This is the life!  A week of ministry by food!!

After Sunday's lunch (photo below, copyright someone at church but I'm not sure who!) today I'm off to the Coffee Club where I will sup average coffee (but it's cheap!) with those whose company always delights and whose mutual love and care is inspiring.  We will laugh, we will chat, we will grumble perhaps too.  But we will share fellowship and love as a community of grace.

Today's PAYG is designed to confound your average Proddy, quoting as it does from Ecclessiasticus (or Sirach, or The Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach) a deutero canonical book that sits between the Old and New Testaments in some Bibles, notably those used by Catholics.  The status of these books is viewed differently by various Christian traditions, and lots of Bappies freak at the thought of it - which makes me smile given how many Victorian Bappy Chapels cite parts of it (now praise we great and faithful men....) on war memorials etc.

Anyway, here's today's protion from Ecclesiasticus/Sirach 4:11 - 19

Wisdom teaches her children
and gives help to those who seek her.
Whoever loves her loves life,
and those who seek her from early morning are filled with joy.
Whoever holds her fast inherits glory,
and the Lord blesses the place she enters.
Those who serve her minister to the Holy One;
the Lord loves those who love her.
Those who obey her will judge the nations,
and all who listen to her will live secure.
If they remain faithful, they will inherit her;
their descendants will also obtain her.
For at first she will walk with them on tortuous paths;
she will bring fear and dread upon them,
and will torment them by her discipline
until she trusts them,
and she will test them with her ordinances.
Then she will come straight back to them again and gladden them,
and will reveal her secrets to them.
If they go astray she will forsake them,
and hand them over to their ruin.

Lots you could do with that passage, for sure.  One option is the oft used personification of wisdom as Sophia, the third person of the Trinity, aka Holy Spirit.  You could substitute Holy Spirit throughout and that would make a challenging reading!

The passage shows that wisdom does not arrive neatly packages and ready to go, it is bourne of experience - some of which is pretty rough '... at first she will walk with them on tortuous paths; she will bring fear and dread upon them, and will torment them by her discipline...'  This is the bit that spoke to me as I listened this morning.  Sometimes my path at present feels not only tortuous but torturous, especially in the wee small hours when I can't get comfortable enough to sleep and the drug induced mega hot flushes leave me drenched in sweat (OK TMI probably), sometimes fear and dread are my companions in the dark, but through this I am learning something and - which is vitally important - 'she will walk with' me.  God's Spirit shares the journey to wisdom and is Wisdom within it.

The passage ends with a note of caution though - if you don't stick with it, wisdom (lowercase w) will leave you to face the consequences of your choices.  Or should that be Wisdom?  Scary stuff!  Sometimes I wish it would all go away; sometimes I don't really feel much like learning in and through it, but mostly I trust that through it and in it and beyond it God is helping me grow in grace and wisdom (very small w!).

I wonder what this passage says to you?

BUGB e-news sweep has this link to an article on Biblical literalism, or maybe more accurately Bilbiolatry.  Worth a quick look see.

Various Baptist bloggers refer to the publication of a collection of essays honouring Brian Haymes (here, here, and here) it sounds a fascinating collection.  And of course I can add in my usual annoying way "I've preached in the church where the photo was taken."  I look forward to reading this at some future date - when my brain cells are working properly!

One of the things that has taken me by surprise since my surgery is how utterly rubbish my concentration has been.  Trying to read anything longer than a page or so or to take in a TV porogramme over 30 minutes long is a disaster, so I have a big pile of books and DVDs waiting for me to recover the wherewithall to appreciate their loan.

I was also lent two jigsaws and the one I'm working on seems to be doing the work of rebuilding my ability to focus and concentrate (phew!  I didn't want to be dozy and distracted for the rest of my life).  I find I can sit, backache notwithstanding, for a couple of hours at a time and work at a section of the picture.  Maybe a 1000 piece puzzle is a bit adventurous for the first one in 40 years, but I'm getting there!

After about 12 hours I've got this far...

I just discovered, via PAYG, that today is the Feast of the Chair of St Peter.  Wondering just what on earth this was, I resorted to that fount of all all dodgy information, Wikepedia, which assures me that there are relics venerated as chairs (cathedra) upon which the Apostle Peter sat.  It also tells me that by synecdoche (no I didn't know what it meant either) it becomes essentially a celebration of the papal office.  Not a feast a good dissenting Bappy is going to mark!  But it did put me in mind of another possibility, born of my expereince as a member of a House Group in the late 1990s. 

Our hosts had two settees.  The one on which I sat became known as the 'silly settee' because we would make flippant remarks (I recall us all saying 'yeah, right' when an elderly King David needed a beautiful young virgin simply to keep him warm at night; 1 Kings 1:1-2 (v 4 assures us of his chastity, so clearly ancient readers thought likewise!)), we would see the funny side of either the passage or the questions in the leader's 'Big Book of Questions' (it was called something like 'Search Ye the Scriptures' and consisted of loads of questions on every book of the Bible - and no answers!), and sometimes we would push the envelope on topics like predestination or religiously sanctioned genocide.  The 'Silly Settee' was an important part of my growth in disicpleship and a place I recall fondly for those who shared it and the fun we had in the studies.

So I hereby declare today the 'Celebration of the Sofa of Silliness' a liturgical commemoration of the role of group discussion in the ongoing formation of disicples of Christ.