Sunday 18 December

Ezra 2:68-4:5

Emotion in church has a good pedigree.  Sometimes I get a bit uncomfortable on a Sunday when people give a little whoop or let out a little wail.  But compared to the mayhem that Ezra saw - this medley of weeping and shouting that was so loud that no-one could distinguish one from the other - I suspect our Sundays sound like the archaeology section of the British library.  Emotion is to be embraced.  If we can’t shout for joy in church then where can we?  If we can’t weep aloud in church then where can we.  The truth about faith, if we really want true faith, is that it is a tapestry of inexpressable joy and bitter sorrow.  True faith opens the door into the surging stream of the emotions of God - love, hope, joy, anger at sin, jealousy, sorrow - and these emotions, if truly felt, will be too much for us.  They should be too much for us.  Because they are divine in origin.  So let’s agree to show emotion in church.  Let’s agree to follow the example of our forefathers and express our bitter sorrows and let out our giddy joy.  Because God is worthy of our authentic expression.  He is good.  And his love for us; the real true us that is splattered in emotion; this love endures for ever.

Revelation 9:13-10:11

Call me a coward, but if I saw an angel who had one foot on the sea and one foot on the land and who shouted like a roaring lion, if I saw that angel and someone asked me to go up to him and take his scroll off him... I would leg it.  I would do a Jonah and be hoiking myself over the back fence.  I may love Jesus but I am not completely insane.  And then, even if I’d been eaten by some passing whale and spat back at the feet of this monstrous angel and had somehow forced myself to take the scroll from him and had it in my hand, even if I had done that, if the angel then told me to eat the scroll and that it would turn my stomach sour... I think I’d be pulling the old ‘food in the handkerchief’ trick, licking my lips and saying “mmm that tastes like honey” while discretely hiding the scroll between my legs.  You see, the thing about this section of Revelation, the thing about the whole bible is that it cracks open the door to the dressing room of God and we see he is big, hairy and terrifying.  God’s enormousness is pretty much blasphemous to our pathetic little human senses.  The sheer weight and size and power of God utterly forsakes any pretensions of power that we have ever had.   Even his angels scare us witless.  And I so often lose sight of that.  I so often look at my problems and look at other people’s theft and my own bias to idolatry and I let them become the big story.  But they are not the big story.  God is the big story.  God is the hulking monster that prowls across this universe.  God is power incarnate, awe incarnate, glory incarnate.  And, most surprising of all, God is love incarnate.  He deserves every heart-beat to be in worship of Him. And yet he chooses to love us and work for our good.  Who could measure the depths of his grace?

Proverbs 30:24-33

You’ve got to respect those conies.