Harley Davidson's Mains ...

Saturday 19th August 2006. Remember the date. A day we got some snapshots of the future.

Most snapshots recall the past. These revealed the future. Vivid, exciting, almost bizarre; some people even said ‘surreal’.

But the future. The shape of things to come. The colours and sounds of the way it’s going to be.

Some folk blinked and had to take a second look. Some folk had to pinch themselves. Some folk thought they must be dreaming.

And some folk maybe hoped that they were dreaming too! Because, please, I mean this was hardly what we’re used to here, not the way it’s always been.

I tell you, this was all a little bit confusing and a whole lot more disturbing for those tidy, blinkered minds that like the status quo.

Snapshots of the future. God’s future: the way it’s meant to be: the way it’s going to be. ‘You want to know just where I mean to take you as my church?’ the Lord enquires: ‘well, take a look at this!’

It was a ceilidh (I’ve got to ease you into this gently! And I know the very notion that the church might be a ceilidh is itself perhaps a stumbling block to some. But if it is – well, maybe you should simply shut your eyes and click the X and not read any more. It gets worse! Or better, depending who you are!)

It was a ceilidh we ran for the girls and the boys of the African Children’s Choir. Not just a stunning splash of colour, but a sometimes quite chaotic clash of cultures too: kilted Celts and eager, young, kaleidoscopic kids from far off lands, combining like the waters where two currents cross – a dancing mass of movement that was often one big mess!

Our jigs and reels may well be second nature at a gathering of the clans. But they haven’t much in common with your average tribal dance (except, of course, the rhythms of the music and the rolling, mirrored movements which ensue).

If you move your ceilidhs out beyond the confines of the clans .. well, it all gets rather messy. Enormous fun, a bag of laughs – but, let’s be clear, a mess!

Which is strange. Because it seems as if the God who brought such order to the thing we call the world is quite prepared, and even rather keen, himself to live with such a mess!

And it gets worse.

Or better – depending again how you feel about the picture of our future which God gives.

For the children arrived from the centre of town on the back of some big motorbikes.

Harley Davidson bikes: complete with their laid-back, stubbled riders, resplendent in their armour of the road. Loud, noisy bikes. The real thing.

Their engines revving and roaring, music thumping and pumping out sound: headlights blazing, horns sounding. I tell you, they arrived in some style!

A convoy of twenty or more, streaming down the Main Street of our quiet suburban life, then riding down the little, sloping lane towards the church. And tucked behind each leather-laden biker was a beaming, dark-skinned child.

And there they were, dismounted at last, these riders from a very different world, joking, smoking, all at home and quite at ease, the blackness of their leathers somehow blending with the darkness of the children’s skins to build a sort of bridge between two vastly different cultures which in any other place could simply not exist at all.

And the multi-coloured clothing of the children, in their turn, gently merging with the brightly coloured garments of their kilted Scottish hosts to weave a whole new tartan of their own.

A messy sort of shepherd’s pie of bikes and blokes and smiles and smoke and kilts and Celts and heather and leather and … well, you name it, it was all there.

A teeming mass of cultures, with a heady mix of very different gifts.

The bikers with their down-to-earth and hit-the-road-with-rubber style of goodness as they met some very basic needs and got these orphaned children on the road.

The locals with their warm and ready welcome, so hospitable and kind – with food and drink to satisfy the hunger and the thirst these people had and make it clear that what we see as being so much our spiritual home must always be, in every sense, an open house.

And the children with their stunning gift of song. They stood on the steps in the evening sun and smiled and sang. A blessing. They invoked in their song the blessing of God on the bikers who’d brought them thus far.

And these tough men, their leather kit bedecked with metal badges so suggestive of the hard and rocking culture whence they came, being touched and moved by music from a very different world that bathed them, head to foot, with sounds so soft and pure they’d melt the hardest heart.

No shuffling around of nervous feet. No knowing little glances to their pals. No hint of any yawning, bored disinterest. The bikers simply stood there. Silent. Transfixed. Gob-smacked.

Blessed.

A snapshot of the future. The way it’s meant to be.

Messy? Sure. For those who like things always neat and tidy this is not the place to be! But, if like God himself, you can revel in the mess this mix of cultures will involve – then stick around and strive to see these rich, prophetic snapshots being fulfilled! Join the party!

Did nothing, went nowhere

We were chatting the other day about our respective summer holidays: unlike a Sunday sermon, my resume was short and to the point – I did nothing and went nowhere.

Four weeks of my life, summarised quite simply like that. Afterwards, when I thought of what I’d said, I started to worry.

I realised how easy it is to spend four weeks doing nothing: and, I have to say, how surprisingly enjoyable it actually is as well!

Then I started to figure that if, without any effort, you can spend four weeks of your life doing nothing and going nowhere, it may be just as easy to extend that out to four decades.

That’s a somewhat troubling line of thought! What have I been doing over the last four decades of my life? (For me, that’s since I started secondary education).

How would it feel to find you’ve spent the last forty years of your life effectively doing … well, nothing?

And where have I been going these last four decades? Just round and round in circles with the routines of a daily life I never really stop to think about at all? Just drifting in a dreamworld that I’ve filled with good intentions but have never made reality? Just running on the spot?

Scary, the ease with which a whole life might be frittered away. How easy and, worse still, how pleasantly enjoyable to do nothing and go nowhere!

But that, I’m starting to think, that seems to be the basic default setting on the hard-drive of my self-indulgent heart. Which is more than a little bit worrying!

Because it isn’t what I want at all. If life is one long ‘holy day’, I don’t want to reach its end and find my whole life summarised like that. I mean, what a fine one-liner that’ll be to have written on my tomb – He did nothing and went nowhere!

And yet, of course, while that briefly-stated summary of my four week summer break may be entirely accurate, it’s hardly the full story. I didn’t really do absolutely nothing.

It’s simply that the things I did don’t register at all on any sort of Richter scale of news: the little daily diary of my trivial pursuits can hardly have significance compared with all the headline-making players all around.

But yes, it wasn’t absolutely nothing that I did.

I married a son, for one thing: a son who might have died a year or two ago, but now is very much alive: and living his life with the girl whom he plainly adores.

Which meant a week or so of people, plans and partying ‘til all hours of the night. A healthy, fun reminder of the things that really matter in this life.

I pottered around in that patch of ground behind the house which, when I work hard on it, I sometimes feel I can rightly call a garden: a pleasant, restful sun-trap to relax in and enjoy. Conducive to reflection.

I read a good few books – and a few of them quite good as well! And the good ones took me places, as they do: secreting me away to other worlds, for days on end – shaping and then sharpening my perspective on this very factual world in which I live.

I climbed a mountain. Lochnagar. Strange to have a mountain called a loch! But the loch that gives the peak its name is quite a sight and the tumbling, white-streaked waterfall the other side was more than worth the sweat involved in getting there.

A sort of gentle training day for all that lies ahead. Mountain-sized adventures with some glories on the other side which, I have no doubt, I’ll really have to see to comprehend.

I even had a practice run of setting out, not knowing where it was that I would end.

A day beginning with worship in Perth, then on out into the highland hills, ambling, rambling through the glens – more drawn, I think in hindsight, than simply aimless drifting; drawn by some strange magnetism within, it seemed, until I found myself on Skye and the dark, compelling splendour of the jagged Cuillin mountain tops.

As if this was a taster for the lifestyle of such living which these coming days will bring. Going out to God knows where. Where the wind will take me. Reaching for and climbing up the hazard-laden heights of all those fresh horizons in my life.

I came back from there with a smile on my face and the dream of such living now pulsing afresh through all of my soul. Ready. Prepared. Eager for the action!

So it wasn’t really nothing that I did. And it wasn’t really nowhere that I went.

It’s just it sometimes seemed that way these last four weeks. And maybe that’s what these last four decades have been for me as well.

Simply getting me ready; making me prepared; giving me a hunger for the action which is now about to start.

Everybody's going surfing...?

Newquay in August is the place to be – if you’re a surfer: or, I suppose, if you’re just up for a bit of fun. More than 200 surfers from all over the world descend on the place to take part in the championships there: and a whole load of others go along for the party as well!

Newquay isn’t Hawaii, of course – which is a big pity, in a lot of ways. But though the ‘tubes’ (a technical term – picture the massive wave curling over and, well, there’s your ‘tube’) are hardly what you’d find in its Pacific island counterpart, and are in fact mainly rather tame, there’s enough to offer surfing of a sort.

It’s really not a very complicated thing at all. To understand, I mean. It gets a little challenging when you try and do it yourself!

You hardly need to be a surfing buff to know that when the right wave comes, you’ve really got to take the plunge (in a manner of speaking – you’re already in the water, of course!) and ride it to the full. Good waves aren’t like Edinburgh buses that generally come in threes. Miss your wave and you could have a while to wait!

In other words, don’t miss your opportunities.

Even William Shakespeare understood that as a basic rule of thumb: and he was hardly into surfing (well, presumably not). The famous words he put into the mouth of Brutus (yes, the self-same Et tu, Brute? guy) in the play Julius Caesar make the point well (even if the language is a little flowery and long – and the context just a tad less kind and loving than we’d like) –

There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

Carpe Diem, as they used to say when Latin was the language people spoke (whenever that was!). Seize the day! Take your opportunities.

Who wants to live their life ‘in shallows and in miseries’ after all? I mean, do we really want to spend our days footering around in a safe and sad irrelevance? Why paddle in the knee-deep, frothy waves, already broken, as they trundle up the shore, when we could be further out and riding like a ruler of the seas out on the rolling, curving breaking of the ocean’s swell?

Surf the wave! Seize the day! Take your opportunities.

I’m sure that’s what the Lord is saying to us here in these auspicious days in which we live. God has been at work down through the years and year by year the swelling waves of his great Spirit’s work among us here have grown their own momentum as they’ve rolled right up the shoreline of our common life.

That tide of grace is reaching now its highest point, its flood. If ever we would launch out in pursuit of all that God would wish his church to be, if ever we would hoist the sails, embarking on adventure with the risen Christ and sharing in his shaping of the future of the world – then now’s the time.

These are days when the tide of God’s grace is at its flood. This is the day of opportunity: this is the year of grace: this is the wave to be riding.

So here’s a simple ‘surfer’s guide’ to what you need, if you would ‘seize the day’ and ride the waves and take the tide of grace when it is at its flood.

First, get yourself a wet-suit. Or a swimming costume of some sort. In other words, you’re going to have to get wet: you can’t do surfing without getting into the water. You must make a pretty basic choice. Are you just going to watch from the shoreline, as others step out and embark on adventure with God? Or are you going to get yourself into the water and be part of the adventure too? Get yourself a wet-suit. Be open to all that God is saying, all that God is purposing to do, all that God will give.

Second, cultivate vision. You need to be able to pick out in advance the wave that’s there to surf: to spot it coming maybe fifty or a hundred metres further out. You get the picture? We need to learn both to expect and then to recognise the voice and call of God: we need to learn to trace those subtle, rolling movements of the Spirit of the Lord and thus be in position when that wave is ripe to break – ready to ride when the wave arrives: ready to travel on the crest of the Spirit’s movement in our world: ready to go where God directs and journey where he takes us.

Third, be bold! There comes a point, obviously, when you’ve got to get onto your board. And, yes, there’s risk involved. The risk you’ve picked a wave that comes to nothing. The risk the wave will take you where you hadn’t planned to go. The risk you’ll lose your balance and go tumbling down the ‘tubes’. Sure, there’s risk involved. Embarrassment at failure, maybe bruises from the buffeting you’ll take. Jesus doesn’t call us to be masters on the seas of his adventure in this world: just learners. He calls us to follow and accepts there’ll be failure: that’s part of the learning curve: that’s part of the risk involved.There comes a point when we’ve got to get onto our board and ride with him the Spirit’s rolling waves. That point has come. That time is now. That wave is here.

Don’t let’s miss that opportunity!