Why is it that when you are on leave you wake up wide awake at 5 a.m. and then have to wait almost 3 hours for it to get light?  Ah well.  Nearly a week off this week (OWW preach on Sunday) during which I will finally get the bathroom painted (loud fanfare) and spend three days in Manchester at a DPT residential. In between times I am, hoping to get a bit of time just to 'be,' something I'm not too good at, but which I definitely need.  So it will be a little quieter in this bit of blogland.

Not a clue how to spell it, but it's a great word, and one some of my folk heard for the first time ever today when I used it in vestry prayers!  Thankfully, my prayer was answered and people seemed not to be too discombobulated by sitting cafe style.  But I was - before, during and after the event - by the hymn I'd selected to end the service.  BPW 308 'God is our strength and refuge.'  It sits there looking inncouous in the hymnbook, and the words, based on Psalm 46 are terrific.  The tune is well known, rousing, powerful and... well, here's the rub.... discombobulating.

The Dambuster's March - for many it conjures up images of torches played on tent ceilings and hands twisted to make goggles.  For others it speaks of triumphalist nationalism.  For some it speaks of heroism.  For some it speaks of the brutality of war and human inhumanity - dams breached and civilians drowned or made homeless, a nation crippled by ostensibly collateral damage.  I guess we all know the long term impact it had on Barnes Wallis.

I was uncomfortable (don't want to wear out the lovely titular word) singing these words to this tune at the end of our harvest service when we'd thought about the ongoing struggles in Indonesia.  And yet...

And yet, I think it was good to be disturbed, uncertain, troubled by what I was doing, because in some small measure it reflected the tensions that the psalm requires us to acknowledge.

I don't know why Richard Bewes chose to write his hymn to fit this tune.  Maybe he just liked it; maybe he thought it had potential beyond the confines of a war film; maybe, just maybe, he was playing with a bit of irony, reclamation or discombobulation of his own.  If anyone knows, I'd be delighted to learn the 'story behind the hymn.'  In the meantime, I live with the tensions and am glad that God is present within them.

Today I have a double dose of harvest festivals - or 'harvest vegetables' as they are known in my family because of what a five year-old Catriona allegedly said when she came home from school (can't recall it myself...).

This morning is GB 'parade' at D+2 where we are taking tins to give to the local 'food bank'.  In my role as 'Miss' I visited a supermarket to buy up large quantities of cheapy-creepy tins for the girls to give.  Many of our girls are from fairly poor families, if they come to church they won't have any tins to offer because their families need to put food on their own tables.  Part of me feels mean buying the budget brand stuff (though I lived on it for four years whilst I was in Manchester) because it seems to say to the recipients 'this is all you're worth'; on the other hand it does mean that each girl who turns up can offer at least one tin to the collection, giving her a bit of self worth.  It's a tricky one!

This afternoon at Dibley, I am giving every member of the church a plate of food and a leaflet with the 'stone soup' story to take away to make a simple meal for themselves and then inviting them to give to the BMS appeal what they might otherwise have spent.  Recent posts will make it clear that I, not the church, paid for these items - to give away church money, heaven forbid!  When I arrived here, we had the meagre harvest displays that so many churches muster by raiding their cupboards for short dated tins and bringing a few apples from the supermarket; after the service these were juggled round into gifts to our own 'over 60's' (so most people).  I was not sad when, after our building closed, this tradition died.  This afternoon we will sit 'cafe style' with no display apart from some Indonesian artefacts and be invited to consider our giving to help those whose lives are blighted by natural disasters.

I do find myself wondering about harvest these days.  When I read the OT accounts I wonder how we ended up with the tokenism that blights our worship these days.  Wouldn't it be great to bring a whole month's groceries and hand them over to the food bank, take up a large offering for BMS and then cook ourselves a good meal, share fellowship and laughter in God's presence and be aware of the inter-relatedness of all people -in Dibley or Indonesia?

"To give, and give, and give again, what God has given thee" - a line from an old hymn I learned as a child.  If we really did give like that this harvest, if I really did give like that, what a difference it would make.

Somewhere during my training as minister, I stopped using expressions such as 'the poor' or 'the blind' because it was made pretty clear to me that these people groups don't like to be so described.  Whilst even JC used such expressions ('the poor will always be with you'), I think there is a valid point to be made.  But it is amazing how often I hear or read references to 'definite article, adjective' and find myself wanting to say 'The deaf what?  Rabbit?' or 'The disabled what? Light switch?' (I've never liked the phrase 'disabled toilet' because I'd rather find one that was functional, but there you go).  I wouldn't like to be defined as part of 'the lefthanded' or 'the myopic' (both of which are true) - so why would anyone else?  I know I'm being pedantic, and I know some folk wouldn't know what an adjective was, let alone a definite article, but it doesn't take much effort to speak about 'people with disabilties' or 'deaf people' and it does remind us, importantly, of the fact that they, like we, are PEOPLE not objects.

Another rant over!!!!

A week tomorrow I preach for the OWW service - on Colossians 1:15 - 20, which seems to me to be Paul 'flirting with universalism' as a former URC college principal I know used to say.  You can't get away from what the letter says, that Christ's death was to reconcile the world (kosmon) not just the humans living on it.  Sharing this with my peeps will be fun!

But it got my grey matter working, which was a good thing, and drew me back to John 3:16, which Rob Lacey renders so exquisitely 'God's so passionate about the planet...." - the whole thing, not just the humans - and to Genesis 1 and 2 creation stories.

I have known for yonks that Genesis 1 and 2 are not identical, learned a decade back that they reflect two different traditions of writing, but had never really stopped to realise how much of a composite, mechanistic story we tell in Sunday School and the like.

The order of the two accounts is utterly different, as is the 'method' of creation.  Genesis 1 - the version we probably all think we know - six days of God issuing commands - is actually anything but mechanistic, rather God empowers the earth (and the seas) to 'bring forth' life.  How different from my Sunday School view of God making things and putting them in place, a bit like a supersized toy farm layout.  The idea of things 'coming forth' from the earth and seas probably formed the basis of the pre-evolution notion of new species emerging from swamps, but actually, dare I suggest offers support for a theistic evolution model?  It seems somehow a more gentle image of God than the one I have somewhere along the line acquired.  I have long loved the 'God saw that it was good...' statements imagining lots of 'wow' moments along the way.

Genesis 2 is much more mechanistic, but retains the interconnectedness with the earth.  The first human is placed in an empty world - reminding me a bit of the yellow pages advert of the person in a room with a phone - and then plants are provided and after that animals.  The helpmeet is the last stage, created not from the earth itself but from the human.  It is an intriguing notion to consider the world appearing around a person, yet still they remain lonely depsite all the blessings of creation.  The message of the importance of human relationships is pretty clear!

Having done my reading and thinking I had one of those 'duh, I'm so thick' moments when I coudn't believe I'd read these accounts so often and not seen what they actually said.

So now I face the challenge of how I communicate any of this to my peeps, some of whom are sure God spent 144 hours on creation and then sat down to watch what happened next, that the planet is a thing to be used and that Christ died only for people, and maybe not even for all of them.

What I want to do, I think, is to remind people that creation is 'good' and 'blessed' and that we are its 'stewards' who have a moral obligation to do our best to care for it.  If I can point forward to the end of Revelation which has earth made new, not just etheral souls floating around in heaven, and if I can get folk to think a little more about lifestyle choices, then I think I'll be happy. 

Whether I might then be subject to a heresy trial, who knows?!