Yesterday I finally got round to preparing Sunday's Ephesians 6 sermon, as part of which I am using some parallels with the clothing and equipment the builders next door use.  It doesn't quite match up but it does a good-enough job.

As I re-read a commentary the passage, the commentator suggested the list was in the order a soldier would put on/pick up the items - notably observing that once he was holding the shield, he'd have to put on the helmet before he picked up the sword or he wouldn't have a hand free so to do.  Hmm, I thought, I'd put on the helmet before I picked up the shield, so I'm not sure it quite works.  And then I pondered the attributes in the listed order - truth, righteousness, readiness of the gospel of peace (not the gospel as sometimes is said), faith, salvation, word of God.  Is this the order in which the average church would list them? I'm not convinced it is.  So is there a danger of reading far too much into the minutiae of the metaphor and missing the point - I'm sure there is!

All of this made me wonder, though, how the metaphor was created.  Did the writer have a set of attributes and then match them up to items of armour (and if so how did he get the number of items to match up) or was it done the other way round?  How significant are the parallels with priestly attire, of which commentators make much, and do they inform the order?

It has made we wonder how I would go about generating a metaphor for aspects of faith or discipleship: which I would include, what parallels I might employ and why.  This very familiar passage did not drop out of the sky fully formed but began as the (albeit God-inspired) ponderings of a real person writing for real readers.

So, what might it mean to speak of the 'toolbelt' of truth (the truth shall set you (hands) free) or the 'hi-viz jacket' of righteousness (unmissable, reflective stripes of Gods glory perhaps), the 'hard-hat' of salvation etc.?  What is gained and lost by changing the metaphor?  Is a building site a more helpful metaphor than a battle field?  Or just a different one?  The 'cosmic battle' theme that runs through Ephesians doesn't neatly parallel one of building a Kingdom of peace, so I don't think it is that simple... but I will still try to focus my folk to a constructive 'building' approach rather than a defensive 'battle' approach.

The current in-phrase in BUGB so cringe if you must.  Twelve pages of ideas and intitiatives that churches - large and tiny -  have been up to, to provide cross-over between church and not-church (two-way traffic), including dear old Dibley.  If you know which one is Dibley, enjoy but don't name them if you comment here - their privacy within wider blogworld is to be respected.

Check it out here

Seen today on a poster advertising an upcoming mission to Dibley and District:

Thursday: Grill a Christian session, lunchtime in the cafe

Would you like sauce with that...?

Thus spake the secretary of D+1's women's meeting when I rang her to confirm the hymns for tomorrow's meeting where I am covering for the scheduled speaker who broke her ankle (a bit desperate as a means of avoidance really...).  Not really what I wanted to hear when I had decided to recycle my prodigal son narrative from a few weeks back, have two services still to write this week and am frantically rewriting and editting for word count (my nemesis/bete noir/something or other) a paper which I have to post on Friday.

So, I think I'm going to ask them what their favourite Bible stories are and take it from there.  Maybe I'll ask them which character they most relate to and why and how they'd tell the story from that perspective.  Maybe I could then tell the prodigal son from the perspective of the fatted calf...?!

No, honestly I'm not trying to show off my rusty language skills by titling two posts in one day in non-English.  Truth is I never did learn any Latin other than odd phrases in even odder contexts.

Yesterday one of my musicians commented to me that when I depart, along with my data-projector, they probably won't sing anything out of Mission Praise or Songs of Fellowship anymore (let alone Common Ground which they've resolutely not bought but have odd photocopies from!).  I looked into the cost of buying them a set of word books for any of the above, and decided it was too dear, so am currently collating "Dibley Praise" a collection of diverse hymns and songs we have sung over the six years I've known this church (it is roughly six years now since I first met them) along with some they sang long before they'd heard of me and had on a collection of tatty sheets of paper.  Of the roughly 200 on the list about a third are in BPW (no, I don't know why they put them on sheets either) about a quarter are drivel and the rest are slowly being transcribed - via Hymn Quest, via SOF discs and in a few cases by typing.  The supplement will end up, I anticipate at around 100 items including a few in Khosa, Spanish and Latin and from Iona, Hillsong, Vineyard, Kingsway and Pratt Green Trust.  What this say about us/me is debateable -  though I think it reflects a healthy openness and flexibility.  Not every song that is included would be my choice, and there are lines in some of them that make me squirm, but I am big enough, old enough and ugly enough (as my Dad would have said) to distinguish between what I sing and what I believe, and whilst my theology is inevitably shaped by the things I sing, it is't determined by it.

Lex orandi, lex credendi? Well, I've never been convinced that I do, but as others may be less discerning/questioning it pays to think what is a healthy balance in our supplementary song collection.