found flowers: 052

beerly beloved: floral interstella

found flowers: 051

winter wonder found

found flowers: 050

cabbage greats punning over the briny

found flowers: 049

still life, and have it to the full

found flowers: 048

we free things of orient

found flowers: 047

ilex for nothing

texting mark five

This little piggy got caught in spatio-spiritual conflict.. Tricky texts and good news, gleanings morning by morning on 07729056452

Mk5v1-2 "the other side of the sea" preachers advocating missionary endeavour sensitively are apt to over-compensate, "It's not about crossing the sea, it's about seeing the cross.." A ludicrous counter-dichotomy. Jesus crossed the sea, Paul crossed the sea. EasyJet has made it easier than ever to go for the most literal interpretation of this, so why not start there? Geography serves as perhaps the superlative analogy for the spiritual and the very spatial experience of entering the territory of enemy-occupation, crossing the otherwise impermeable threshold of water which boundaries an other domain in which other rules apply. Like the Americans en-moating their new Battersea fort, there is power in such spatiality. In the meantime, consider the other less tangible spatialities of Shari'ah, or the seemingly less spiritual fob entry divisions of privilege in this city. How am I going to get to the other side of that sea? What 'furious squalls' have kept me from ever setting sail?

Mk5v3-4 The Gadarene Demoniac finds exquisite contemporary rendering in The Dark Knight Rises' Bane. Sociopathic superhumanity, the terror of a total evil which is limitlessly strong. And by the strength of these demons came a certain freedom: a being-untetherable. There are surrogate strengths that technology affords which likewise untether us, and marketing's maxim of Freedom sells landrovers, wireless devices, credit cards.. Now, I take for granted that the Christian is free more truly Gal5v1. What, however do we do with a theology of 'strength'? How strong are you? What is your strength for? What is your body for? It is tempting to blur a God-is-our-strength sense of dependence with a cyborg disembodiment which despises incarnation. I would argue that it is a semiotic absurdity to be singing Hillsong's Stronger while working actively to undermine the excellence of imaging physical strength, hoping to borrow signifiers from elsewhere. Meekness is strength restrained, distinguished from weakness. Jesus carried his cross ~ 135kg. God breaks chains Ac12v7, Ac16v26, Ju16v12, and so should we Is58v6 - wary of which strengths we cultivate for such freedomings.

Mk5v5-6 "Night and day" - how do you distinguish these and mark time? If God's truth is found in thesis-antithesis, truth is distorted in the blurry merge of the synthesis of days without end pursuing the abstract ideal of a 24/7 culture. The city that never sleeps is in many ways a tormented city, unboundaried, unrhythmed, out-of-sync, insomniac, frenetic. However, we do not run away from the city, we do not despise the lonelified denizens spun out with selfharm symptoms. Christianity is an emergency service, and Ps121v3-4 our God stays up for us, let us do likewise 1Th5v6. "saw Jesus from afar" what distance is your visibility? To reach a 24/7 culture, you may need to be a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night Ex13v21. Apply.

Mk5v7-8 "Do not torment me" there is some ambiguity as to who is voicing this - the demons or the demonised? If we take for granted the sort of no-holds-barred, Geneva-convention-less, enhanced interrogation that demons deserve, and so fear, perhaps we could consider the alternative voicing - the possible ambivalence the demonised might feel, faced with Jesus. I know that schizophrenic feeling towards idols myself ~ forgetting what is ahead, I strain for what was behind (contra Ph3v13). Often I am afraid that following Jesus will be a torment, the all-I-once-held-dear stripped away, the previous presumptions of aptitude, worth and self-righteousness. It is an alarming thing to be as free as Jesus offers you to be.

Mk5v9-10 "What is your name?" - Why do you ask? Jesus would have known this already, and even then, what does it matter - the rose smells as sweet, no? Perhaps Jesus is asking a neutral question to cut through the demon's bluster, almost by way of distraction ~ yes, but it doesn't really get to the nub of naming. Perhaps Jesus is narrating to make teachably explicit this lesson in defense against the dark arts ~ yes, but if so, what lesson is Jesus teaching? Names are very important in all contexts. Words create worlds Gn1v3, names order realities Gn2v19, names (and new names) are supernatural identities: Gn17v5 Gn32v28 Jn1v42. Fundamentally, names are Personal, they conjure the Person in the Person's irreducibility. Spiritual warfare is personal. Naming, therefore, is a crucial corrective to impersonal thinking about evil. When you are seeking to make Kingdom inroads into Islam, or Capitalism, consider asking for a name. Evil is active, personal, specific, stealthy and intelligent. See their reply: "Legion" = 'many' ~ or so I have thought, but it is more interesting. 'Legion' denotes a multitude *organised in a unity* and, what is more the term had synechdoche application to the principal leader, (ie. as England might play France at Tennis, a Legion might go to speak with a Rabbi alone) there is power, authority, delegation, subordination and subjugation bound into the phrase itself ~ how does this change the way you consider evil's organisation? There is something of a Riddler's jousting in the response "We are Legion", it obscures their precise number location and conjures a supra-personal entity - a terrifying dark mass of indefinite extension which we have also allowed into our notions of Islam or Capitalism.

Mk5v10 "not to send them out of the country" Again the under-explored notion of spiritual territoriality, genius loci, a national character? There is evidently an area the demons would like to be allowed to remain, contrasted with some other place. What spatio-spiritual inheritance have we in England, what sort of place is South London. Attack the Block considers the expectation that an attack would necessarily be universal. "This ain't London-wide. This is localised."

Mk5v11-12 Kamakaze demons, demonised pigs, a swinocidal saviour, what do you want to do with these? Jesus appears either to affirm food law or to senselessly kill a herd of his creatures. Riddle me this. Perhaps we can allow that there is a staggered timeline of liberalisation, Jesus has permitted unwashed hands Mk7v2, but not yet pork? Not sure this satisfies. Perhaps cleanliness law remains conceptually intact, honoured as a culturally relative language of obedience, and so here swine represents a sin against their conscience, even if not sin in an absolute sense, ie. 1Co8v9-10. Uncleanliness as a category is renounced as far as it is a constraint to missiology Ac10v25, and we can take for granted that it is not what goes into a man defiles him Mt15v11, but none of this makes food amoral. There is a mode of disobedient farming which both Jesus and the demons recognise, the swine here are an unhygienic open wound of conscience which the demons would make their gangrenous home. What might Legion beg to be cast into today? ~ battery farmed hens, hormone fed cattle, dyed pink salmon, the many and various dark infrastructures of our global food economy.

Mk5v13-14 The conspicuous destruction of these pigs functions like charred lungs on a cigarette packet. We carry so much invisible death around inside us, barely aware ourselves of the full death of it. So much of my minor substance addictions, petty jealousies, unresolved bitternesses, my intellectually prideful identity, lustfully damaged visual imagination, privileged value system of poisonous entitlement.. - these only occasionally surface with proto-demonic force in power-over displays of technologically enabled strength or punishing self-destructive manifestations. Perhaps God my give me the health-warning grace to cast my caffeine addiction into a spider and watch the web it spins then. Jesus' porcine illustration fails like the justification for all animal testing fails to be absolute, but, THE PIGS DIED, you probably want to put down the shampoo, and reckon on an enemy who seeks your ruin. And quickly, before you are the carcrash the madding crowd swarm to see.

Mk5v15-16 "Clothed". The association of demonisation with disrobement is interesting to apply. Clothes are not merely nudity-mitigating, nor indeed is nudity a straight-forward ethical issue for Christians. Noah gets drunk and gets naked Gn9v21; Nebuchadnezzar goes mad and grows feathers Dn4v33; while Vashti refuses to dance in only her crown Es1v11; yet David gets spiritual and gets naked 2Sm6v14; Peter goes fishing and gets naked Jn21v7; Jesus calls us to be non-violent and get naked Mt5v40; the young man in Mk14v52 is presumed to have been recently baptised naked; linen cloths in the tomb suggest Jesus was raised naked Jn20v5.. So we are now to dress ourselves somewhere between these Galileans Gone Wild and the Victorians who put skirts on piano legs. There is an MTV-derived madness with demonic overtones that leads to culturally normalised underdressing, which would relate to materialistic and disintegrated notions of the body-as-mere-animal. Being clothed starts at non-nudity, but is more importantly containment, composure and communication, it completes and frames the person, it will be your final state Is61v10 Rv7v13. What excellence of clothing bespeaks a post-exorcism comportment of your fullest Humanity? Wear that.

Mk5v17-18 Lots of geography-based begging to Jesus. v10 the demoniac begs, v12 the demons beg, v17 the people beg, v18 the ex-demoniac begs. It seems there is universal acknowledgement that power for radical contextual change, for better or worse, can be found in this man Jesus. Jesus responds to begging: the demoniac is set free from a mountain exile, demons are not sent out of the geographic area, and Jesus concedes to retreat from the region. BUT, he does not allow the demoniac to travel out with him. Spatial relations and conversion give one again to think of Islam and contextualisation. If C6 unlimited syncretism, and C1 is the imposition of totally alien church praxis, the demoniac's request here is for C0, an airlifting of the convert out of that geography altogether. But no, whatever the danger, Jesus will not allow it. Speculate why and apply. The strategic power of specific testimony relevant to a context of acute resistance represented a sufficient opportunity to justify the risk of likely non-acceptance. Cultures are boundaried, even hermetic, self-protectively-thung and exclusive, self-contained economies, languages, traditions. An 'Insider Movement' is a spatial concept (with perhaps occidental overtones), it conjures an impassable architecture of the Other, and suggests organised approaches to thresholds, structures and Trojan modes of import. Jesus' strategy is fundamentally personal, it has no qualms with an airdropped approach of brief encounter, the strategy puts exclusive responsibility on the converted individual, is irreducibly Charismatic, and puts massive faith in the power of story alone.

Mk5v19-20 How is your "much"? Muchly? or Much of a much? Much is a relative term at the best of times, being in the eye of the beholder. And the much in play here is a reciprocal exchange of muches, as Lk7v47, the one forgiven much, loves much. How much have you been forgiven? In this way, muching is contingent on transmission, appreciation, consciously ascribing much to the much, the bottleneck is at your end, not God's. As von Trier's Dogville considers, grace-reception is our great struggle, we are a proud gift-averse people, resisting the giftyness of gifts (and then thanklessly absorbing them.) The demoniac, it seems, has no such struggle. I am seeking today to be a much and more-than person, like a little light bulb plugged into the hydroelectric dam of God's grace,the 101% being, the lake of grace over-flowing, he is more-than, the potential difference is infinite, deserving of nothing I have been given everything, open the sluice gates wide Mt81v10 and the people will "marvel" ... Mt19v11-12 in another context emphasises reception as the barrier to the impossible grace required for marriage and for singleness. Ref also the Mt11v9-10 prompted survey of more-thans goo.gl/pDbAkn

Mk5v21-22 Scene setting verses are skimmable, unless you are reading two verses a day. Mark takes time to make emphatic the nature of the unrelenting crowd. Jesus sailed away for 24 hours, calmed a storm and that.. then sailing back, the shoreline emerges back into view and the fader brings in the still pounding bass-line of a hyper-dense throng, the zombie mob of concentrated human need pressed up against the glass. Jesus was "nigh unto the sea" in a don't-push-me-'cause-I'm-close-to-the-edge sort of teetering, twitching switches on the pressure cooker of first century Palestine, a dot before a heaving ocean of desperation, cinematic extras extend indefinitely like a Nuremberg Rally or a Salt March. Against this backdrop, a figure emerges, characterising the anyone, the everyone, the you and me. Face planted into the crowd-trodden earth, dust to sweated brow. Daughters were ten-a-penny in the old days, primitive times? No and never. And the ache of powerlessness fails to form full sentences in the Greek. Please God, daughter at point of death, help.

Mk5v23-24 "lay your hands on her" - to be contrasted with Mt8v8's 'only say the word..' - proximity, touch and the body are more Jewish sensitivities than Roman perhaps, but both are expressions of faith. Driscoll speaks of an air war and a ground war - there is a balance of approaches, mediated and direct, virtual and physical, mechanically reproduced and irreducibly there. Chapman makes touch one of five love languages - different folks, different strokes ~ however you are gifted to give and receive, Jesus meets you there. In this Advent time we are put in mind that Jesus came and comes as close as breathing, as near as hands and feet. Before baby Jesus had words he had a body. He set about touching, go and do likewise - so many of your friends are at the point of death, so many of them exist in the pathological touchlessness of web2.0, so many of them would be transformed if you would lay hands on them.

Mk5v25-26 I imagine this lady in the cowed tragic wasted image of Hannah Danby towards the end Mr Turner. Mark layers a vivid portrait of a chronic degenerative condition with attention to cost ("all she had") and trajectory ("worse not better") and, crucially, with allusion to the social-spiritual price of privatised medical care: the cruelly crushing condition of utter abasement at the hands of "many" discompassionate profiteer physicians. Prudent business models target those chronic conditions with social repercussions (see the trivial example of the anti-aging products industry yet valued at staggering $261.9bn last year ref: goo.gl/OnPV62 ). The cure sought here is as much a social-emotional need for dis-isolation as for healing of the physical ailment. And the isolation is layered also: the health condition was an uncleanness, and the uncleanness was putatively punitive ~ divine judgement on some hidden sin. The Daily Mail keeps us very fluent in this ugly mode of vilification, 'benefits scroungers' are demonised by the suggestion that they are culpable for their dependent condition. Imagine. In desperation I would be driven to a similar superstitious faith in magic, touching the hem is not faith in the fullness of the person of Jesus. But. Jesus honours it. This woman, twelve years a slave to an invisible impersonal master, rendering her an outcast exile, incurably unclean. Jesus honours her fledgling faith. And just as Jesus ruins pork farming (Mk5v13) divination dealings (Ac16v16) and religiouse indulgence marketing (Mt21v12) etc he wars against privatised medical care.

Mk5v27-28 "Reports about Jesus." Have you heard reports? Have you published reports? Christianity as reportage is in view here, and you are the religious affairs correspondent, you are the foreign correspondent, the frontline embedded journalist, you are at the newsdesk, you're in the satellite broadcast van, copywriting to a deadline, choosing words with an urgency.. Consider the paparazzi's appetite for a scoop and the infrastructure of newsagencies and the technology of camera lenses and the risk of motorbike chases, all propelled by the fuel of a gossip column's fleeting headline, a momentary newsflash in the pan. Consider the striving twitterers seeking to retweet themselves into an aggregator's trending recognition. How much more is Christianity the sort of reportage the would cause flashmobs, if we would only publish. Faith comes by hearing if the signal can be distinguished from the noise of the rumour mill.

Mk5v29-30 Who dat, who dat? That do that, do that? I-g-g-y knows that the 'Who?' calls out an ascription of value, naming has a power to locate and distinguish, honour and promote. Jesus asks a question after the event, a question to which he already knows the answer. So, why the who? Questions are central in Jesus arsenal of love, they summon a response and draw to the surface a questionee's personhood that otherwise would lie passive. Without question-prompted dialogical encounter, we are inclined to take the gift and run, see the sunset, eat the meal, and construe an impersonal cosmology of things in which we are not obliged, indebted or dependent. Jesus cares for your healing, but it is a means to an end which is you. "Who are you?" Jesus asks. I don't know how I would answer that. "Who are you?" God help me to learn to take such an essential interest in Others.

Mk5v31-32 "..and He looked around", Jesus came to seek and save the least, the last, and the lost. Contemporary lost-ness is preeminently lost-in-a-crowd-ness. This description of Jesus 'perieblepeto' is precious (Gk - to look closely with high personal involvement (a Markan favourite)) The search-in-a-crowd is more pertinent, more resonant, just now than perhaps the lost coin or the lost sheep, today's lost are obscured in the mass, absorbed in the city. Personalism makes such a plea to recognise this lostness: "The lowest level on which a human universe can subsist, .. is .. to be simply aggregated with the others, ceasing to be a lucid and responsible subject. This is the world of consciousness half asleep, ... of the crowd, the anonymous mass, of the irresponsible apparatus of life." Into this Jesus makes the difficult search for a needle in a stack of needles, needles melting and melding like Dali's pocket watches. And crucially it takes time at a moment of narrative emergency, time, as Mrs Gardiner recounts of Darcy's search for Lydia "He had been some days in town, before he was able to discover them; but he had something to direct his search.." Jesus' search is directed. Tenuous but the "One who" and the "done it" are in the Greek's feminine - he knows the hairs on your head, he seeks you out in the crowd.

Mk5v33-34 "Fear-and-trembling" recurs as a mode/symptom/quality of faith. Ps55v5 'fear-and-trembling came upon me..' Ph2v12 'work out your salvation with fear-and-trembling..' The suffering lady had reached Kierkegaard's point of infinite resignation in her journey towards faith. As we, when the pain is too great, the paradox too paradoxical and overthought, then fear-and-trembling emerges as the brink of faith. She leaps. She leaps and reaches but a magic touch. The leaper who truly vaults the chasm is Jesus: bridging to her, laying a hold of her, seeking her out, he does not wish any to settle for superstition. Fear-and-tremble thus and utterly, every defense stripped in that moment, all categories of uncleanliness bared publicly risking all people's good opinion, everything you have ever sinned, every infirmity you have ever carried, every prejudice, every timidity, every chance you could be wrong. Only through true trembling is there proper peace.

Mk5v35-36 "is dead" (aorist indicative) Faith is the difference between Lk24v21 'we had hoped' and Dn3v18 'but if not..we will'. An infographic of your use of tenses would display a marked shift your use of tenses as you phrase your reality more and more by faith. If death is not a finished occurrence but an impermanent state, our grammar changes, no longer had-hoped, but hoping which does not disappoint Rm5v5. .. "do not bother the teacher" Faith understands Jesus is bovvered and can be bothered and encourages his followers to be God-botherers, persistently insistently faithing in the face of propreity and probability Lk18v5.

Mk5v37-38 Faithing in the face of hysteria. There is a form of nameless worldly sorrow pent up, visible where it finds tangible a public grievance to grieve. As in first century Israel, one could hire professional mourners to amplify the wailing, today the mechanisms for release and reinforcement are different, but the tabloids still selling with Diana and Maddie leaders give comparable vent to the lake of unmourned devastation in the life of the everyman next to you on the tube. Jesus wept, even knowing the hope of ressurrection, Jesus wept because life hurts, we suffer wild injustice, God weeps more than words Rm8v26. But. I would say that appropriate grief is qualitatively different from manufactured and massive sentimental transferrance. You will faith and lead and pray in a context of legitimised hysteria, a public not surprised-by-hope but entrenched-in-despair. What resurrection have I to offer them? Tomorrow evening I'm preaching Exodus 16 at St Marks - the Israelite congregation united in a hungry plea, public and vocal, against God's representative. Faithing as mere private persuasion offers little foundation to stand before any suffering throng and lead them to any promised land. That is, if Christ has not been raised, my faith will manifest futility.

Mk5v39-40 "sleeping" ~ 'and I'll go to bed at noon..' Jesus the original holy fool, interjects profound comedy at a moment of Shakespearean tragedy - and it is rendered rhyming in the esv: weeping to sleeping, (and to the G they be the same thing..) "..and they laughed at him." - Less, I consider, as ridicule but as a laughter serving for release at a moment of cognitive dissonance: when heaven's possibilities collide with our presuppositions, laughter is the circuit breaker, for Hope is sometimes too much to bear. We are tragicomic fools for Christ, his Kingdom is upside down, and resurrection is absurd, folly 1Cor1v23, but more pity the fool we would be without it 1Cor15v19.

Mk5v41-42 "Talitha Cumi" - Here is a different sort of language game to speculate on. Jesus is recorded in Aramaic, Mark makes the language explicit, why? The best I can give you is this: By contrast with 2Ki18v26, where Assyrian Aramaic is devised as a mode of privileged educated concealment, for Jesus in 30AD, Aramaic had become the ordinary language of the people, the mother tongue, the heart language. Jesus draws close and speaks your love language. Mark wants us to note this particularly. Who needs healing? How will they hear your? ~ Heart languages reach parts other languages don't reach. Hebrew high brow academic languages. Greek imperial languages. Overly conscious conceptual latinate derivations.. These are such temptations for me. Jesus says pray Abba, pray daddy.. if in doubt, pray in tongues.

Mk5v43 "no one should know.." and yet we know. The Ninjas become the Ninjees.. What are we to make of the command for radio silence? A Seelonce Mayday orders a period of quiet so that faint distress calls can be discerned. Maybe that, amidst the tumult, let's not add noise to noise? Or perhaps the contrast 2Co4v18 makes: 'For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.' So, conjuring invisibility? And yet this is not invisible, emphatically not ~ the child is eating - the same resurrection evidence Jesus offers in Jn21v13. How can they but tell? And what are they going to tell the professional mourners outside? My stab is that Jesus highlights the limits of broadcast for effective heart change. A timely damper on hysteria in an age of mechanical reproduction, electrical amplification and twitter, perhaps?

092

200words: richard serra at gagosian

Dead Load (2014)

A sliver of light between is the electric energy of this paired piece: plinthed and plinth, sledge to anvil, victor, victim - equal now they are stacked inert. “Dead” only for having once lived.The glow of molten metal breathed cool long ago, and the craze lines in the surface, the layered raging rust forest, the flecked mackerel streaked slate curling about mauve figures are a life after death.

Ramble (2014)

Irregularly multiply a brutal idea and what was accidental in one reinforces itself as a regime wrought upon a congregation of iron. This is the power of the mechanically produced many, Serra’s mute masses are here assembled as a holocaust of murdered metal, violently brought into being, the weather-tormented staining tears open the wounds of their making.

London Cross (2014)

Very very very there. I am totalised by a guillotine that pretends to go on forever, cropped only in my field of vision by the presumption of gallery walls. These vast metal planes would cross-brace the universe’s entire reality, and that infinite weight of being is brought to a stiletto point. London is invoked as such a node for irreconcilable, uncompromising singularities. 

Backdoor Pipeline (2010)

Such an even oxidation gives this leviathan hull to glow, and the writhed muscular architectonic manoeuvres of enclosure, disclosure and the womby void want to be Freudian. But it is again the weight, combined with the impossible double curvature, which command attention and awe at the pure sublime bombast of engineered extremism.

gagosian.com

texting mark four

A like for likes? Similaic seedlings, scattered, sprouting buds for buds: 07729056452

Mk4v1-2 // some text missing.

Mk4v3-4 The Kingdom of Heaven is like The Lorax. It is valuable when considering the potency of this metaphor to ponder what is not a seed. Life conceived not in living-and-active terms, but inert-and-plastic, dull-and-reactive, manufactured-and-repetitive, stagnant-and-mechanical. Seeds as seeds conjure a magic irrepressible: springing into being, surprising, explosive, expectant, contagious. A germinating seed can break apart concrete. Therefore sow.

Mk4v5-6 Depth. You need to have depth, an interior. "The inside of an object can be viewed as a volcano, kaleidoscope, witch's cauldron, steel mill, or alchemist's flask in which one thing is somehow converted into another" (Graham Harman) By contrast the paper thin affect of humans considered as nodes in a web, fleeting surfaces, soulless images of a thing, hollow men, stone hearts. Not so. Sous les pavés, la plage!

Mk4v7-8 Liable to frustrate the naive gardener, weeds. So too the Christian with an under-realised theology of sin's very active activity. Consider the way a weed works, a living organism with a life of its own, a parasitic barbed vine that grows entangled amongst you, drawing life from the crop, sapping and stealing water and light.. The consequence is less death as fruitlessness. I am one among many Christians choked to a fruitlessness. Trotman rallies that we are Born to Reproduce... A hundredfold? Bring it on, holy weedkiller help me.

Mk4v9-10 Hear me now hear me now. Christianity is a listening hard, a close reading. The Christian looks twice, rereads, pours over. The world around you is speaking, the very fabric of reality is encoded, encrypted, enriched with parables. If you are struggling to decrypt and decipher, first v9 use your ears, tune your senses, pause long enough to receive the data that is there, then, v10 ask Him. Go to Jesus, when he's alone, and ask him. In the quiet space hear and ask, hear and ask. Christianity's cliched 'quiet times' are your keys to the parabolic reality of the Kingdom of God.

Mk4v13-14 "Don't you see?": Jesus earnestly wants you, Christian, to be a parable-perceiver. "How then will ye know all parables?" He tells stories for the story itself, for the meaning of that story, AND as advocate for stories generally as the language of a parabolically accessed spiritually total reality. What are "all parables"? Jesus' '32' or '46' by various counts? Or the parable of all things which God is constantly speaking through? I have a picture for you, one of no-unsacred-spaces, the re-enchanted all-parable universe, a bottomlessly recursive fractal narrative of perpetual wonder. The sower sows the seed of seed-sowing of seed sowing.

Mk4v17-18 Be buried deep in God, rooted, grounded, immersed. Sprouting is easy, and almost irrelevant given my willed soil poverty. Sappling faith supporting a fragile and half-formed Christian identity, imperiled by both circumstantial affliction, and targeted persecution: I wither readily and needlessly, paddling in the shallow end of God; shying short of the water table I choose a faith experience of surface fertiliser, caffeine and adrenaline. What does such digging consist in? Morning by morning Is50v4.

Mk4v19-20 Christianity is about multiplication and I'd argue that there is parabolic license to talk across metaphors to interrogate the implications of the go-forth-and-multiply imperative that makes of Christianity an ecstatic wonder, over-and-against everything that is dead, dry, inert and choked in the world. Consider three spiritually contraceptual motive forces Jesus invokes, and contrasts with a Kingdom framework: 1. "cares of the world", the overwrought anxieties of the poor, the indignant "99%", inventing a godless license for impetuous limited ambition. Pragmatic considerations as constraints to conception need be calibrated radically in the context of divine superabundance. Are there any 'cares' legitimate in this world to dink for? 2. "deceitfulness of riches", the obliviously 1%, blinkered by wealth's relativity. Grayson Perry said last week that 'rich people on the whole don't create culture..', am I that rich? The narrow Kingdom way feels often like a needle's eye for me, perhaps I am too enured to wealth's lies to imagine this other way. So, so-called over-population is a risk-averse crisis of imagination pertaining to means and modes of just distribution and the exuberant sufficiency of a life well-shared. The population 'crisis' is not a crisis of human quantity so much as humane quality, where that quality is Life, and Life is risk, and no greater risk exists than other people, dependents, children. 3. "lust for 'other' things", that is, sensual vice, the pornographied virtual existence we indulge which is definitionally necessarily decidedly infertile. One could expand other 'things', objectified objects, and the static array of trinkets that populate the worldview of unKingdom. In the unKingdom, measured impedence to fecundity via premeditated sterility finds coherence in the context of a total world view which also births entire sexual and spiritual landscapes as sterile as Canary Wharf. We're damaged goods, people are stupid ~ as B said last night, and in this way multiplication is exponential folly, utterly unconscionable, unless people can be redeemed, unless there is a power in the world that is infectiously restorative, a Jn20v15 good-gardener's creed of relentlessly nurturing new growth, building-back-better, turning death into life, unclean to clean, draining and unstaining the cup of pollutants. The cares of 'the world' conjures that hegemony that prefers to divide rather than multiply, when we dare to multiply with an urgently fecund parabolic imperative it will be controversial.

Mk4v21-22 A light is lit, actively, intentionally. From nothing to something. Into your great darkness is spoken a "let there be.." (Hear Jez on this poetically goo.gl/ODSs1v ) You were lit for a purpose. You were sparked at a price. The gospel in you is an ignition bringing to blaze all the fuel God put in you, an uncontainable fire hazard. And light lights, the rectilinear propagation of that which is in you cannot but bring a richness of colour and texture to visibility in the room and along the street and across the sky. Katy Perry gets it, boom boom boom, even brighter than the moon moon moon.

Mk4v23-24 'ere we go. Jesus commends the examined life in four verbs: 1. Hear; 2. Listen; 3. Consider; 4. Measure. 1. Engagement with the parable-woven reality is phenomenological, sensed with your senses, encountered in the now. Jesus relentlessly unblocks ears and unblinds eyes and condemns those willedly senseless and desensitised: Mk8v18 Mt15v14 Mt23v16 - as Ps135v16-17 emphasises: contrasted with inert idols, we have a God who is there, and is not silent. 2. Receive, then perceive, tune the signal from heard noise and so discern. I want to hear God, but I am easily distracted. I want to hear God, but I have too many tabs twittering, I'm not here and now, and so the message is out of sync, truncated and shot through with interference. 3. Consider and 'carefully'. The listener's duty of care is to take care of the message: meditating and memorising. As Jm1v24's scripture amnesia, you have to hold on to revelation, lest we forget. 4. Jesus: the original Karma Policeman promises to give you a taste of your own medicine? Perhaps. As he leads us from hearing to doing, we are lead to externalise things received out into the world beyond, a world of equal and opposite reactions, a Newton's cradle of reciprocity and return. What is your 'measure', what weight of glory, what portion of grace. Give that, 'use' that, reinvest your full measure.

Mk4v25-26 Have/have-not. Have you? I think 'having' must entail also a conscious appreciation of what-you-have. Despising and so discounting what-you-have is tantamount to not-having and will result in a depreciation of what-you-have. But as a maxim it seems too much to write a true truth of virtuous cycles of spiritual ROI. God doesn't necessarily 'help those who help themselves'. God doesn't necessarily 'bless those who turn up'. You cannot 'give to get' on any cosmic vending machine. The misappliance of these verses can render a tribal, exclusive, capricious universe where Christianity is an agent perpetuating and entrenching the spiritual privilege of the 'haves' over against the 'have-nots'. However, the notion of haves-getting-more ought to be an encouragement to hope when the crop looks to have failed, and the battle seems lost: there is a bigger truth, a coming harvest, a war that is already won. If you get this, you'll get that.

Mk4v27 'he knoweth not how..' Tis mystery all.. Do you need to know how salvation works? At what level? If two-ways-to-live or four-spiritual-laws are an approximate diagram of the mechanics, is that enough? At some point you have to black-box it, concede a finitude of knowing and surrender before the efficacy of a fundamentally supernatural otherly process. Philosophically unsatisfying? Epistemelogically humble? Pragmatically urgent? We know-not, so there are limits to growth-strategy.

Mk4v28 'all by itself the soil produces..' I'll say it again, we live in a parabolic-realist universe, freaky things going on out there.. Agency is ascribed to soil by Jesus. Spontaneously, like the prison door in Ac12v10. In all there is something processual and organic about the growth. An oak tree looks nothing like an acorn, and no two oak trees are the same ~ who knows the shape of christian T could be. Christianity is not topiary.

Mk4v29-30 Jesus wants you to *say* literally: 'Who do you say I am?' Mk8v29 but also, and importantly, to say 'What shall we say the Kindgom is *like*?' Arguing by metaphor, wooing by allegory, interrogating the parabolic quality of a thing is biblical mode of accessing the real. Dwell poetically, as God's poiema Ep2v10 and say as such. Live likeably as similes and speak to one another in psalms Ep5v19.

Mk4v31-32 S, M, L, XL Do you consider the gospel as a scaleable thing? Church pain follows from too fixed a sense of right size. From the Bigness of the tumourous mega church to a bonsai approach of confected authenticity. Hospitality should be the governing principle of appropriate and expansible scale and there is a fractal reciprocity to the principle: the seed is planted in the soil, so then birds are roosted in the resulting tree. We are hosted to host, nurtured to nurture, grown to grow, housed to house. As Jn14v2 In my father's house there are many mansions.

Mk4v33 'with many such parables..' What is a parable? A story? What stories do you tell? How many stories do you tell? Are they good stories? What makes them good stories? What story does your life tell? Is it a good story? Madeleine L'Engle quotes Aristotle's Poetics: ‘that which is probable and impossible is better than that which is possible and improbable.’ Do you tell those sorts of stories?

Mk4v34 'he said nothing without parables..' What is my parable to prose quotient? How much of the gospel am I able to explain in literal language? Is there a figurative imperative in my speech? .. 'he explained everything..' Does my story demand an explanation? Is there depth to my life, or am I all surface?

Mk4v35-36 It was a dark and stormy night, and the captain said to his men.. there is a Scooby-Doo sense of ham ominousity: 'Evening came.. "let's go to the Other Side"' And yet, apt: the Christian life is a launching out into a stormy maritime analogy, we are tiny boats, specs of white casting off at dusk into the dark, perilous like astronauts in Cuarón's Gravity, timers ticking a crescendo before satellite detritus shreds all semblance of security. And, like the disciples in this moment we too exist at a junction of impending environmental calamity.. Climate change is coming, if for no other reason than to prompt Christians to pray for the weather, as Jesus did.

Mk4v37 Is the NIV taking poetic license too far in rendering megalē as a "furious" squall? ESV's "great" is more balanced.. But maybe the squall was furious - the demons are.

Mk4v38 Does Jesus care if you drown? Jesus contrasts the care of the Godhead variously with caricatures of God: Lk18v2 "A judge in a certain city who neither feared God nor cared about people." ; Jn10v13-14 "The hired hand who ... cares nothing for the sheep" ; and Lk19v20's "hard" (NIV) "severe" (ESV) "exacting" (NASB) "austere" (KJV) "tough" (HSCB) man. There is something Malickian about these Gods. Zvyagintsev's film The Return also powerfully considers this concept - is God uncaring? And, what happens if we believe thus?

Mk4v39-40 Jesus, the great millponder, issues a meteorological cease and desist, laying Henley booms across Galilee, calming with implausible instantinaity: what of momentum's inertia, whence reverb, and where does the wash go? My life is turbulent, it will always be, the toothpaste won't go back in the tube, the existentiallist's being towards death with a sense of unravellment's chaotic but just inevitability is bad maritime analogising. Jonah was a bad maritime analogiser, who slept in a boat, woke to a storm, and Jh1v15 caused it to stop instantly - we can do better than that.

Mk4v41 "What manner of man?" And what does this mean for all humans? Do we distinguish Jesus' 'humanity' from our 'humanity'? Yes, in terms of it's execution, but in terms of its potential surely not, and if not, what form of glorious supernaturally enabled humanism do we arrive at by allowing this?  Shakespeare speaks of man noble in reason, infinite in faculty; in form and moving express and admirable; in action like an angel, in apprehension like a god. Ps8v4-5 speak of man a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned with glory and honor; given dominion over the works of God's hands; with all things put under his feet.. Schaeffer speaks of no little people. C S Lewis claims there are no ordinary people, no mere mortals. What manner of man is your notion of a man? Jesus came as perfect humanity to radicalise your humanism. goo.gl/njiPuV

love oval tote bag (buy now on etsy!)

Dear all. Love Oval Totes are available now, get them online via Etsy, (If you are new to Etsy, use this link for money off! ~ get involved it is a magical marketplace), or come to the Oval Farmer's Market and see all the wares that the Love London crowd are selling in aid of OvalCAP and VauxhallFoodbank.

Briefly to introduce the two causes: TrussellTrust is a Christian Charity which runs a massively increasing number of foodbanks providing emergency food to families in crisis, the foodbanks collectively stand urgently also as a measure of the state of injustice in Britain. ChristiansAgainstPoverty are a network of debt advice centres for those who have become trapped by debts, primarily their work is mediation and structuring a payment plan with creditors, but more essentially CAP partners with churches to provide holistic care and support for anyone in these circumstances. 

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200words: children of silicon valley

“the scoffer is an abomination to mankind” (Pr24v9)

Silicon Valley, as Babylon, is located metonymyically more than geographically. It conjures the concentrated efforts of digital city-building: a catalyst of world-creation, an accelerator for the hopes, dreams and foibles of the contemporary human condition. A future is forged in this kiln, transactions here are prophetic, entrepreneurs here are prophets, false prophets insinuates Harrison via Jesus.

What is Jesus doing name-dropped at the culmination of this sneeringly snarky, uncharitably pessimistic, fear-mongering Luddite article beset by ad hominem fallacies, broad brushes, slippery slopes, strawmen and old-fashioned cynicism? This is not the Jesus who enjoyed clubbing with the Sean Parkers of a different time (Mt9v11). Nor the Jesus who advocated extremely shrewd management of coffer enlargement (Lk6v9). Nor the Jesus who had no qualms with working for so harsh a taskmaster as Google (Mt5v27). This is a Guardian reader's own personal Jesus, presuming that Jesus would take the side of the Heideggarians. Would he? There is worlding and there is overcoming the world – a tension which meets in the incarnation – and such a meeting does change a world which needs changing.

Harrison's article is astute, while it is also indulgent. Technology, as journalism, has the power to simulate, stimulate and self-replicate. What then, Phil, is the fruit of your work?

nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/jul/17/children-silicon-valley/

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Mk3v1-2 Watched closely, with the intent of catching him out. A verse for the philosopher, trained to study every detail intently, with the objective of deconstruction, objection, problematisation, accusation, from a position of high objectivity, of course. Oh, philosopher, you are the worst of all the legalists, you look but you do not see, & you know not how to be free indeed. The smallest-minded, the least alive. Re-breathe the generosity all around.

Mk3v3-4 (NIV) 'Stand up' I am a man with a withered hand more literally than many, but we all in our own way walk with a limp. Jesus says stand up, before you are yet healed, stand up in front of everyone, stand up and be thought presumptuous, stand up and risk. Apt/spooky that this text should have come yesterday on the very day L'Abri emailed to ask me to lecture on Architecture - before I am fully healed.. God *is* on the move.

Mk3v5-6 I've found this verse hard to find words for. I am both the hard-hearted & the in-need-of-healing, & so are you. Maybe part of the struggle with this verse is that I struggle to pray for others' healing and hard-heartedness. Both seem too presumptuous, the former in presuming to know God's mind & risking the other's disappointment. The latter presumes I know what is going on in another, & involves a judgment, which risks pride & alienation. Yet, in the spirit Jesus discerned, responded-to, spoke-to both these. So I want to pray for your healing, I want to pray for your unhardened heart. I want you to pray for mine. I want to do it right. Come Holy Spirit.

Mk3v7-8 Consider the phenomenal magnetic force, drawing a surge of magnetic flux density, lining iron filings like columns of termites coarsing a new channel, dusty driven across an ancient terrain, summoned to a cinematic epic with a zillion computer generated extras all the world's weak and walking wounded. To a centre. Christianity is a nodally orientated mode of being-toward a person at all costs. That person is Jesus. From Tyre and Sidon, across land and sea that person is Jesus. Even a rumour that there is genuinely a power from outside of our closed loop reality would cause such a flood. Christianity needs not to be church growth strategies, but crowd management.

Mk3v9-10 If they crush you, you're good for no-one. & other platitudes, yet I will take this new maritime analogy for such a time as this. Boat as sanctuary, cocoon, womb, fence. Away from the crush. Jesus is there too.

Mk3v11-12 Here, demoniac clairvoyance that sees and knows 'You are the Son of God' leads to prostrate confession of Jesus' divinity. If this confession is authentic, the picture is one of diabolical incompetence akin to the Lion King's hyenas or Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition. I read this today rather as a dark subtle disingenuity, exaggerated worship as a means to sink Jesus by association with their own compromised ship - if the one thing we know about the devil is that he lies all the time, what better way to discredit Jesus than a confessional double bluff. This then makes more sense of Jesus's silencing of the spirits. Applying this to my own condition, I consider anew that the Devil works to undermine me both by straightforward lies, but also by falsely discredited truths, as it were. Just as damaging to internalise the lies of my unworthiness as to internalise a claim to my worth by an institution or individual I know to be discredited.

Mk3v13-14 I [Jesus] have [past tense, not still deliberating] chosen [elected, noticed, specifically called out, loved through, not by default] you [Phil] to be with [alongside, in shared space, prior to all output or criteria of success, enjoying one another] me [Jesus].

Mk3v15 Called. Twofold: called to be with him & called to be sent out. Breathe in, breathe out. You are within to be without. And when you go out, they'll know that you've been with him Ac4v13, Mk14v67. And when you go out, your ministry is twofold: preaching & exorcising. You go with authority to displace authority. Preaching is a transaction in spiritual territories which understands that there is an enemy occupation. By contrast with mere teaching the preacher both delivers a message and delivers their hearer. Preaching is inseparable from authority is inseparable from the supernatural.

Mk3v16 Named. Calling is naming is identity. At a certain level you become your labels, branding works, self-understanding is self-fulfilling. But more than that. God names and packages you, like over-priced coffee, but that is not all, for he is also the one who grows you, nurtures you and brings you to a ripe roast. Simon is not yet Peter/Cephas, not yet Rocky. But so he is named despite all that is unstable, infirm and lacking in rockiness at present because those whom God foreknew he also predestined, he also called, he also justified, he also glorified Rm8v29. God's naming perfectly anticipates your gradually glorified future self, that is to say, he will rock you.

Mk3v17-18 When I think about the documentation of my own life, it is full of names & faces. Here they are, sat around candles, I can tell you all their names & something of their stories, that the stories are still unfolding, & unfolding as part of my own. The Christ did not go through a international selection process to find the most interesting or skilled, but chose to share with these ones, just there, with whom he could unfold.

Mk3v19 HPH are recruiting, and elsewhere I'm seeking to be recruited, elsewhere I'm hoping to find a home for F.. the process gives one to the question of calling, being called, selection, election, inclusion, group dynamics and qualifications for leadership. What was Judas' character like for 3 years before his brief moment of limelit notoriety?  A key member of the team, the bearer of the money bag, one of but twelve in Jesus' closet circle. God's plan absorbs and subverts evil, even an evil which is tragic, personal, slow and incredibly subtle.

Mk3v20 The original crowded house church. Somewhat like the pressure on houses in London: hidden homeless, clambering for a foot in the door, what centripetal force brought you all here? With Jesus we're caught up in the maelstrom of human need, with Jesus we're amongst an epically retweeted flashmobbed houseparty #goodnews. With Jesus, all of life is an opportunity for emergency response to an overcrowded world on the brink ~ don't burn out ~ "when did you last eat something that didn't come out of a vending machine.." With Jesus, homes in crisis become family. HJ's AGM last night contrasted their Night Shelters with a homeless care 'Industry' that operates at £800m pa. Homelessness is largely caused by relationship breakdown. So significant then that v34 Jesus refamilies us.

Mk3v21-22 On not recognising the good. Mawson, whose text I am using with my students, suggests that while we now live at an epistemic distance from God, & can choose otherwise, can fail to recognise - when we find ourselves face to face at the end & new beginning of all things, we will not be able to err, we will not not be able to choose Him. He will overwhelm us so. Oh, picture of heaven, break into the now. Arrest my will, my believing, my sight. Amen

Mk3v23-24 Belatedly. I have struggled with this all week. It will not do to treat the Pharisees' incoherence dismissively as the rhetorical flailings of jealous conservativism. But also, Jesus speaks a truism and it seems too much to extrapolate application from his house-divided parable, except to observe that Jesus considers parables are a valid critical mode of reply. My question is this: What is a Pharasaic worldview (and where am I guilty of similar)?  [1] Synthesistic. Satan can cast out Satan, if evil is not personal or thung, but rather a cloud of qualities, variable concentrations of which displace others. The Pharisees are postmodern in permitting a pic'n'mix mode of ethics, in which there is no genuine antithesis but merely fleeting appearances of socially constructed norms. Jesus will not be so synthesised, there is no yin in his yang. Fascinating that he invokes 'house' as an example (conscious that this refers to a family more than to its architectural containment, but..) House here invokes unity, consistency, indivisibility. There is a thingyness to Jesus' notion of house, an undilutable, unpartitionable in-and-of-itself substance to a house. Go therefore build. [2] Antagonstic - Privelege, and pretensions thereof, divides, tribalises and demonises. Even well-intentioned agendas to defend the well-being of a certain division of humankind necessarily divides the whole. Feminism, for all its compassionate optimism and critical insight, definitionally struggles to unite because it is predicated on an unstable dichotomy that degenerates to demonisation. The Pharisees look to defend a vulnerable set of society from false messiahs, but their vision is not big enough and so is blind to universal grace when it breaks in. I believe Jesus would criticise feminism as he does the pharisees, for a tribalism that brings the house down. [3] Inversely Nietzschean? Evidently Jesus has power. If all power is power-over, if all headship subjugates, if all engagement of body and emotion in worship is manipulation, if all power corrupts then all power must be resisted. There is a mode of Christianity which never switches the power on, a cessationism which shies away from ever turning the ignition: a Christianity that risks nothing, feasts nothing, never dabbles in the Babette's feast of Hillsong's smoke machines or the Vineyard's leg-extending street ministry. I'm just saying...

Mk3v25-26 The point Jesus makes here can be applied to all houses, all homes, all communities. The house must not be divided against itself, it must be united, it must not be at war. Not only will it not flourish under divided conditions, but it will fall, it will not be able to stand. It will not be able to stand up to evil, it will not be able to stand strong as support or container. We want to build a house, to build a kingdom (of the Kingdom). Let's begin with unity. Let's begin with unity between the pieces of our own hearts, our fractured consciousness reassembled by jesus. Then let's start with the unity of our marriage, letting the deeper deepest unity in Christ remake our dyad daily. Let us be united with our church, for though we are many, we are one body, for we all share in one bread. What was the end of henrietta's sermon on why relationships in church matter to God? I would venture in part because a house that is divided against itself cannot stand. So this statistic about relational causes the primary cause of homelessness. You want to build homes? You want to do community? Your deepest need is the unity of jesus. Eph2v19 has a picture of the household, because v14. This word is for us, this word is for me.

Mk3v27-28 It's when Jesus analogises the Kingdom to criminal activity that one has to think twice before applicating.. I think he does it deliberately ~ at one because controversiality provokes inquiry; but more, Jesus would genuinely seek to inspire exactly this sort of ingenious energetic mischief in the spiritual realm. If your self-understanding of Christianity is not a call to breaking, entering and plundering you may be labouring under a blasphemy of gracelessness. We are so unshackled, so forgiven, so electrically alive.. for what? Why, between v27 and v28 does Jesus put these two things together: adventuring on covert ops and being-forgiven. Because being-forgiven is the fresh start to write all adventure, it is the disburdening to climb all mountains, it is the summons and the security to risk everything. Whatever you fail in when risking will be covered except the failure to risk at all. Thus, as Charles Rennie Mackintosh calls to architects: There is hope in honest error, none in the icy perfection of the mere stylist.

Mk3v29-30 When v29 is quoted it is often without v30 (I realise, in my experience) even though v30 serves as an explanation. Grieving the holy spirit here is misidentifying Her as evil rather than good. So resisting Her rather than welcoming Her. Condemning Her rather then worshipping Her. So this explanation rings of truth all the more: You cannot be forgiven if you refuse the forgiver. God is not trying to catch you out. God is for you; so receive.

Mk3v31-32 Presumably the crowd was as crowded as previously, but it is still interesting that mother&brothers elect to remain outside. Being recognised v32, they doubtless could have made their way to the front. The boundary of the inside-the-house is a spatial prop, accessory to the familial tension Mark is establishing. (Parallels with Disney's Brave abound) Hard to consider that mother&brothers' motives were either entirely naive or entirely malign, but either way, Jesus (as Merida) is rattling their prejudicial categories, and the threshold of the house makes physical the rift of pride. Standing outside, messaging mediated expectations to Jesus is a passive aggressive stance, a non-confrontational power-dynamic. This is how to divide a Kingdom.

Mk3v33-34 I once heard Terry Eagleton using these verses to bolster his claim that Jesus was a Marxist, & for abolition of the family, for leveling all partiality to impartiality. I don't think this is the way to read this verse. I want to defend human partiality, in the extended use of mothering & brothering, a hospitable partiality, the small group that's never closed but yet isn't formless. The these of these are my mothers & brothers.

Mk3v35 Blud. Christianity is a fraternity of doing. To be-alongside is necessarily to do-alongside, as Sennett's Craftmen Together. Jesus' new family is a thung thing: an economic unit that works, a band of brothers that looks out for its own, a homestead built as an elegant reciprocal structural an interdependent arrangement of mutually supportive members where being is a doing. God architects against the ludicrous dichotomy of a christian passenger class of pew fodder, he architects against redundance and obsolescence, God adopts as he builds, supports as he employs, calls as he sends - in this you are all invited to do be do be do.

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texting mark two

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Mk2v1 Why did Jesus go back to Capernaum 'a few days later', after saying 1v38 he needed to go on elsewhere? Was it an intentional whistlestop tour? Did he change his mind? Did the wind of the spirit blow unexpectedly? What is it to return? Did the same faces come out? Did Jesus continue conversations begun after a gap of time, leaving space for the other's reflection, but not leaving them alone in their questions? A good dialogical practice perhaps offering enough engagement and enough space to allow self & other to co-constitute, to speak new life from outside, whilst allowing also the other to be other. So, as complementary to the Mk1v35-36 reflection, an ongoing divine leaving & return. I extrapolate wildly, of course.

Mk2v2 
who are the faces
in this crowded house?
there are layers of light
(and dark)
beneath these pressing hands.

Mk2v3-4 How'm I going to get T in front of a power encounter with Jesus? [1] Collection action; [2] Creative destruction. [1] The paralytic was carried by four men. Prayer, here, is shown to be a cooperative endeavour. How was their group dynamic? Who instigated, who lead, who was the first follower? How did they discuss it? Who convinced whom that this bonkers idea was legit? 1Tm2v8 wants men everywhere to raise up holy hands, because when we do we then can crowd surf the afflicted to Jesus. [2] Barriers, hurdles, obfustications, churchianity, christianese, the inertia of the liturgical status quo, the strongholds of well-intended inflexible Christian culture which present such impermeable container to the gospel within. Permeate it. Perforate it, go in to our Oval Office, right now, and turn what ever ain't tied down, upside down :P The person of Jesus is a summons to architectural transgression, flying in the face of Secure by Design, we leave the side door open, we let the rain come in, we set about re-roofing and spacemaxising like the palsy depends on it, switch enclosure for disclosure, run a renegade Open House London like its urgent. Motivated by youtu.be/DBY7FnkNI4c a Contagionous sense that the world's illness is to be actively resisted, and that Jesus heals. Take a corner of T's mat for me this morning.

Mk2v5 The forgiveness of my sins is Christ's greatest act of love towards me. My liberation from guilt, that explosion to dust of the fear of the law that otherwise resides in the pit of my stomach, towards a rushing wide open space, that is safe & alive & beautiful. I experience my belovedness most deeply when I experience the burning up of my wall of sin, & find my stripped self left standing, & seen, & touched & wanted. (thanks to the faith of others)

Mk2v6 'They questioned in their hearts'. Like the older brother of the prodigal son, we're so quick to think & speak suspicion over the grace granted others. There are some others we want to lower before Jesus on a mat, perhaps, but there are others towards whom a secret unspoken judgment grips us. Jealous & self-righteous at the Gracedness of the Other. One remains a mat-lowerer & not a scribe when one remembers that first we were all mat-dwellers; loved

Mk2v7-8 We ask: Why does he forgive? Jesus asks: Why do you doubt? 'Why?' as a question unpacks causation and purpose. To a 3-year-old's curiosity it is a magic word to meet an insatiable appetite for an ever expanding universe of discovery. Somehow this novelty tarnishes. Why is bellowed into the void late at night. Why is taboo in a culture of small talk that fears a meaningless origin and a meaningless end. Why is weaponised to undermine half-formed creative beginnings, intangible in-progress developments, vulnerable intuitions, Kingdom glimmerings. // Aristotle offers four causes to any why thusly: v7 why does Jesus forgive? Efficiently to make us whole, finally to bring us to himself for his glory, materially because God is love, formally because love qua love when incarnated in the form of sinful flesh, for sin, must overcome the justice sin deserves, by absorbing sin's penalty. And v8 why do we doubt? Efficiently to deflect challenging things, finally to make us authors of our own truth for our own glory, materially because we are fragile clay vessels, formally because broken vessels must patch up gaps in any united epistemological hypothesis with presumption and rhetoric.We, however, have a because 1Jn4v19; we fear no whys, we are not satisfied by a settled scepticism. Let God be God, let him be your healer,forgiver, your why.

Mk2v9-10 Yeah, which is easier though? Why does Jesus ask the question this way? I have always assumed that he is asking a rhetorical question about the nature of what is vs what seems. ie. That it should be obvious that forgiveness seems easier to speak, but isn't? But how does the proof of healing connect to this thought? Jesus showing that he meets us in our seeming as well as our reality? He will even use our false ideas about him to try to shift our eyes towards the true? Clunky thoughts this morning, I welcome a clearer word, but wanting seeking choosing the Christ who treads the line of grace & truth. Thank you

Mk2v11-12 Bed ridden bidden, forgiven: the invisible risible risen. He's upsidedowning our guise, urgently unbreaking all lies that we lie in, rise now to a new thing. We're footloose, we're furniture free: to left luggage he calls thee. Come messy come messier. No longer carried but carriers. You never seen it before? They'd never seen it before. Micah 7:8 said it, I'll say it again. Rise.

Mk2v13-14 Teaching. Jesus the educator. A simple prayer, in this season of new & extended teaching, that I would learn how to teach more like Jesus. That I would teach well, teach to make clear, teach to provoke, teach for-the-sake-of-the-other, teach as love. May that it would be that those I meet & teach would hear Jesus saying 'follow me'. Pray for this with me.

Mk2v15-16 'There were many who followed him' - Twitter has done to 'follow' as Facebook as done to 'friend' - semiotic dilution and impoverishment. The controversy of Jesus' "following" lies in its exclusivity. Levi left his tax booth, Peter left his nets.. Have I only decided to follow Jesus? What have I not yet left? 'eating-with' - Who is at your bbq, whose bbq are you at? We know we are branded by association, the tacit approval assumed in being-seen-with, how much more so when eating-with. Communion unites bodily in counter hygienic comingling; hospitality unites in that bond of gift reciprocation; eating-with is slow, vulnerable, undeniably intentional time constituting a 'We' 'why does he eat-with?' - Jesus is about to meet this with the statement that we are sick needing a doctor. Contained within this response is the suggestion that there is something medicinal about eating-with. Check your diary that you are eating-with sinners as urgently as if you had a cure for ebola. Check your diary that you are regularly eating-with Jesus to learn how.

Mk2v17-18 No fancy wording today. I'm sick. I'm sinful. I'm seen. I'm sought after. He comes for me because my soul is abusive & ingrown & I need help. He does not come to me because he should. He comes for me because he loves me.

Mk2v19 Somewhat as Robin Williams initially does not see the banquet in Hook. Somewhat as the Dwarves in The Last Battle: "Aslan raised his head and shook his mane. Instantly a glorious feast appeared on the Dwarfs' knees: pies and tongues and pigeons and trifles and ices, and each Dwarf had a goblet of good wine in his right hand. But it wasn't much use. They began eating and drinking greedily enough, but it was clear that they couldn't taste it properly." There is so much cause for celebration in the now, and how much more so in the imminent presence of Jesus. Fasting and feasting are responses to conditions, not for-themself rituals. Jesus issues a call not to be unresponsive, ritually, but rather to be alert to circumstance and so to diet parabolically. By contrast with the Pharisee's feast-proof mindset, which fasts preeemptively, presuming and presupposing a reality of scarcity, a harsh reality of scarcity, a harsh taskmaster, an absentee chef. Would that Christians might be known as feasters, festivalisers. Oh let us be in pursuit of an excellence in our expression of cultural abundance and culinary generosity.
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Mk2v20 Does then fasting have any place in the Christian's life? Surely. Desperately and urgently, fast and furiously, fast forward with eyes on the goal of change, fast as a response of prayer to conditions which have procluded God. Many are the mournings to make a meal of, to passionately and pathetically feel the pain of. Let us also fast with an acute excellence, as a response not a ritual, forego the fat of the city, ... the blinding excess, so to usher in a reality of sympathetic embodied prayer: feasting and fasting radically.

Mk2v21-22 Not only the promise of new life new creation & renewed mind, but prophetically of new wine that it is a not-yet, a wine yet to mellow & mature in unfamiliar wineskins. Where you, new wine, are weak, or sharp, you will brew steep distill ferment soak into this new thing, which remains the new of the spirit without the new of novelty. You will become depthed in flavour, stronger in substance, full-bodied. Fear not, new wine

Mk2v23-24 Passages encouraging liberal and pragmatic interpretations of Sabbath guidance seem written for a time other than our own. Jesus relaxes rabbinical over-strictures, but right now, in London, in 2014, there is nothing left dilute. 24/7/365 I will shop, work, shop, consume, work, harvest, cook, drive, shop, glean and do bland violence to the seventh day with total and unconscious abandon. I have great sympathy for the Pharisee's cause, nothing is sacred anymore, no one pauses, no one decorates, the church is a grey pragmatistic edifice of unspecific principles and workaholic incoherence, the Sabbath's poetry is utterly obscured, and with it, the glory of being. So. Send in the secret police to shadow the rogue picnic gleaners and pay the agents time and half for patrolling on a Sunday.. the irony is significant. Sabbath typifies exactly the fragility of the balance of law and grace. It is not straightforward to apply what Jesus is implying license for here, Tesco is not a grainfield, the Northern Line is not a country walk, your emails are not ears of corn. But a picnic with Jesus and friends certainly is given precedent here.

Mk2v25-26 Wine, & now bread. Permit me some free association. New bread in new tabernacles too. New aabsorption new digestion. Feed on christ in your hearts by faith, for you are not only allowed to come into the holy of holies, but he comes into you, bread & wine, body & blood. Come because you're hungry, like david. Come not because you are strong but because you are weak. Come because you love the lord a little & would like to love him a lot.

Mk2v27-28 Jesus as Time-Lord. And we are his heirs, inheritors to a dominion over time. Far from being ruled by the clock, we have time at our disposal, we can make time and take time, it is ours as a gift to spend time. The Pharisees' grossly impoverished notion of the human is critiqued here in its unjust and inhuman timing. The flawed but worthy Justin Timberlake film In Time illustrates the relationship between time and the vested interests of social injustice. What horror that the Pharisees would employ the Sabbath as a new scarcity myth, a superstitious righteousness, a system of subjugation, what irony. Sabbath is a rehearsal of eternity, a weekly freedom cry, a time traveler's exodus from wage slavery and clock watching. A declaration of the freedom we are free for. Jesus' eternality makes a mockery of the notion that we are under time. Sabbath is the life we get to live, it never runs out. There are no rules, it is all grace and gratuitous, a pause to pursue unnecessary beauty, art which needs no justification.

st leonards