooted in a compassionate and joyful theology - full of God’s mercy and forgiveness, and the motherly quality of love seen in Jesus. We are to live gladly, she says, because of this love.

Such love is infinite in its scope, yet Paul prays that the Ephesians might comprehend its length, height, depth and breadth. Endless love surpasses human knowledge. Yet Mother Julian finds a way to express the inexpressible; this endless love tenderly embraces us in our finitude; we are held in love, like a hazelnut resting in the palm of our hands. 

Paul’s prayer focuses on our inner life, being filled with the fullness of God’s love: the Spirit strengthening us; Christ dwelling in our hearts. To be rooted and grounded in love in this way is not divorced from action. 

Another woman, who was a spiritual guide and writer, and who also loved cats, was Evelyn Underhill. Buried a few miles away in Hampstead, she encouraged the unity of the active and contemplative life within Christianity. Like Paul and Mother Julian love was the chief virtue, expressed in how we treat one another. 

She wrote: ‘Adoration is caring for God above all else. Charity is the outward swing of prayer toward the world… embracing and caring for all worldly interests in God’s name.’ She encouraged simple, regular habits of prayer; time spent in stillness. She also explored the ways in which God comes to us in the pressing tasks, demands and routine duties; she called it a “Sacrament of the Present Moment” - receiving God in ‘every sight and sound, joy, pain, opportunity and sacrifice.’

Over the coming weeks, our gospel readings will come from John 6: an extended meditation on Jesus as the bread of life, given to build up his body, the church; given out of love for the world. Today we are given a glimpse of the way God’s love, in him, creates abundance. 

Elisha’s words invite us to know the life-giving justice of divine love. He himself is a prophet and a farmer - working with God in prayer, word and deed to bring life; to provide for the community. Together with the servant, he shared the first fruits - and all were satisfied. Faith and action are bound together - an outward swing of prayer as Underhill puts it, embracing the world’s needs in love.

In today’s portion of John 6, the large crowd needed to eat; but they were also drawn into a miracle of deepest needs being met. Yes, they were fed but they were nourished at the point of deeper need: for love, compassion, belonging, hope and companionship. 

They become collaborators in bringing life out of death, freedom from oppression. When Jesus creates abundance it is more than sparking a wave of generosity. As David Ford puts it, the message is about: ‘the compassionate love of Jesus; the unique relationship of Jesus with God the Creator, who is free to generate this abundance from very little; and the rich symbolism of bread and eating, resonating with the Eucharist and much else.’

Jesus’ feeding miracles are showings or revelations of divine love, to borrow Mother Julian’s language. He gave bread because he is Bread. That bread gets inside us. 

At the end of her text, Julian of Norwich writes: "From the time these things were first revealed I had often wanted to know what was our Lord's meaning. It was more than fifteen years after that I was answered in my spirit's understanding. 'You would know our Lord's meaning in this thing? Know it well.' Love was his meaning. Who showed it to you? Love. What did he show you? Love. Why did he show it? For love. Hold on to this and you will know and understand love more and more. But you will not know or learn anything else — ever."

Love is the meaning of the bread that breaks, falling over all things. Love is the meaning of the wafer of bread that gets inside us today. Love is the meaning.

When Jesus rejects the pressure to be made king - he withdraws before meeting the disciples on the water. In the face of darkness, winds and rough seas, he stirs up in them the desire to know who he is. May we like them confront their deepest hungers and fears in order that compassion swings from being an abstract concept to life-saving action. 

A prayer by Bill Braviner (posted on X on 28 July)

Encourage us, Lord,

to make constant love

for one another

The hallmark of our lives.

Whether things

are going well or badly,

however we feel

we are journeying

on our path of life,

let your love for us

be the bedrock of our lives,

the heartbeat of all things,

today.

© Julie Gittoes 2024

Bells: a voice of he church

Easter 7, 12 May: Bell Sunday: Ezekiel 36: 24-8;  Acts 1:15-7, 21-end; John 17:6-19

Bells are part of our soundscape: here in Hendon - and in towers from Didbrook to Long Melford, Westminster Abbey to Christchurch New Zealand, broadcast at 05.43 each Sunday morning on Radio 4.

Bells call the living; they mourn the dead.

Bells ring out our celebrations; they toll the heart beat our grief.

Every peal is an attempt: a reminder of life’s challenges, failures and successes; of all we practise and place our trust in; rhythms, patterns, changes; individuals, banded together. 

Jeremy Pratt, Conductor of the Abbey Company of Ringers, said of church bells, that ‘they are the loudest and most public, outward-facing voice of the Christian Church. When people hear them, they know something is happening.’

For some, it might be a call to prayer; for others, a reminder that prayer happens, routinely or in extremis; for others the sound of prayer itself.

Today’s gospel takes us to the heart of Jesus’ prayer. In the context of parting conversations and the washing of feet, in the intimacy of an upper room, his words ring out.

Perfume lingers in the air, bread crumbs on tables; the taste of wine and the salt of sweat and tears: because the atmosphere carries the weight of pain and promise. 

‘I ask’ says Jesus. 

His parting words express the longing for unity in the face of betrayal, for protection in the face of hostility, and for joy as they are sent into the world.

The disciples have shared in his life up until this point. There is still so much that could be said - and letting go in the face of death breaks human hearts. There is still so much that will unfold - as resurrection life restores human hearts. 

But they cannot bear it now. And he cannot say it. But he can ask, in love, for love to sustain them in loss; for love to renew their hope; for love to establish a new community. 

As David Ford puts it in his commentary, Jesus’s desire is that the: ‘intimacy and intensity of God’s own life opened up for wholehearted, trusting participation in the ongoing drama of being loved and loving.’

We and the disciples are sent into a world which can sometimes be hostile: where trust and participation is low; where communities can be siloed or marginalised. 

Jesus prays into that reality: that they and we might be protected in that ongoing drama.  The worship that we share as we gather around our Lord’s table - as bread breaks and wine is poured out - is but a gathered interval in our scattered life. We will be sent - in peace - into the spheres of our work and family life, our networks of relationship and numerous tasks.

The gift of the sacrament is part of what sustains us - as bread gets inside us and enlarges our hearts, as blessing rests on us to expand our imaginations. 

Our hearts are turned from self-absorption to attention to God; and onwards into concern for others. God’s self-giving love for the world revealed in Jesus Christ, continues to flow through the power of the Spirit.

Jesus prays for this sanctification - this ongoing work of the Spirit.  Holiness is the nature of God - we draw near to this refining fire of love in worship, in penitence and faith, in forgiveness and renewal, in gathering and being sent.

We share in ways of holiness - focused on what matters most, with dedication, and persistence. In this is glory and joy: in being faithful in small things, ordinary things; doing them with great love. 

As the seventeenth century priest and poet Thomas Traherne wrote:  ‘Those Things are most Holy which are most Agreeable with God’s Glory. Whose Glory is that he is Infinit Lov’.

There are echoes here in the words of the prophet Ezekiel. He focuses on God’s action - of gathering, cleansing and renewing. 

The experience of exile had been traumatic - the separation from homeland and places of worship, the fragmentation of community.  They will be gathered together and reassembled as a people.  

That restoration goes hand in hand with being cleansed from the consequences of rebellion against God’s ways - letting go of the idols that have supplanted the commandments of love; letting go of the corruption that has exploited and diminished others.

God promises renewal: a new heart and a new Spirit. Human will and desire will be recommitted to God’s ways. A heart of stone is cold and unresponsive; a heart of flesh beats, kindles love and sustains life. 

When Jesus prays, he asks that we too might come alive to God’s love and God’s desire for the world.

In Acts the disciples gather in obedience to God - in awareness of risen life, but also in prayerful waiting. They are waiting for the Holy Spirit to touch human hearts, to create something new.

God guides them and us out of a troubled past and into an unknown future. As they tell the story of betrayal and replacement. But the power of love reaches to the depths of the grave, including Judas. The Spirit gives space for rehabilitation and redemption - in this world and in the world to come.

For now, the disciples are called to continue in that drama of being loved and loving. To wholeheartedly participate in the life of the world - but with the intensity of God’s life in us; life shared in the intimacy of breath and gesture; in the infinite movements of renewal and pursuit of what is just, beautiful, equitable and peaceful. 

We are restored penitents called into cooperation for the common good in shared service. 

Like bells, we call the living and mourn the dead. Our heart beats celebrate life’s joys and mark our grief. Everyday is an attempt to live this drama of being loved and loving. Sometimes we succeed; sometimes we don’t. But we practise habits of love - human and divine. We are individuals banded together - with our hearts beating the rhythm of love, our lives following its pattern and changes. 

May our lives, not just our bells be an outward-facing voice of the church: so that when people meet us, speak to us, get to know us, they sense that there is something happening. A rhyme of love that renews and heals.

© Julie Gittoes