Urbanisation and dependence

“²⁷ So every carpenter and workmaster, that laboureth night and day: and they that cut and grave seals, and are diligent to make great variety, and give themselves to counterfeit imagery, and watch to finish a work: ²⁸ The smith also sitting by the anvil, and considering the iron work, the vapour of the fire wasteth his flesh, and he fighteth with the heat of the furnace: the noise of the hammer and the anvil is ever in his ears, and his eyes look still upon the pattern of the thing that he maketh; he setteth his mind to finish his work, and watcheth to polish it perfectly: ²⁹ So doth the potter sitting at his work, and turning the wheel about with his feet, who is always carefully set at his work, and maketh all his work by number; ³⁰ He fashioneth the clay with his arm, and boweth down his strength before his feet; he applieth himself to lead it over; and he is diligent to make clean the furnace:

³¹ All these trust to their hands: and everyone is wise in his work.

³² Without these cannot a city be inhabited: and they shall not dwell where they will, nor go up and down”

(Sirach 38:27-32)

Cities are inhabited by tradesmen - urban centres are full of business.

Psalm 107 speaks about the need of a city to settle in – that without God the Israelites had no city of their own. I live in a city – in fact, more than half the world’s population now live in urban centres – as opposed to rural. It is expected that 70 per cent of the world population will be urban by 2050. This is staggering! Take a look around your nearest city and consider the way it has grown – from what humble beginnings did it start? Where is there growth? New estates of houses? New shopping complexes? New business?

The idea of building is used in one of Jesus’ most famous parables – the Wise and Foolish Builders. In this parable, Jesus suggests that wisdom comes from coming to Him, hearing his word, and putting them into practice (Luke 6:47). Good foundations come from this wisdom. If you’re going to build, Jesus says, do it properly. Of course, this is an obvious point; as ever designed to make His listeners laugh.

‘Why on earth would you not lay good foundations??!? ’

‘Exactly!’ replies Jesus.

This idea of diligence is quite common in the Bible. The second Rogation Day is focused (traditionally) on commerce and industry. Effective tradesman/businessmen are those who are diligent and hardworking. I watch The Apprentice and love the simplicity of success – put your back into it…well it works most of the time!

The passage from Sirach (also called Ecclesiasticus) refers to three specific trades: carpenter, metal smith, and potter. It suggests that it is God who is at work in their labours. Labours that form the foundation of a working society, a successful city. Do you work in a trade? I have great admiration for plasterers (I once tried it...messy wall isn't even close), electricians, and plumbers. There is a strange beauty in the way complex issues are resolved in smooth walls, light-fittings that issue no shock, and a shower that is both warm and wet... Tradespeople may not find God in their work, it may feel quite 'secular', but I believe God is present in their endeavours.

Isn’t it fascinating that God is described as all three tradesmen in the passage from Sirach …he is the Potter in Jeremiah 18, God is described as plucking Israel from the iron-smelting furnace (again Jeremiah 11:4), and of course Jesus himself is a carpenter. God endorses and operates as a tradesman.

The purpose of Rogation Days (from the Latin, Rogare, meaning ‘to ask’) is to prompt specific prayers of petition to God – asking him to bless the seasons and crops, commerce and industry, and the environment in general. Historically these were far more popular in an agricultural society that depended so much more on good weather. We really don’t have an appreciation of plague, famine and drought…our forebears did. Society then was deeply local and often rural.

We live in a deeply urban world, where jobs are in service industry, online, retail and hospitality. And in this world we are often made to live for ourselves – to become more and more independent.

That said, we currently live in some of the most turbulent economic conditions known. We are realising, perhaps too late, that we are dependent in deeper, more profound ways with our European neighbours as well as our next-door neighbours. As Greece looks into the abyss, there is a real chance that botched economics, flawed commerce will create even tougher living conditions globally…

This RogationDay we should stop and join in the words of the collect:

Almighty God and Father,

You have so ordered our life

That we are dependent on one another:
Prosper those engaged in commerce and industry
And direct their minds and hands
That they may rightly use your gifts in the service of others.

Rogation Days remind us that we depend on one another, on the land, on the weather, on animals, on the world we live in.

And of course, ultimately, we depend on God – the one who fashions and shapes us, who brings us through the tests and trials of life, who as carpenter took up a wooden cross to give us life.

We pray to show our need.

Do it!

Rogation Day

It's Rogation Day!

"Eh? What's that?"

Well...um...let me see. Well, actually, today is the second of a set of three.

"There are three?"

Yes...these three days fall immediately prior to Ascension Day.

It's quite an ancient tradition - taking its root from the Latin 'Rogare', to ask - we spend time praying for our needs...for fruitful seasons and those who work on the land and sea; for our commerce and industry; and for the environment that God might help us care for the world, to help us be good stewards.

There are three special prayers (collects) for these days:

Almighty God,
whose will it is that the earth and the sea
should bear fruit in due season:
bless the labours of those who work on land and sea,
grant us a good harvest
and the grace always to rejoice in your fatherly care;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Almighty God and Father,
you have so ordered our life
that we are dependent on one another:
prosper those engaged in commerce and industry
and direct their minds and hands
that they may rightly use your gifts in the service of others;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

God our Father,
you never cease the work you have begun
and prosper with your blessing all human labour:
make us wise and faithful stewards of your gifts
that we may serve the common good,
maintain the fabric of our world
and seek that justice where all may share
the good things you pour upon us;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

We often think that prayers of request are somehow crude, ugly and selfish. You must be a shallow Christian to pray such prayers...

The truth, of course, is that we never graduate from this form of prayer - all the meditation and mysticism cannot erase the fact that we NEED God. And this need drives us to our needs...we need forgiveness, guidance, energy, insight, healing, support, etc, etc.

Indeed, one could argue that we disobey God when we fail to ask..."until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete" (John 16:24)


You can read more about the roots of Rogation Days here.

Two busy weeks...

Christmas is fun, Lent is serious, Easter is joyful…but what of Ascensiontide?

Here we are it has been a month plus now since Easter…there’s some toe-tapping as we await Pentecost (which is always around my birthday). And yet, sandwiched at the end of Easter-tide this year are an exciting collection of Holy Days.

We are entering an exciting period in the Christian calendar…lots to feast our hearts and minds on, lots of inspiration…

-          Rogation Days
-          Feast of St Matthias
-          Ascension Day
-          Ascensiontide
-          Festivals for such luminaries as Dunstan, John & Charles Wesley, The Venerable Bede, and Augustine; plus commemorations for: Caroline Chisholm, Aldhelm, Philip Neri, and John Calvin….completed by
-          Pentecost.

The next fortnight is a liturgically rich time – something for everyone.

And we start on Monday 14 May with the first Rogation Day and the feast of St Matthias.

Where's the meat?

A new song I was told in the email...and once again utterly devoid of theology.

Our hearts are waiting for You
Our hearts are waiting for You
Earnestly seeking, awaiting our healing
Yes our hearts are waiting for You

We humble ourselves and pray
We humble ourselves and pray
Your love never failing, our God ever reigning
We humble ourselves and pray

Heal our land, we need Your Love
Restore us, restore us, we need Your touch again
Arise, arise, around us shine
Finally, hope is here, hope is here

Brian Pridham
Copyright ©2012 Planetshakers Ministries
International/Adm. Integrity Worship Music

What is this drivel?!

Grief or Gladness: the dilemma of Easter Saturday

I’m always confused about how to behave on the big feast/holy days through the year.

I am unhappy to ‘pretend’ to be an Israelite waiting for their Messiah, or a Shepherd hearing the angel’s good news (Advent and Christmas). We live in the aftermath of Jesus’ incarnation and we are in fact waiting for his return.

But I also appreciate the power of re-enactment. The nativity play somehow keeps the story alive, it reminds us of the cost. Buy also, Nativity plays are quite cute.

So imagine how I feel about Holy Week?!

In an even more profound sense, the faux-mourning and pretend grief get up my nose a bit. Why do we play-act at sadness? We live in the aftermath of Easter…that joyous defeat of death.

Furthermore, the reading from John 2 on Easter Saturday (I do prefer the moniker ‘Holy Saturday’ or ‘Silent Saturday’) drives this point home:

“18 The Jews then responded to him, “What sign can you show us to prove your
authority to do all this?” 19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and I
will raise it again in three days.” 20 They replied, “It has taken forty-six
years to build this temple, and you are going to raise it in three days?” 21 But
the temple he had spoken of was his body. 22 After he was raised from the dead,
his disciples recalled what he had said. Then they believed the scripture and
the words that Jesus had spoken.” (John 2:18-22, NIV)

The disciples had been told there would be a middle day. They just hadn’t remembered. But we do??! We know what follows Saturday.

So shouldn’t we actually be rather more upbeat about all this? Why mope about as though we had been abandoned by Jesus – let down, etc. Once we pass Good Friday shouldn't we get rather more excited - like the anticipation of a long-awaited film, or the return of a long-travelling loved one?

Perhaps; perhaps not.

But in truth I’m rather glad we re-live the grief. For, for in truth, as many commentators suggest, we find solace in Easter Saturday because our own lives are marked by great sorrow and sadness, abandonment and confusion. There is comfort in knowing God is comfortable with silent tears.

I think, however, we must remember Paul’s injunction in 1 Thessalonians to “not grieve as others who have no hope” (1 Thes. 4:13). We grieve with hope.

And this is perhaps why Easter Saturday is the great climax of Lent. The last day we use the Lenten liturgy.

After spending time during Lent meditating on our sin, we find ourselves in Holy Week reading from Lamentations which suggests we should respond in silence (Lam 2:10), penitence (2:10), weeping (v. 11, 18), crying out to God (v.18 – much like the Psalmist in Psalm 142, the morning prayer psalm for Easter Saturday), a sense in which we come and pour our heart out before God (v.19). This is no play acting. And yet is precisely the range of activites we imagine the disciples engaging in. We come on Easter Saturday and sit in our own place. We now know Jesus is resurrected, but this understanding also makes us realise our part in his death – it was not a failed political venture, but a great act of mercy.

I am constantly, throughout Lent, repeating in worship and in private prayer the great cry from Hosea: “Come, let us return to the LORD.”

There is great promise in Hosea – that God will heal, bind up, revive, raise up, but also that he’ll appear and come. (Hosea 6:1-6)

This Easter Saturday – knowing the full extent of God’s mercy – Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again – we may be moved to tears – that he did all this for me. In my sin, my own most grievous sin – he did all this for me. So perhaps my tears aren’t just from grief, but gratitude too.

Passiontide - Day 1

The 5th Sunday of Lent sees a shift in the tone of the season - it grows heavier, darker, deeper, sadder and more focused, almost transfixed to the cross.

Hence the reading, John 12:20-33, which is focused on the cost of the cross. But so many of us miss this...

Holy week is a funny thing you see. We have this dark, contemplative season where in a spirit of introspection and self-examination we seek to walk with Jesus and discern the many and varied ways our walk has become hobbled. Through Lent I realise that my walk is hampered by a limp, by ill-fitting shoes, by a rocky road...and then we hit Palm Sunday, which is all-too-often a joyous celebration. We play act and frankly lose the sheer irony of the day.

Yes - Jesus entered triumphally, but we know how it pans out. Why do we celebrate? Surely the spirit of lenten sadness should move us to weep that so many so quickly deserted Jesus, including his own.

And then we stumble into Easter Day - the high point in our calendar.

Consider this...if you take the four Sundays including Mothering Sunday (4th Sunday in Lent) you can quite easily lose entirely the Lent theme: Mothers' Day, 5th Sunday, Palm Sunday, and Easter Day...the effect is exacerbated if one doesn't go to any church events during Holy Week...one could ignore the agony of the cross entirely!

Therefore - allow me to try and take you on that path of lamentation that Passiontide requires...

In John 12:20-33 we find Jesus in a deeply contemplative mood. "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified". Not quite the response Andrew and Philip expect when informing Jesus he has some guests to entertain. One writer has suggested that the disciples have had to 'find' Jesus as he was withdrawing from public ministry. He is all too aware that his purpose was about to be fulfilled.

But this is not just his purpose - but he teaches us a valuable and essential Christian principle, "unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds"...and He goes on to repeat his thoughts on what discipleship looks like...a choice between life and death.

In our cell group we have been wrestling at length over this issue of following Jesus. In Mark 8 Jesus says you must deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow. And we began to think the three things are separate...the first is about submission, which requires us to let go of our own agenda and ambition; the third is about obedience. But taking up your cross is not just a euphemism for 'deny yourself'...it speaks directly to what needs to happen to us - we have to die, not just make a decision to serve or submit.

Like Jesus we too have to die. Paul writes about this in Romans 6: "We died to sin" (v.2)

Death...it's not something I seek, but Jesus seems to be saying, "pursue death, run at it, ensure that you have been killed off - you are useless to me as you are - your sinful self will prevent my greater glory, and oddly - will stop you living. You are worth more to me dead than alive - for when your zombie nature is killed, then you can be really alive, for I shall bring resurrection. This shadowland you currently live in is as nothing compared to the bright gloriousness of you as you are truly meant to be..."

....And still...fear remains.

But trust is essential - and obedience. I follow; he leads.

And even Jesus shrank away from the fact of his death. Even he, my Lord and King. Even he said - I am scared of death, but for God's glory, and his known purpose he set his face toward the cross.

And that is passiontide. The fixing of Jesus' face on the cross. It is where our eyes must also turn. We must look upon the horror and glory of the cross...and in our turn, follow.

O Love That Will Not Let Me Go

We've travelled a long way since last blogging...we've moved through the final day of Advent, through Christmas, Epiphany, some Ordinary time, and now we're well ensconced in Lent.

I'll be quite blunt. I'm really quite down at the minute - lots of externals in my life are going well, very well in some cases, but there are some personal problems bubbling along that are really tough to handle.

So I've been quite blessed - and comforted by the following hymn and its story:

The hymn 'O Love that will not let me go' was written by George Matheson.

'O Love That Will Not Let Me Go' was written on the evening of Matheson’s sister’s marriage.

His whole family had gone to the wedding and had left him alone. Quite odd you would suggest? And he writes of something which had happened to him that caused immense mental anguish.

There is a story of how years before, Matheson had been engaged. That was until his fiancé learned that he was going blind, and there was nothing the doctors could do. So she told him that she could not go through life with a blind man; and left him.

He went blind while studying for the ministry, and his sister had been the one who had taken care of him all these years, but now she too is gone.

Matheson had been a brilliant student, some say that if he hadn’t went blind he could have been the leader of the church of Scotland in his day. He had written a learned work on German theology and then wrote “The Growth of The Spirit of Christianity.” Louis Benson says this was a brilliant book but with some major mistakes in it. When some critics pointed out the mistakes and charged him with being an inaccurate student, he was heartbroken. One of his friends wrote, “When he saw that for the purposes of scholarship his blindness was a fatal hindrance, he withdrew from the field – not without pangs, but finally.”

So he turned to the pastoral ministry, and the Lord has richly blessed him, finally bringing him to a church where he regularly preached to over 1500 people each week.

But he was only able to do this because of the care of his sister and now she was married and gone.

Who will care for him, a blind man?

Not only that, but his sister’s marriage brought fresh reminder of his own heartbreak, over his fiancé’s refusal to “go through life with a blind man.”

It is the midst of this circumstance and intense sadness that the Lord gives him this hymn – written he says in 5 minutes! Looking back over his life, he once wrote that his was “an obstructed life, a circumscribed life… but a life of quenchless hopefulness, a life which has beaten persistently against the cage of circumstance, and which even at the time of abandoned work has said not “Good night” but “Good morning.”"

How could he maintain quenchless hopefulness in the midst of such circumstances and trials? His hymn gives us a clue.

“I trace the rainbow in the rain, and feel the promise is not vain” The rainbow image is a picture of the Lord’s commitment! It is a picture of the battle bow that appears when the skies are darkening and threaten to open up and flood the world again in judgment. But then we see that the battle bow is turned not towards us – but toward the Lord Himself!


O Love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul in thee;
I give thee back the life I owe,
That in thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be.

O light that followest all my way,
I yield my flickering torch to thee;
My heart restores its borrowed ray,
That in thy sunshine’s blaze its day
May brighter, fairer be.

O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.

O Cross that liftest up my head,
I dare not ask to fly from thee;
I lay in dust life’s glory dead,
And from the ground there blossoms red
Life that shall endless be.


- Amen -



There's a beautiful modern version by Jason Sears on Spotify. There's also a great live version on Jason's blog.

I'm also grateful to igracemusic.com for informing me of this story.