I believe

I am the king of all I survey, ruling a great and mighty empire. Other nations and their gods fall before my armies. Who is like unto me? Who can compete with my power and glory? I am the chosen vessel of Bel and Marduk, the gods of my people, and perhaps I have outstripped even them in glory. My power knows no limit. I move peoples and nations according my whim, mixing them up so that they might become one people, just as when water and wine are mixed together and cannot be separated again.  But is it enough?

No, it is not enough. I want more than just their subservience, I want their worship. I have ordered the construction of a mighty golden image of myself. Who is fitter than I am to receive the worship, the homage, the adoration of the people of Babylon? I am Nebuchadnezzar and I believe that I am a god.

……………………………………………………………

My name is Nebuchadnezzar and I am not a god, just a foolish and vainglorious man. I believe that there is one true God in the universe, the Most High, King of Kings and Lord of Lords. The only power any man has is the power that the Most high allows him to have.

I should have known, I should have believed much sooner. First there were the boys who refused to eat the idolatrous meats from my table, yet they throve. (How could I not have seen? How could I not have known? But pride is a terrible blindness). Then there was my prophetic dream of the large statue made of various materials, which no one but Belteshazzar, prophet of the Most High God, could discern or interpret. He told me then that it was his God who was the revealer of mysteries. I should have known when those three Hebrews refused to bow to my image and I had them thrown in the fierce flames but they did not burn. Instead they walked around in the furnace with the same ease with which I walk around my private gardens, and they were in the company of another who was as glorious as a son of the gods. How could I not have realised that He was so much greater than I?

But I persisted in my folly. I was warned in a dream to change the direction of my heart, for the Most High is merciful beyond man’s comprehension, but I was wedded to my pride, so the King of Heaven humbled me so that I might be delivered. In the very hour when I raised my voice to declare that the glory of Babylon was a reflection of the glory and majesty of myself a voice from Heaven de3clared my sentence. Everything I treasured was taken from me, I was driven forth from the city, and, with my sanity vanished, my very humanity disintegrated. For seven years I lived like a beast of the field, filthy, unkempt, unsheltered, eating grass like mindless cattle. I had neither majesty nor dignity.

After seven years came a moment of blessed clarity, and I lifted up my heart in praise of Him who orders the kingdoms of men and gives them to whomsoever He pleases. And my kingdom was restored to me.

Now I believe and declare that all glory dominion and power belong to God. His kingdom, and his alone, has dominion over all the world and shall endure for all generations. And all He does is right and true and just.

Two hundred and three million

Two Hundred and three million

(the number of victims of genocide in the 20^th Century)

Two hundred and three million

And our tears are turned to ash,

Scattered by dry winds.

There was a time they laughed,

Looked at the sky,

Tasted music in the wind,

And touched with love.

There was a time their stumbling tongues

Learned speech; their stumbling legs

Learned to walk, run, hop, skip,

To dance … to dance …

Till all the dancing stopped,

The walls went up,

The blade came down,

The shots spun through the dark:

Humanity

Denied itself again.

Take up your tears,

Two hundred and three million

Have scarcely stirred the dust on barren graves,

The pitiless dust on barren, silent graves,

One drop for each is more than we can spare.

In a world gone mad with madness,

Who will dare

Name the unnameable,

Take up the mirror,

(The one that does not glow with rose-pink light,

Or Hollywood halos flashing)

To show our social garments of compassion

For the rude rags that deck our empty hearts.

Let the wind take up their cry.

Let the earth blench with shame to have covered such a burden.

Let the songbirds cease their songs.

Let the flowers hesitate to bloom

Let the angels of heaven stand in the places where we failed to.

Let there be light,

Remorseless light –

Blaze into our darkness

Till the excuses die upon our tongues.

“Any man’s death diminishes me”

We have hardened our hearts

Lest the knowledge break us.

We have turned away our faces

Lest we see they look like us.

We have clasped our hands behind our backs

Afraid of driving nails,

Afraid of life, afraid of human blood,

Afraid of being vulnerable like them.

I cannot pretend to walk

With the burning compassion of the angels.

It is easy not to care.

Two hundred and three million had no choice.

Two hundred and three million call my name.

In the Name

They knew they had done nothing wrong. In fact, it was a work of mercy of the highest order, the very sort that their Master used to do. Now they would continue, for His sake and in His name. But they also knew exactly why they had been arrested – because they had done this act of healing in the name of the One whom the priestly party had condemned to death with agitated ferocity.

It had been a completely spontaneous response. A crippled beggar had asked for money, but they had none to give, so they had given what they could. “Silver and gold I do not have, but what I do have I will give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and walk!” And the man had done just that, jumping up and putting the new-found strength in his legs through its paces, all the while praising god for this miraculous gift.

And the crowd was astounded. The ripples of attention spread out rapidly as the immediate witnesses told others what had just happened. “Did you see that?” they said to one another, and soon everyone was thronging around to see for themselves, for the crippled beggar was well-known. An explanation was in order, and Peter and John were only too happy to give it. The very Jesus who had been handed over to death by the people of Jerusalem, was the one whom God had raised from the dead, and they were His witnesses to proclaim this wonder to the world. And men believed.

But the priestly council, the same people who had bribed the soldiers to cover up the truth of Jesus’ resurrection, were not pleased at all, so they had arrested  and imprisoned Peter and John, and now they were going to question them. “By what power or name did you do this?”

It was the crucial question, and the answer was the resurrected Jesus, the same person whom these very men, gathered here, had condemned to death and turned over to the Roman authorities to be crucified. And now they had the opportunity to preach of their Christ to the ones who were his murderers. Peter did not hesitate. He had met the risen Lord, he had been filled, changed and renewed by the Holy Spirit. He was no longer the one who had denied his Master three times before the cock crowed twice on that fateful night.  In the name of Jesus, their crucified and risen Lord, they had raised a crippled beggar to walk on his own strong legs, to the praise and glory of God. There was, after all, no other name under heaven by which men might be saved.

To the Shadow

Yes, we have touched, have met

In the woods where we passed

There, when the sun grew cold

And blight lay on the grass.

I heard you in the trees,

The wind betrayed your course.

I had no energy

To trace you to your source

There, while the morning burned,

I was a flattened thing

Laid low with so much ease

By the brush of your wing.

I am so very small,

You, a monstrosity,

Mighty to shake my world,

Mighty to fall on me.

Yet I know all that tale

Which you would not have told,

Of your triumphant day

When sun and moon grew cold.

Oh, it was all a lie,

Your famous victory –

It took one empty tomb

To crush you utterly.

You still breathe venomed breath

Where paths grow hard and grim;

Yet you are dead, oh death!

All is restored in Him.

For Good Friday

As the bird shelters nestlings

In the shadow of its wing

Whatever storm may rage,

So you have sheltered me

In the shadow of the cross

And the worst has not come nigh me.

Sometimes I almost sense

The thud of hammer strokes,

Unimaginable tear of flesh,

The scream of worlds unmaking,

And I turn my head away

That the worst may not come nigh me.

Sometimes I almost sense

The blood-lust of the crowd

(It is not so far away)

Where justice bends to evil

And the social contract shreds:

May the worst still not come nigh me!

Sometimes I almost sense

The bright, clean light depart,

Dark where dark should not be

Swallowing friendly stars,

With death’s entirety

And the worst has not come nigh me.

Sometimes I almost sense

The mockery that kills,

The laughter born in hell

That splinters like cruel glass

And stabs with poisoned stroke,

But the worst has not come nigh me.

………………………………………………………….

I climb again that hill

Standing aloof from time

Trying to face those wounds

Which should have all been mine.

I cannot hold them fast,

No longer mine to bear,

All that I see is love,

Love that is everywhere.

All that I see is you,

Welcome upon your face,

Under that crown of thorns

Shines such transcendent grace,

No portioning of blame,

No tallying of sin,

Only your arms stretched wide

To take a whole world in.

The Servants

What does a servant do when the Master is absent? A faithful servant follows the Masters instructions, and waits for his return. And so they waited, and they prayed. The sense of expectation was heavy in the air. It wasn’t at all like the Master’s last absence. That time, brief though it was, had been the nadir of their lives. He died, and it was as if they tasted his death in their own beings – the death of hope, the death of meaning, the death of laughter, the death of love. In their loss of him they had tasted, though they hardly had words to name it, the death of their God.

But the darkness was over and the morning had come, the fairest since that time when the morning stars had sung together. Death itself had been overcome, and though they understood that they would never walk with him and talk with him in the same old way again, they also knew that they would be with him forever. He had only gone on ahead. And he had not left them as orphans, he was sending them Another, the indwelling Spirit, and he would be with them soon. They waited now in joy, not terrified grief.

And so the servants waited. They were not sure what to expect. They had the old stories, to be sure, of what the Spirit had done in the past, but they knew that this was supposed to be different, that it would be something that had never happened before in the history of the world. And so they wondered. They waited, they wondered and they prayed.

And the Spirit came to them on the Day of Pentecost, with a sound like a mighty rushing wind coming down to them from heaven, and it seemed that the whole house was filled with it. And, as they watched each other, amazed, it seemed that there was fire too, which separated into individual tongues of flame, resting on each person. Their hearts were full, their courage was set aflame with love that cast out fear, and their tongues were loosed into new languages, as if Babel had never happened. For when Babel was built among men they had sought to raise themselves up, but now God had come down, and fierce was the joy of that hour. Once, on Sinai, there had been flame and rumblings and smoke, and a thick darkness where God was, and Israel, constituted as a nation in that hour, had been shaken in terror. Now, as the church came into being, the servants were filled with wonder.

And the servants were released to serve in a whole new way. A short few weeks before, they had cowered in immobilising fear, now they came forth, borne by the power of God to speak words of world-shattering truth. Their waiting was over.

A Humble Beginning

They never gave him a thought. He was the runt of the family, little thought of, little cared for: a grubby kid whose only possible worth to the family was to send him out to watch the sheep. He did seem to be reasonably capable of that, despite his dreaminess and his tendency to want to sit and make up music all day. What use to the family was that? A boy like that needed to be constantly put in his place lest he start imagining he was somebody special. And when they muttered to each other in annoyance, his older brothers never gave a passing thought to another younger brother, centuries before, whose older brothers, irritated beyond measure, had sold him into slavery.  That boy, Joseph, had risen to be above them all, but what of that? After all, these brothers had no intention of treating the kid that way. Out of sight was out of mind.

So when the prophet came to visit they scrubbed up, dressed up, and went nervously out to greet him. What was their little town to warrant such attention? What did Samuel (or, more alarmingly, Samuel’s God) want with them? It wasn’t a comfortable meeting, and they never gave a thought to that uppity kid as they organised themselves. Their father, Jesse, was one of the elders of the town, so they were present when Samuel was greeted. He assured them that he had come in peace and only wanted to offer a sacrifice. He invited them to consecrate themselves and attend. The brothers felt honoured to be included, and even more honoured when the prophet asked their father to present them to him, one by one. But as each of the seven was presented, the prophet searched their faces as if he was trying to see into the deepest parts of their hidden selves. There was a sense, a very disturbing sense, that he was looking for something that wasn’t there, that these brothers, handsome and tall in the prime of their young manhood, lacked something important.

The prophet said nothing, however, until he had inspected all seven, then he turned to Jesse and said, “The Lord has not chosen these.” There was an awkward silence while each wondered what it was that he had failed. Then Samuel continued, “are these here all of your sons?”

Jesse was startled, but he knew better than to lie to a prophet of God. “No,” he said slowly, “there is another one, but he’s out in the fields with the sheep.”

Samuel ordered him to send for the boy. “We will not sit down until he comes,” he said.

So they sent for the boy, David, and when he came in, to their immense astonishment, Samuel rose up, took his horn of oil and anointed the boy. The brothers didn’t dare catch each other’s eyes. What did this mean? But before they could gather their wits to find a way to ask, Samuel had risen up and gone on his way back to Ramah where he lived. But they knew that something had changed and something very important had happened.

It took years before it became clear – years of persecution and humiliation, years where they wondered if the boy had any idea what he was doing and why it was that he kept putting himself in danger. It all seemed too crazy to be true, and too horrible to contemplate. But then it came to pass, and David became the king of Israel, a far greater king than Saul had ever been. And even then they did not see the whole of his glory, how he was named a King after the Lord’s own heart, and how he was the great ancestor of the Messiah. They had no idea that, millennia later, his songs would be sung around the world by millions who had no drop of Jewish blood in their veins. He was, after all, their kid brother.