Baptist Worship, July 2003
Worse
than a weary way, brought us
almost too worn to take any more
at last
to
The bread in the Lord’s Supper
Surprise, gentle sure nourishment
How did we, ill-shod feet shuffling rough paths,
Death marching, come to such a grace station?
More
By perversity than perseverance
Idle habit,
deference learned in childhoood blocks
our walk out now.
So we sat through it all,
the spirit not at home, not consenting,
Rather walking abroad with all who in our age abandon church
Not because they do not believe, they say, but because
The church does not present the truth of God,
Not because they do not hunger for the bread of life,
they like to think, but
Because the bread of life is here no longer shared.
Thinking with them, I descend into deeper pew-misery,
Caught where I see no reason,
Hear no good news,
And that because here bad news runs off preacher’s ducking-issue back:
tales of genocidal Joshua, model Christian leader,
read as good advice today
read as though they put no question to our faith in God,
who as we sing puts his finger down into the congregation,
Humungously to say
Hey you! I love you! …
….(but not the Canaanites)
In reading tales of genocidal Joshua,
We follow the Lord’s orders,
Taking his book for leadership training in the church
While in the world we are not praying for today
Women await stoning
but anaesthetic preaching makes no mention
And does cannot bear to read
or make awakening comment
on the punishment of Achan
as contemporary issue for us.
This text and our world
Are so alike
Why then
Do we seem to like one
And dislike the other?
Why do we pay reverential attention to the historically distant
And ignore the one that presses on us now?
We no longer read ‘the signs of the times’
(I have not heard that text for a decade or more –
perhaps it is true
we live after the End of History)
But hear the message:
Heed what is said:
we should follow our leaders
picking up clues from Joshua
while squeamish selectivity
leaves out all his deathly violence
to make a paragon of evangelical love
If we are out of sorts with our leadership
We should not come to this table –
So the leader says
Deviating (could it be?)
From
Paul, who said
Come only if you discern the body
Present in the poor
Who must not be shamed away.
The table is the poor Lord’s,
Not the leaders’ –
Not merely wearied,
By this hour of song and sermon,
Offput,
Into despair
About gospel faded out of church
Yet this hard road brings us to the Bread
Gospel happens of a sudden
Here for us
A piece broken from the loaf,
Felt with tongue taste teeth,
Bread from God’s creation, speaking life
Through millennia evolving grasses
Through peaceful work,
Ploughshares not swords,
Tractors not tanks,
Life changing from seed to flour to bread,
To nourish, to cheer, to share
Peace of God
Giving life
Not genocide
Nor denying flight from genocide
Bread, ‘my body broken, for you’
flashes light after the long darkness,
God comes surprisingly,
longing for dawn miserably fainted quite
away
The bread of life –
Veritably
Gospel truly
But where
are the words of life
going with it?
Where Church?
***
This whatever it is reflects an experience in church, when there was a series of sermons in christian leadership, based on the book of Joshua. The killings were not mentioned or were spiritualised easily. Singing the song about having a great big God of love put no problem in the way of this preaching.
It reduced me to a despair I often feel in church, and reminds me how close I am to many who have left church in recent times, appalled by what is said and by the claims to authority for those who speak, coupled with the requirement of obedience or acquiescence. Here is a church that not merely has lost the Gospel, but does not know what it is doing.
The communion service came as a sudden relief – a reminder that God is not bound by the church. It reminds me of the forgotten disused hymn by William Cowper: ‘Sometimes a light surprises the Christian while he sings; It is the Lord who rises with healing in his wings…’
NOTES
For the question of Joshua, compare R Williams On Christian Theology p30-1 on reading the story of Abraham’s sacrificing Isaac – ‘the church finds out what it is saying by absorbing this scriptural exegesis from its own margins –‘
Couple with p40, note 22, Dennis Potter could not enter the community of formal Christian believing because he believed its jollity, triviality and half-truths masking suffering would deprive him of his power to write’ – That is what this poem is protesting against: preaching and pastoral care which is forever smiling, at the same even temper, out of a simple confidence in our God seeing us and the world is all right – which in view of how the world actually is, not only far away, but brought into church by many of the people who come, comes out of a massive insensitivity. This insensitivity is not the result of ill-will, or cynicism taught by experience, it is not even the result of lack of intelligence in both senses of the word (information and the ability to manage much information) – it comes most from a determination to live and speak within the limits of one sort of christian spirituality, possible to certain temperaments in protected conditions, like the church.