Tuesday 29 November 2011

texting psalms 1-41

Text and texts will be given unto you. Come ascend the psalms of a morning with we. 07729056452.

Ps1-2
Psalt for preppers: be ready: bring a new new song for a new new wine. We come to the Psalms right on time, a prayerbook for a prayerful season. What are the chances? .. 1v1 Let us be the blessed nonscoffers if we possibly can. Oh God give us grace for that. Note the progression: whose counsel have I let in? What cause did I pause for? And where have I ended up sitting? Reverse engineer your seating plan. 1v2 The law must be read kept understood through the frame of delight. Delight and not duress. My meditation is this: Pharisees pacing about a dry empty swimming pool, muttering devising even celebrating that the water-tightness of the structure keeps out the elements.. Only we know, the water-tightness is to keep water in, so that we can play, swim and be delightedly buoyant. Delight that we have a reciprocal covenant of exclusive love with the God of everything, ridiculous aye. 1v3 Be as a tree in you metaphor and simile: an oak of righteousness, be green and full of sap in your old age, be a mustard 'tree' to nest in, be shelter and be shade. 2v1 Our intercontinental ballistic rattles thrown from the pram in a storm on teacup earth. It is laughable, in retrospect (a perspective God is able to take of past and future) how much energy we waste raging and plotting. 2v4 What sort of laughter? Surely a laughter of love. Would that I laughed at least as much as Tony. Laughing like kids in the playpool, entirely safe, haptically delighted, holy mischief makers. Oh to laugh at myself much today, for God's grace is more than a little ridiculous.

Ps3-4 4v4 I have been thinking about how my prayerfulness is helped and hindered by risings early or layings in bed, openness to learning to pray better asks for a re-examination of these. Let me ask 3v5 4v8 God be in our bedtimes, in our lyings awake, in our sleep, in our dreams, and our wakings to new days. In you, God to live and move and have our being, so be welcomed into our sleep lives. God our shield, safety and salvation, our glory and joy, be welcomed into this new day, I want to meet with you.

Ps5-6 Words: boasts v5, lies v6, flattery v9: sins of propagating unreality. Sins of thought and words indeed: failing the onefold by dualising? failing to have our yes be yes? failing to keep it real? failing to be steadfast as God is steadfast. God's steadfast love is our means 5v7 and our end 6v4, he is our beginning and our end. .. Beginning with morning sacrifice 5v3, before the day has happened, we expectant anticipate, pay-it-forwarding, confident to spend our first fruits first on him. .. Singing 5v11: Reverse engineer your singing plan, where singing is a fruit of confidence is a fruit of knowing you are loved is a fruit of pausing to sing. This is the virtuous cycle of tacit knowledge, of knowing through doing, of integrating faith and works. Sing to love to sing. .. 6v3 How long? How long will we not have for not having asked Jm4v2?

Ps7-8 Small meditations to bring forth trees of life.. God the judge, who searches hearts and minds, make me transparent.. Thank you for your glorification on the lips of children, let us learn.. What are human beings that you are mindful of us? Who am I that you care for me, know my name? Human beings, human beings, all around us today, these image bearers crowned a little lower than the angels, in the library, across the table, buying tube tickets. Let us glory to God by loving human beings, and being very fully human.. Dominion and dominioning and the urban landscaping, God? Glory to God, let us glory to God, glory glory glory to God.

Ps9-10 9v1-2 I will give thanks, I will recount, I will be glad, I will sing. Will I, will you, will we? Will I stand? Arms high? Heart abandoned? God willing, I will: future tenses risk a presumption of grace. God let me be faithful one more day, as in 13-14 the if-then and because for our worship is God's graciousness, his sustaining, his permission. .. 10 The silence v13 of a forgetful v11, hidden v1, distant v1, blind v11 God, who is not there v4, and does not care v5. Should we speak so when it feels such? {LACTS?] Our lamentable laments are shallow because we cushion ourselves with cheap grace and simulated salvation. The 'blacks' I mangled in last night's exposition might be these, the dark dark places on various spectrums, the extremities of God's apparent absence. Pray that I would cry better and more often, in better accord with the emotional range demanded by the scale of grace I have received.

Ps11-12 Topping and tailing with God's trustworthiness and our corresponding safety 11v1 12v6 v8 for 11v3 there is something for good people do when everything falls apart., and this is a trusting God. Reading Psalms after reading Job, the Psalmic and Jobic worldviews correspond here: God is so good. God we can trust and keep trusting.

Ps13-14 v3 Light up my eyes, light up my eyes, light up my eyes. To theologise sleep and so to both allegorise and practicalise. What is sleep? What is waking? How, practically can we rise like children, Tiggers for Jesus, on Christmas day every day.. Awakeness contrasted with a deathly sort of sleep, depressive day-sleeping, a curtain-closed numbness, the escapist dulling of the senses in an overindulged haze. My indulgences in bought and word and feed: in retail, in irony, in the gap filling saviour of comfort foods. Help me beyond help, save me. Oh God, rest us well, rise us well, rouse a fearlessness. Wake a waker within us, among us, for this winter time, as the darkness closes in. God we wait eagerly for your breaking dawn, we are now with Mary in her advent pregnancy. Come Lord Jesus Come. I need you. v7 Let Jacob rejoice, let Israel be glad. Let us? He has let us. So, let's. Let us. Lit eyes.

Ps15-16 Regarding security, both of these. v15 words and money, recurring themes, how they are patterned in our lives depends on our knowing (or lack of knowing) security in God. We should talk about this less abstractly soon. v16 secure in God's goodness we can bear the knowledge of our conscience. So I come to Psalm late at night, v7 in the night my conscience warns me. Not the angst of laying awake at night indulgently tortured or regretful, but conscientiously conscious of who we are to be made better. In favour of one's nighttime conscience, as with mirrors: because not all self-knowledge is self-indulgent... So lay us down to sleep, God, in holy knowledge. Thank you for v3 our community, v8 your presence, v9 our security in you, v11 you our joy.

Ps17-18 God our knight and day. v3 God our nocturnal mystery shopper: surely God was in this place. 18 v19 Have we our hands tied? So long we for release from the claustrophobia of our sin. v29 The Lord is my Matrix, my blue pill, my rabbit hole. By him we can take time to make time to bend time and walk on water. v35 By gentleness we are overcome to overcome. .. God's way v30 becomes our way v32 when we follow him down it. Blamelessness is in the following: we are that following following. Singing as we go.

Ps19-20 Sky yes. Today's confident cool blue. A sky with a purpose, not ad hoc and not unconstant. The sun with a happy purpose and a linear narrative, from one end of the sky to the other. God what a mystery. v12 No-one can see her own errors, deliver me from wilful sins, don't let them rule me, as they do. You can rule me, God, really. God in these thoughts, from the centre to the edge, reconfigure my thoughts and my imagination. I need a way of imagining Jesus so that he can rule me. 20 So trust. And trust, it begets hope.

Ps21-22 This the show-and-tell of Jesus' body broken: I'll tell my brother v22, our congregation v22, the world's end v27, unto a generation yet unborn v31. What are we telling? What have we been shown? Treasuring Christ and the call to suffer. I am called to suffer. That is my calling. To do hard things, bear heavy weights and stand in the way of bullets. Ps22 tells how and tells why. The how requires calibration and perspective. Calibrating our suffering against the innocent-sufferer-par-excellence here prophesied. And history's perspective's assurance v5 v9 v10 v21 v24 on which basis we have faith in future grace, and a vision for what will be achieved by suffering by Christ via ou bearing our cross in/of/as witness. Why am I so troubled this morning by the shortcomings in my theology of suffering? Fruitlessness and the fear of pruning perhaps? Yesterday's challenge's to risk: by Y regarding communication, by Driscoll regarding marriage and hospitality and by the Navs regarding Sabbath. Suffering is key. Indulge me in a little wander longer than a text is a sensible medium for. The cake-on-the-plate-while-you-wait corrective to an underrealised eschatology would be helpful if we lived in a Danish Lutheran fishing village before Babette. But we don't. Our generation knows no not-yet. And the why of our suffering and the pie in our sky is this: that Christianity would endure to our grandchildren's England. There is no cake in that, we will be dead. Part of me is convicted to take every comfort, luxury and advert-elevated-'need', and not to throw it away, and so become a Danish fishing village, but to throw them in to the Sabbath, The whole lot, meat cake espresso hot-showers lie-ins.. So by suffering their absence 6 days a week, we might image a heaven worth waiting for and create Sunday worth resting on. And this is not legalism, to delay gratification to heighten pleasure is hedonism. Enough. And I am being flippant in the light of Jesus body broken. v17, hear the sound of bones cracking today. The life we live is amazing. Bought at a cost. Grateful also, God, for my parents v4 who trusted.

Ps23-24 So the Lord is my shepherd. THE: the definite article, there is only one God. The LORD: and none else, no other idol, not myself, not these other gods, may it be. IS: not a might be or a was or a will be, but present, definite, matter of fact. MY: even mine, even me, for I am know, not as impersonal data, but as a lover, mother, brother. And also in this the call to our always choosing – something of the truth of existentialism's dread, our kirkegaardian on this God I stake my life. SHEPHERD: Jeus the good shepdherd who lays down his life for the sheep, I want to imagine you thus, the sheep know hiw voice, because he gathers us, cares, keps, intends good for us, sacrifices, risks for us. I know Jesus loves me, because he risked himself for me. Thinking about Otford's sheep, there is something honest and uncomplicated about the shepherd-sheep relationship, though it may be hard. Hard but not complicated. So I shall not be in want, because the Lord is my shepherd and he alone is sufficient. And surely goodness and mercy will follow me. They are not hidden in boxes under the sand, they follow me where I go astray. God pursues the grumpy with goodness and mercy, one over one shoulder, one over the other. Remember as you walk today, this is the grace-full universe we live in. So God's house will be my home all my life, 23 to 24 and God's house is the earth, cake on the plate. But this poem full of the not-yet also, God is still coming, we are not complete, so prepare, prepare, for your unrealised pie, fling wide the gates, prepare a way in the desert, for all of life in an advent.

Ps25-6 v2 Trust vs Shame, v3 Waiting vs Shame, v20 Refuge vs Shame. Not sure that I am being terribly profound, simply to say we are safe inside a steadfast beloved unashamed shamelessness.. v7 Remember God's great forgettery. Tattoo it on a friend. .. v14 Friendship. We should image this mode of our relationship with God, against facebook's damage done, oh to be a friend, substantially, unambiguously. .. In that vein. v15 Pluck us from the net. .. 26v12 I'll link you to McCracken on Tebow. Shameless unirony. God, let me be so simply Christian in a single-minded pursuit of excellent witness. Psalms in the evening dredge the day's detritus, it is a different experience. God, forgive forget what I have been and done.

Ps27-28 These Psalms need to be read aloud, read them aloud to remind of our embodied dwelling in the house of God, words from your body to your mouth to spoken declaration. v4 There is one thing I want, to dwell in the house of God. Dwell dwell, with heart body mind soul strength, deeply. Dwell with every footstep and every word. v8 Hear God calling us to worship. Let us, let us settle into worshipful ways, dwelling in God's presence, here now, in all these tasks, transformed by templing. The Psalms connect worshipful delight in God, pleas for salvations and the pursuit of wisdom. From beginning to end 27v1 God my light and salvation, 28v9 the Lord is still my shepherd. We dwell in him.

Ps29-30 the bigger your notions of God, the more offensive Jesus' claim to be him. Our God is a great big God. Jesus was a nobody from a nowhere with nothing. Just like us. We have a great big God within us, among us, for us. This by his voice, which is our voice, if only we would. Let us with creative voices speak urgently his healing, proclaim boldly his kingship, and advocate justice, and imagine the possible, and speak a storm of hope, a flood of love and rebuild a word-damaged world:You are forgiven. It is finished. We are free. This our banner, these our bricks, this our medicine, these our roadmaps. O saints sing! Dear saint, beloved, believe in the blood bought freedom you've been set free for.

Ps31-32 32v2 Blameless, 31v7 Beloved, this is for sharing, let all those we love stand under these banners. 31v12 the fear of being forgotten, as she of the end of Life In A Day, the pain of much church pain, the vulnerability of love. God in gathering today would we demonstrate that you, the God who forgets sins, does not forget anyone. Gather all near in unforgotten knowness, so for knowing, as we are fully known.

Ps33-34 v1 Befitting. It is right to give him thanks and praise. Right for him, right for us. This is our right (and our joy), it is what we deserve (apart from death wages) 34v1 and 1Th5v17 Continually. That irony might not get a word in edgeways. v3 Together. As FirstAidKit, as the Laurels, as those Life In A Day ladies hammering out the grain, let us live with polyphonic glee inviting all to join our chord, the welcome enclosure of notes between, and so expertly executed, and so deliberately together. 34v5 Radiance. Lit eyes. Where I have seen this in others, I have longed to know Christ their way. Turn us out, turn us on, lights to worlds, cities on hills. God, ablaze might we be, eyes affixed on you and hearts affirmed. Alight us, aflame us. Come Jesus, rescuer, rescue me.

Ps35-36 God fights for us. Protect us today, oh Lord, protect us together and apart, protect us from the evil that comes against us, & protect us from ourselves. Confessing that I am wicked, that I am 36v4 one who makes evil plans whilst lying in bed, I am prompted to pray in the morning for the day ahead, and in the evening for the night. Forgive me, & protect me from myself, for I am my own worst enemy. 35v2 God's armour, let us this morning consciously put on our Eph6v10-18 armour, to battle evil, to risk romance adventure journey, fight for all that is holy, & so be all we were made to be, knowing that truth drives our falsehood, righteousness destroys my own wickedness, readiness is quicker that complacency, faith proves itself strong, our salvation is the safety we live from, steep in God's words. That you God for your 36v5-12 constant goodness love righteousness justice care.

Ps37-38 Fret not. Lk2v10etc Fret not. Ph4v6 Fret not. Stealing a host of Piper's pictures of the unfretted Christian life, I would adjure us thus: be coronary Christians, (vs twitchy adrenal), and put ballast in your boat, place your feet on a concrete platform just beneath the waves, be sages, deep rooted oaks. Be chill. And know. .. I have this morning attempted a bridge between this fretting and last night's fleeing discussion. Bear with me. What flees? The healthy flee a plagued town, a dog flees the kicking of a cruel master, the lazy flee hard work, the naked flee sight, the anxious flee fright, escapists flee generally, and, I think, most usefully in this discussion, the hungry flee famine. I should like to establish this as an understanding of the Devil's flight. It is a flight from pain to pleasure along a path of least resistance. This is why we resist. We have something the Devil needs and we can withhold it. The devil, can we construct the devil as incomplete, an unstable isotope, a starving parasite? We have in Ps37 v19 and v25 the image of God's nutritious supply, and within this dynamic of sustenance, I will hop skip and a jump via Mt4v1-4 to our Jm 4v7b. Fretting not is trusting God is feeding on him is resisting the Devil is starving him is putting him to flight. Another way: either we can feed on God Jn6v35/53 and so feed his sheep Jn21v15/17 OR we can feed on our sick 2Pt2v22 and so be devoured by the Devil 1Pt5v8 (and each other Gal5v15). Resist the Devil, feed on God. And what is feeding on God? Doing his work Jn4v31. And what is his work? Mt16v24. Thus Christ's pièce de [peaceful] résistance is the cross. Let us. Fret not. With apologies for mixed metaphors.

Ps39-40 The conflictual emotions expressed throughout the Psalms (39v12 'come near me..leave alone.) Is not be celebrated so much as understood it. We are to know when to be silent, and 39v2 when not to. On the value of questions, complaints and honest expressions of emotion communicated rather than repressed and left to grow at the back of the mind, becoming bigger than they are. Rightly we are to critique an understanding of authenticity that is simply 'doing what I want' but this is not what this is, this is an articulation of feelings explicitly in the presence of God, to make sense of them, to seek God in them, with them, through them, & depsite them, intentionally. Forgive me thoughts repressed, God, teach me helpful communicative articulation of difficult and painful emotions before you. Let us be Jacobs wrestling and let us not romanticise this wrestling. Brought to mind Lauren Winner's description of her conversion as admitting that she'd been fighting with Jesus in the way that one fights with someone you love. Honest wrestling makes a way for 40v1-2 salvation, safety, singing. Yes yes let us sing together, let us sing together. These circling pleas and praises, a spiralling deeper into God. v6 God today, give us ears to hear you, whatever is specific to hearing your speaking spokenness, let us be attuned and attentive. I mean it, here I am, here we are.

Ps41 v1 Faith works and salvation by social action. There is no need to problematise this so. I need to be reminded that it is by positioning myself to serve the poor amongst the poor for the poor, there will I find blessing, and from the open handed, hands-out-of-pockets, heart abandoned position am I to receive blessing, unknown in another place or position. At some level serving is its own rewards, the joy of cooking, at some level serving creates a rewarding return, the investment in community, and at some level there needs to be a reward that comes as you give yourself to death, the reward that God will meet you there and you will never outgive him.v7 Whispering and imagining the worst. Let us rather, speak plainly and imagine the best best.

Wednesday 16 November 2011

200words: 33 bond street

When in Rome, the insecure become Greeks to the Greeks, second-handers, emperors with no clothes but new clothes; as such, the clotheshorses and the celebrity art buyers of Bond Street unveil here a nostalgic tragic Trojan conceit: social injustice has always been a timeless way of building. The haves and the have-nots have nothing in common, except the view over the brinks of the chasm in the recession wrought landscape which now divides them, and on this side, the Mayfairer side, the revivalists are resuscitating old oligarchic structures, while the 99% grin in their vendetta masks and bear market it. In the post-post-modern world we revisit the past without irony.

Too much, too strong? Definitely too oblique.

With regrets I couldn't get inside, I enjoyed this handsome addition to Bond Street, the confidence of its stone composure, the pictures in the picture window, the unstriving sense of proportion, the playfully handmade handcrafted claim that things can yet be done well by humans in a technopolised world. The lighting design is mysterious, showy and counterproductive. Why highlight, with grazing-incidence uplights, the warp and joints in the stone columns and not light the frieze? Many whys. And whos and hows?

http://www.richard-green.com
http://www.adamarchitecture.com/

Saturday 5 November 2011

200words: postmodernism at the v&a

“And when he heard this, he was very sorrowful: for he was very rich.” Luke 18v23

Postmodernism is at once eminently exhibitable, being image-based and knowingly conceptual, yet at the same time it resists any comfortable boxes necessary for a coherent exhibition. A narrative imposition is needed, and fortunately our subjects, the PoMo set, with their cinematic bent, lend themselves to being fashioned as protagonists within an heroic narrative. So, we journey with these young provocateurs emerging from self-made ruins, through pseudo-ruins, unto the wealth of Disney's megastructures built with a Sebaldian eye to their future existence as ruins, (and finally we visit Ai Wei Wei's ruins rebranded). Sorrowful stuff. We are a curious breed of mischief makers, writing our histories before we have finished, picking over the corpse while it is not even fully dead; the curator's unhappy task of post-justifying the adolescent fumblings of post-modernism poses the complicating difficulty that post-modernism is still current as a philosophy and question. Protection is available by constraining it to an era, consigning it to a style and by ascribing it to periodised social-economic factors. Symptomatic of this, I am now writing about lecturing about exhibiting about drawing about architecture, illustrative perhaps of the over-thought intellectuality of post-modernism.

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/exhibitions/postmodernism/

img: flickr

texting job

Testing Texts. If you'd like to help us out of a morning. 07729056452

Jb1-2
Job, more than the right response to every prosperity theology, but to every way in which we think we can make God's agenda fit our own in virtue of doing it right. Noticing for the first time 1v5 Job the parent, as I think a little on a theology of parenting. We should offer sacrifices for our children we are to play a part in raising, because they are given to us to be responsible for. Parenting together so that no-one parents alone, an unconditional love for children involves a radical Levinisian asymmetry of responsibility, let us learn better the cost of this, the sacrifice to be brought. So anyway, God and Satan and that.. why do we love God? For the sake of fear or pride or intellectual apathy? For the sake of an easy label? For a superstitious reward? If community & marriage & children & friendships were taken from you. If your happy home & your good health fell apart. If all hope of good work were denied you. If your mission proved to be a dead end, if all your gifts went to waste. Would we still love God? Would we? Let us try to glimpse out of the corner of one eye what it means to say that we have no rights and that grace is sufficient. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord.


Jb3-4 ESVSB: Job is not suicidal. And neither am I, only let all of reality be different.. We do laments an injustice if we psychologise them, or as The Matrix's Cypher program an ignorance for them. The case Melancholia makes for the sanity of those who recognise the futility of things almost has mileage, and yet, and yet.. The image of being hedged in here 3v23 should be recognised as God's good greenery 1v10, and as we walk this path it is less The Shining's maze as it is a labyrinth prayerfully walked towards God and step by step scripturally illuminated by God. .. As a correction to our use of irony, which we employ to talk around hard and painful things, let us learn to lament, and so let our oh no be oh no. First rue what might have been in order to hope that it might yet be. Let us be lament-able, so to heal, so then to weep well with those who weep.

Jb5-6 Distilling a three point sermon from an anguished stream of consciousness is possible only up to a point, much of this text is to be entered as a poem, I think, let us dance a little. There is a conversation here, a dialogue, an exchange of worldviews: unabstracted because it is Job's own reality in question, his frame of reference, the meaning of his meaning. Are all dialogues about what God is like, really? This is a conversation about justice, about salvation, about whether God is a God who answers. When circumstances challenge our world view, which they will, what gets transformed and what remains? This is the way of a difficult I-Thou wisdom. Some conversations will not be life-giving, let us not believe we've found streams of living water where we haven't. But let us continue to ask, examine, speak, listen, in the hope of seeing God's face. What did we learn?

Jb7-8 Is it problematic that Job is 'blameless' 1v1? So for us who sinfully sin, where all sin is infinitely deserving of judgement separating us from an infinitely pure God, then no suffering is undeserved. In which case, the rebuke of these so cold so-called-comforters is right, we are in the v4 'hands of our transgressions'. But. But what if we are blameless? Eph1v4, Rm8v1.. Then Job's words can be ours? On this basis we can confidently go forward against systems of suffering which stake a claim to our lives (or claim a stake in our lives. Tangents..) When accused by voices within, when despondent, when called to account, we can give an account of the way Christ bought our blamelessness. In this he strengthens us Rm16v25. Let us Live today in all that we already are. Blameless and beloved. Blameless and beloved. Blameless and beloved. Overcome with gratitude, we will overcome.

Jb9-10 God the other, God the wholly other, God the holy other. Ranting and reality, with perspectivism's permission: I know my heart and will speak my mind before this God, knowing that my heart is not the measure of all things, God's otherness not reducible to my small epistemology. So 9v35 returns to v3 in a virtuous circle. & in this form let us return to remember our belovedness, formed in the womb with care and intent 10v8-12 (Is45v9-10) and our blamelessness transformed by Jesus 9v31 becoming Rev19v8. Blamelessness & belovedness speaks the end of 10v22's despair, there is no no-way-out, no inescapable darkness, rather: Jn1v9 inescapable light.

Jb11-12 Why is Job in the bible and as long as this? Is it a measure of our resistance to God's sovereignty? Is it a measure of our presumption on God's sovereignty? Either way it will not let us rest. We see in Job's comforters unmercy justice taken to its logical conclusion. This is a position it is possible to hold by omission, that is, in not feeding the hungry we express a Zopharian conviction that they deserve to go hungry; in not preaching the gospel we express that they deserve to go on in ignorance.. Rom1v14 Unto the gift of grace we are obliged. If we only know how undeserved our life is it would render inaction impermissible. Let us fight our own proclivity to passivity which would have us laze in a because-i'm-worth-it cheap grace. Undeservedly blameless, undeservedly beloved. For the joy. x

Jb13-14 The lines between fruitful dialogue and unhelpful argument can be easily blurred aye, this is something I need wisdom for. 14v1 We are all born weak and helpless – so I have been reading this week, with an academic analyst's spin..all these questions, incredulously probed mysteries of birth and death, these belong to us all, we are surrounded by people asking these. And we believe with Job 14v15-17 that we have found the place to ask these questions, a God who transforms them. Forgiveness changes everything.

Jb15-16 Do you fight 'injustice'? Do you protest your 'plight'? Do you defend your conduct and their consequences based on your understanding? Do you claim to understand? Do you know anything, let alone enough to claim that the balance is misweighted? Do you presume to pray? What are you praying against, as if you had not received, by breathing, more than you could possibly repay? You do not know the half of your shame, you do not know your debt. How much of my talk is v3 unprofitable, and my fat is v27 the defence of a proud God-disregarder, and my pre-ruins are v28 the habitations of the postmodern wicked. On shame and the over emphasis of total depravity: it is easy to caricature Job's comforters, their language of shaming is powerplay, however, without an unpayable debt there is no Christ-shaped-hole. We should heed the tutting of the v10 grey-haired, but then out-Live them. Uncondemned Blameless Beloved. You are.

Jb17-18 Thinking about 17v6 the use of proverbs, soundbites and tidy theological formulations as weapons. These ostracise those whose experience falls outside their prescription. God is the God of the real so doctrine without experience is empty, (experience without doctrine is blind). This is why we listen. Oh and 18v4? God might just move mountains for us, actually. Grace comes extravagantly.

Jb19-20 v3 The shame of shamers is their presuming the right to judge, this presumption invariably leads to false accusation. ESVSB links this with Dt19v19 which decrees false accusers should themselves serve the sentence which they pronounce on the other, so obv Mt7v1. If our lives are false gospels, false witnesses and presumption manifested in unsympathy, apathy and social disengagement, then we will be visited on by unhappy judgement? v23 Publish when you are damned, when you are at your lowest point, when faith is needed most. The faithful write their biographies before they are triumphantly concluded because they know already that their story ends well, because they know these things will be resolved, because they Know their redeemer lives. Our redeemer lives. 20V27-8 In this way, by living these stories, by writing them, we integrate seen and unseen realities, making true on earth that which is true in heaven.

Jb21-22 Sort of that sadness here, of different people all seeking God and yet concluding differently. .. There is so much truth in Bildad's accusation. .. 22v25-7. So I like the honesty & complexity of this book. Knowing as we do, how this story end, the thing to do when in disagreement with holy people is to keep seeking, keep praying, keep talking, keep listening, as we do things, even to the end of time. 21v21 when our lives are over do we really care whether are children are happy? Phrased as cynical rhetoric we might transform it into one benchmark for our attitude towards stewardship & all we leave to the next generation, how we parent, how we cultivate life and Life.

Jb23-24 v8 God on mute. Is he ever? Or has our Jesus film just been poorly dubbed? Or are we simply hard of hearing? .. 24v3 “They” [who put angels in the electric chair..] - Who are 'they'? Why do they persist in history? 24v18-20 “You say..” - Who is 'you'? This is the 'you' of the them-and-us of all church pain. The Jobic dimension of church pain is: graceless comforters confronting the problem of evil in the face of suffering. 24V13-8 Those who dwell in darkness have likely been on a night-shift. The question of what is done at night and the morality (/sustainability) of a 24hr society is a current one for one here roused at 3am to arbitrate just such a dispute. We are silly men. .. Though the darkness closes in, Lord, still I will sing: v10 God knows. Our blamerless belover, he knows. Our redeemer, he knows you, he sees your best, you are the apple of his eye.

Jb25-26 Inescapable light 25v3 there is no place where God's light does not shine. As James told us last night, Jm1v17 God is the creator of lights, God does not cause darkness. And Jn3v18-21 the light has come into the world but people love the darkness..we fear light because we fear our evil deeds will show up. We fear shame. Shame is exposure, vulnerability, pain. Shame is an experience of our v6 worthlessness. But back to John we are blameless and beloved, because, here, of Jesus. Jesus is shame's healing, before Jesus we can be exposured, vulnerable and loved into freedom. It is the tone of Bildad's words that are not truthful, rather than their content .. They have a 'you can run but you can't hide' God as a Hollywood villain. But rather: you can't hide, as shame would have you do, you can't hide, but the light inescapable is all love. Seen & loved. Seen & loved. Seen & loved.

Jb27-28 The wicked wicked are to get their comeupance? This Bildadic 27 is perhaps hyperbolic-ironic, perhaps intended to emphasise the wickedness of self-righteousness, perhaps to be framed in terms of v8 judgement after death? .. Now, 28, slowly sumptuously. Wisdom is. The whole bodily experience of mining bears some meditation. The intrepid, in far flung places, beneath the surface, with strength for faith to risk for a reward. Dig deeper gold diggers, treasurehunters, London our rockface, Oval our seam of: localist wisdom, natural knowledge, experience, persons saving persons saved. // The bible our rockface, and early mornings are dark places we go to find rich things: doctrine to see by, doctrine to sow with, we mine the iron here with which we form a plough to turn the soil above? Wisdom out there, wisdom in here. And what is wisdom The particulate and the precious. Let us make our home an NHM rock room.

Jb29-30 Injustice will befall us, at some scale at some time. Why do we think that a good week will be followed by a bad week? Not because God is like karma, and not because God is not to be trusted. Rather, God is to be trusted, without condition, when bad follows good follows bad, which it will, in some way. Let us not dwell in the past as 29 but turn to God in the present, 30. If only sometimes to weep. God is here.

Jb31-32 To covenant with my eyes: the theology of thought-crime and self-covenance in one. Guard the ports of your mind, rigorously, accountably. There are sins we admit, commit and omit: sins that we let in, let out and let go: be sure to let the right ships in. .. If. If I have not filled every minute with 60 seconds of distance run, I repent. .. Elihu: don't self-justify, for it is God who justifies. You cannot but protest too much. Oh holy fools and Elihus, come, and call us to account, call us out of our self-deception. .. v22 “I do not know how to flatter..” One day, God-willing, I will forget how.

Jb33-34 Found in here, imperfectly, adoration 33v26, v30, confession v27, thankfulness v28, and supplication (ish) 33v1, 34v31. So prayerfully and more prayerfully to 33v14 listen, v15 dream dreams, vision visions and v17 be so radically transformed. Prayerfully today.

Jb35-36 ESVSB: “Again, he seems more arrogant than he realises, as young men sometimes do.” Elihu's wisdom has limits, and what truths he does manage unsympathetically to express are invalidated by Job's blamelessness. But. Helpfully these: 36v5 God's sovereignty, which is ultimate power of infinite knowledge of power: God knows, he know the backstage of the backstage, he knows the context's context, he knows and alone justifies. So rest. 36v15. The disciplinary function of suffering: true even for we saved. I want to insert a discomfort vs 'suffering' clause in this discussion. In love God opens our ears, uncomfortably? 35v12 The proud oppressee and the problem of feminism: isms predicated on the unjustice of victimhood go awry by pride? This can only be uttered internally, because one can only call oneself to radical meekness. We compound our sin by the pride of claims to deserve a wage other than death. .. And yet and yet. In Christ we have that wage paid. This whole Job problem of blamelessness should be our daily amazement. No suffering the suffering of meaningless blind suffering, only refining, only hoping, only reforming. Everything we ache now is God drawing us into his likeness. There is nothing to run from. On this basis, as we have strength, let us look to bear another's pain. Love my love to love this Tuesday, be eyes wide open.

Jb37-38 37v7 Bring me to a stop. v14 to pause. Prayerfulness is a stopping constantly, within a doing and a going about. My prayerfulness is a fumbling because I have not let this now-platitude about pausing soak deeply into my being, for I am still ugly noisy clatter chatter. v21-22 sky sky sky and the glory of the God who is real. For 38v12 it is God who commands the day to dawn, the sky to splendour light and colour. And here is the God who is real, who speaks, before whome there is shivering smiling silence at this mystery. God the imaginer, creator, sustainer, lover and sharer of all that is good and true and beautiful. God who walks in beauty. I submit surrender soak. God of mysteries we love you.

Jb39-40 The problem of extinction, domestication and the David Attenbrisation of our encounter with a wild God from the comfort of our settee. Let us strive against over-familiarity with nature by seeking unmediated encounter. .. The colours of the winds and the limits of pantheism's natural wisdom. There are somethings to be learnt from the bird who do not sow (and the lilies who do not sew) chiefly in the area of unanxiety. We as behemoths before turbulent waters, but not because we are strong, but because he is. .. Shall a faultfinder contend with God? Am I, do I? What an occupation it is critical we lay down. Critical. Not a tame lion, aye, can we build our epistemologies on that. For the fun, for the joy, for the wonder.

Jb41-42 Would I write more poems, on present mysteries, to the glory of God. Divine conclusions... This book offers little from a detatched third personal perspective, it only works as an engaged first person meditation in discovery of a second personal God. Job only works if God is real and if God speaks. But see hear.. 42v5 in the past I only know what others had told me about God,not God is closer than breathing, not I have seen for myself. A God who shows himself amidst evil & suffering's reality with his own sufficiency and the capacity to bring new life. This hope changes everything: restoration.

200words: occupylondon

i'm preoccupied.

five, already awake, wait, muffled alarm, tiptoe round mitch, kettle, tea, nehemiah's eleventh, one in ten to live in the city, one in ten tents occupied, trust we the telegraph?
i'm preoccupied.

five-thirty, texting texts, emails, gatti, geri, small world, this city, a global age, a globalised good?
i'm preoccupied.

six, pre-packed paniers, dark, outside, wet, switch, light, keys, lights, cleats, clicked, clapham road, waterloo bridge, streaks of taxi headlights, glistening tarmac, and there. where london's dark streets shineth, was it a night like this? did the Word tent so among us? john1:14
i'm preoccupied.

six-thirty, canvas clusters bask in an eerie glow, reminds me of geri's, all tulips budding, in plastic tents, under floodlighting, beyond utrecht, pregnant with protest's possibility, this their winter, when their spring?
i'm preoccupied.

pedal, pedal, trafalgar square, pedal, bond street, pedal, bond street again, how long have i lived in london? lost in shopping, is this a parable for the problem? regent street, and i've gone too far, haven't we all?
i'm preoccupied.

seven-ten, late, the one i love, pain quotidien, is this 'quotidien'? is this the problem?
i'm preoccupied.

'what did you see?', had i but eyes..
i'm preoccupied.

(27.10.11)

http://occupylondon.org.uk/