Catching God's rhythm

Today I'll be reflecting on Psalm 4 at our afternoon and evening gatherings.

It's one of those psalms we tend not to notice but which is foundational for the spirituality of the book as a whole. It forms a pair with Psalm 5, the latter being a morning Psalm, while Psalm 4 is an evening psalm. Together they draw us into God's time zone.

They put prayer into the rhythm of Genesis 1 with its refrain of 'evening and morning' as it counts the symbolic days of creation. They are rooted in God's core principle that we work from rest and not vice versa - hence the evening coming before the morning in God's time zone (this is why the Jewish sabbath starts on Friday evening and ends at sunset on Saturday).

We see it in the fact that human beings were made in God's image to carry out his mandate of managing creation on day 6, then on day 7, their first full day on the planet, everyone rests: we work from a place of resting in our relationship with God.

And that's what this psalm is calling us to at the end of the day, before we go to sleep to be refreshed for the adventure of the coming day.

And as it does, it reminds us that without our relationship with God, without his Spirit at work in us, his word giving our lives shape and meaning, we are, like the earth at the start of Genesis 1, formless and void. Hence the psalm starts with anxious asking - playing out the anxieties the day has so often left us with - but ends in quiet trust in the one who gives our lives shape and hope.

In between verses 1 and 8, in a framework of trust and gratitude for all that God has given, it commends an evening dialogue with ourselves as we settle into bed that reviews the day, lays open its disappointments and failures and offers ourselves afresh our lives as living sacrifices to the God who calls us through sleep into the working day ahead (v5).

This psalm (along with its close partner) is God's gift of a rhythm of life built on trust and partnership with the creator who shapes our days according to his grand design. Why not weave it into your daily devotional pattern?

Praying on the tourist trail

One of my meetings was cancelled today so I had a bit of time once I got into London. I strolled up Whitehall, picking my way over the trailing cables and manoeuvring in and out of gaggles of tourists and journalists waiting for something to happen and into the National Gallery.

It was as ever a place of tranquility and calm. There were groups of primary age children crowded round a painting having it explained to them and a few others wondering between paintings, whispering to one another.

I spent a good deal of time looking at the two wonderful Piero Della Francesca paintings the gallery has in their own viewing space.

The better known of the two is the Baptism of Jesus, a painting of such stillness it is impossible not to stop and contemplate it. The figure of Jesus is serene and prayerful but captured leaning slightly towards the viewer, as if  inviting us to share his moment of commitment to John's movement. Above him a perfectly stationary dove waits to complete her descent on to God's Son. It's as if Piero has frozen the action and invited the viewers to come and linger over the scene: Jesus at the start of his public ministry - what does it hold for him, what does it mean for us?

To the right of it is his less well known nativity. The painting looks unfinished, yet the backdrop appears very similar to the one in the baptism painting, suggesting it's drawn from Piero's own home town where he did a lot of his work. The simplicity of the execution looks intentional on Piero's part. This is not the cluttered nativity so commonly found in the work of his contemporaries. It is a sparse scene: a simply dressed Mary kneels before her infant who reaches up to his mother. A choir of angels with lutes sing to him. Joseph and the shepherds chat in the background.

Again Piero captures a moment of stillness, contemplation and devotion. Mary prays while Jesus reaches up to her, a suggestion that the Son of God responds when we call. And yet Jesus is also 'calling,' wanting feeding, affection, the tender human touch of a mother.

These are works of genius, beautifully composed and executed. But they also appear to be works of deep faith inviting the viewer into the life of prayer that is at the heart of them. It's wonderful to be able to able to step out of the bustle of Trafalgar Square into this holy space.

Praying in the midst of the credit crunch

There's a good prayer we should all be praying posted here (scroll down) - and reproduced below:

Lord God, we live in disturbing days:
across the world,
prices rise,
debts increase,
banks collapse,
jobs are taken away,
and fragile security is under threat.
Loving God, meet us in our fear and hear our prayer:
be a tower of strength amidst the shifting sands,
and a light in the darkness;
help us receive your gift of peace,
and fix our hearts where true joys are to be found,
in Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Many in our congregations will be feeling less secure and increasingly anxious in these uncertain times. And they will continue to feel these long after the headlines have moved on to the next crisis. So let's keep praying for those particularly affected by these testing times.

Going deep with God

I've been preparing material on Matthew 6 for preaching and home groups over the past couple of days. It's amazing - I suppose I shouldn't be surprised - but no matter how familiar texts like the sermon on the mount are, they always have a freshness, almost a strangeness when you come to preach and teach on them again.

We're in a series on the teaching sections - the so-called discourses - of Matthew, having started with the final 5 verses of the gospel where Jesus tells us to make disciples and teach them all that he's commanded. Matthew clearly thought the teaching sections were important because that's why he constructed his gospel the way he did.

I think it's quite likely that the gospel was used in some way as a discipleship manual for Matthew's circle of churches and probably quite quickly much further afield as people got wind of its existence. I'm not much persuaded that he wrote for a tiny community, still less that it's mainly a polemic against other takes on the story of Jesus, especially Paul's.

It seems to me that it's an open-hearted, pastorally-guided account of the life of the Christ with the aim of helping disciples grow and fulfil their calling to make other disciples through their lifestyle and conversation.

That being said, the sermon on the mount becomes an essential guide to the revolution Jesus invites us to be part of. And Matthew 6 is the essential guide to the spirituality of that revolution.

What struck me as I read it to preach it was the refrain about reward and still more strikingly the introduction that describes giving, praying and fasting as 'acts of righteousness'. We'd call them acts of devotion or spirituality. Jesus calls them acts of righteousness. He probably has in mind a contrast between his followers and the scribes and pharisees (who he spoken of in relation to this in 5:20).

But what's all this about rewards (6:1b, 4, 6, 18). Jesus can't be saying that our salvation is a reward for our piety because he's made it clear in the beatitudes that membership of the Kingdom community is a gift from God. The reward seems to be that as we give, pray and fast in the way Jesus outlines, we get closer to God, nearer to his heart that aches for our world, more drawn into his Kingdom and his revolution.

I was thinking of this when I met someone who's very serious about their devotional life which combines elements of Buddhist and Christian practice (with a emphasis on the former). As I spoke with this person I found myself marvelling at two things - the depth and seriousness of their practice (it cost them dearly in terms of time and commitment) and why I don't it replicated in many Christians.

We can be very casual about our piety, our devotional lives. Evangelicals in particular are prone to be spontaneous activists who don't have much time for reflection, let alone meditation. We tend to think that extempore praying is so much better than using set prayers and liturgies and hence we tend to repeat ourselves a bit and use God's name as a form of punctuation.

I wonder if this is why Jesus calls our piety 'acts of righteousness': he wants to stress how serious and essential it is that we go deep in these areas because without depth with God in secret our lives in the world be very shallow.

Prayer's strange ways

I'm now focusing on our church conference - in ten days time - and Prism - the alternative stream of the Baptist Assembly in Brighton over the May Bank Holiday Weekend that I am co-ordinating with others.

In fact, I've had a good day lining people up to be involved in various of the evening celebrations at Prism - as well as raising last minute queries about the layout of the venue.

Mostly today, though, I've been catching up with an old friend and talking about prayer. She's doing a project for the 24/7 prayer boiler room in Guildford and asked me about any really great times of prayer I could remember, times when I saw God move in a particular way. I mentioned one or two things and then told her a story that I nearly included in Building A Better Body, but couldn't find the words for at the time.

It concerns the time back in the mid-90s when Britain was swept by the so-called Toronto Blessing. Our church wanted some of whatever God was doing. So we had a week of meetings in the early autumn - it must have been September or October 1993 or 94. Each evening we met to pray and see what happened. We sang, looked at the Bible and waited on God. Some people fell over; others brought words of prophecy and insight; all of us felt God come close at various times through the week.

I'm not sure what we were expecting, but I don't think it happened (if that makes sense). But we ended the week feeling it had been worthwhile.

A couple of weeks later, a young woman, Ellie, expecting her first child, died and the church was rocked to its core. I tell this story in Building A Body. In many ways this story marks my time at that church and has shaped my ministry since more than I probably realise.

Looking back on those events, I see God working in that week of prayer to prepare us for the wave of grief that broke over us later that autumn. I don't think I'd have coped if we hadn't had those moments of closeness with God; I don't think the church would have come together in the wake of the tragedy but for our week of praying.

I wish I'd put the story in the book because in many ways it illustrates one of the things that church is about - being there for one another in the presence of our awesome, mysterious God.