I love that comment in Revelation about there being silence in heaven for half an hour... all the alleluias cease, no flying winged creatures, no angels passing on messages - just - silence.

This morning I introduced our Lent series of services built around encounters between Jesus and A N Other in the gospel of John.  Essentially I've extended the lectionary gospel narratives a bit and omitted the OT and Epistle.  The plan is that I lead a 10 minute reflection on the passage, we sing a song or chant, have ten minutes of silence (with some optional resources to help anyone who finds them helpful) and then the song or chant again.

I was a little bit nervous about introducing it, and was overwhelmed by how well it was received... a few people who rarely express opinions sought me out to say thank you.

It's all much 'bigger' than that, though, and every week the way God's Spirit works in, through and despite us strikes me afresh. 

The all agey bit was a story 'I Love You because You're You' a delightful account of a mother fox who loves her child when they are good, bad, happy, sad, shy, bold, angry, stubborn etc.  I ended up saying that God loves everyone just like that.  "Even the guys who don't know?" asked a three year old - yes, even the guys who don't know.  Wow!

The intercessions were utterly stunning in their depth and courage - prayer for baddies as well as goodies, for those who know and name Christ and those who don't... the perfect match for the child's observation.  Wow!

Setting up this morning was fraught - the church projector kept misbehaving and shutting down.  I cadged a lift home to pick up mine, which then failed to work because the bulb had gone phut.  Thankfully we got the church projector to work (who knows what was up with it - the old unplug, replug trick!) and all went well (aside from me having the wrong version of the chorus of one of the hymns).

Silence in church for ten minutes - today and each Sunday of Lent:  I think that will make the vibrancy and noise of Palm Sunday all the more intense, and I hope it will prove overall a positive experience for those who participate.

... Eliminate the negative

A bit of reflection and self-examination never goes amiss and, whatever the outward appearance of my bloggerel, I am conscious of becoming increasingly grumpy and negative.  It may be my age or my hormones, it's quite likely to be yet another side effect of my drugs, but I don't like it and I don't want to be it!

So I am hauling myself up by my metaphorical boot straps and choosing to be positive.

All of which means if/when I descend into negativity, grumpiness or moaniness you are allowed to take me task.

This week my blog link for Lent is to two posts by Andy Goodliff, who I am really pleased to see is blogging again quite regularly after a bit of a break.  He, too, has been reading the Archbish's Lent book, and his reflections offer a more positive counter to mine!

See here and here

So the web is 25 years old - which might help explain why I've spent half the morning trying to resolve apparent bugs on the church computer that meant it refused to connect to most websites that weren't bookmarked (no I hadn't altered my settings)... I finally fixed it with the old 'switch it off and switch it on again' routine for the router.  It might be faster and more whizzy than back then, kilostream and megastream datalinks, dial up mdems (though a few evidently still have this) laughably antiquated, but some things stay the same.

I have been with my ISP for 15 years or thereabouts, since I first went online at home, never having changed and having had very few problems along the way ... the smaller, unknown ISPs do seem less problematic than the big names... even if the big names own almost all the small names nowadays.

Happy birthday WWW... you've come a long way in quarter of a century.

The next two chapters of 'Looking through the Cross' and my sense of 'so what' is, I'm afraid, largely undiminished.  It seems to be pretty standard stuff not aimed at anyone who has studied theology or even been in the Church for more than a few minutes.  I do like very much that it is accessible, and the use of contemporary literature (including Harry Potter and Ian McEwen's 'Atonement') works well, but I am not finding many (any yet) new insights or even sentences that make me think.

The chapter on evil, or more properly on atonement, treads a well worn path and assumes that God the Father abandons God the Son, or that God abandons the man Jesus, whichever you prefer, as evidenced by the citation of Psalm 22:1.  I know this is received wisdom, but it has never worked for me, not at any stage of my understanding of what the cross might be about. 

I have minimal knowledge of biblical languages, but I do know that Hebrew lacks punctuation, so what we have is someone's best guess of where the commas etc. go.  This what is traditionally rendered

My God, my God, why have you foresaken me?

Could legitmiately (so far as I can tell) be rendered

My God, my God, why?  Have you foresaken me?

Anyone who has read my stuff over the years will have seen this before - it is an alternative that allows me another, more helpful, reading of the start of Psalm 22.  And it works, it makes sense in context... the double question sits as well as the single question in the flow of ths psalm.

Did God abandon Jesus?  Did "the father turn his face away" as the song puts it?  No.  I do not believe God did, any more than I believe God abandoned/abandons me in my own darkest and lowest moments.  Just because it feels like abandonment does not mean it is.  There are oodles of pslams and other texts that support my hypothesis!

Tomlinson has Jesus dying as 'one of us', dying as 'one for us' - a version of substitutionary atonement that neatly evades the pecuniary aspect of some models.  I think its a decent attempt but, for me, adds nothing new to think about.

The chapter on power/powerlessness again treads a very familiar path, though to be fair, there was historical stuff about Pilate of which I had managed not to be aware until now.  The subversive power of chosen weakness, of sacrificial love is an important theme, and again the examples, many rooted in the common experience of ordinary people, are helpful and accessible (you don't have to be a martyr to live sacrificially), but not exactly a new idea. 

So far, so not very inspiring then (sorry Graham Tomlin) but here are a couple of rather neat little sentences from page 77 (the best page of the book so far IMO!) worth pondering a little further...

"When a person grasps in a quite profound way, that neither their achievements nor their mistakes count before God, it leaves that person with nothing to lose."

"When we lose the love of power for its own sake, we discover the power to love."

Looking Through the Cross, Graham Tomlin, London, Bloomsbury, 2013 p.77