hallelujah

Hallelujah or Alleluia...it's that time of year when Christians say it a lot! It means 'praise ye the Lord' or 'Dudes! Let's praise God!'.  We say it to encourage one another to recognise how awesome God is.  It feels a particularly powerful word just after Easter in the Church of England because we have tried to avoid saying it in Lent during the six weeks that run up to Easter.  Why?  Because we are waiting for Jesus to be fully revealed as a different sort of Lord and King.  A King who was enthroned on a cross, killed by those he chose to forgive as he showed that through him - Jesus - nothing can separate us from the love of God.


Nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8.38-9).


After Easter I went off to Spring Harvest with my church.  Spring Harvest is a big Christian conference with thousands of people gathered together to study the bible, pray and sing to God, and learn more about how to live the Christian life.  Whilst I was there we had the privilege to hear from someone who had spent many years in prison in North Korea for being a Christian.  It was a distressing and powerful story to hear which involved the killing of family members, brutal torture, hard labour, and unbearable living conditions.  In this place of sleeping on cold concrete, rat and insect infected, piled up in small rooms with people who died in the night and whose bodies were often not removed for days...in this place the whispered gatherings of a handful of people kept faith and hope alive.


As Christian believers passed each other they would whisper to each other 'hallelujah'.  What an extraordinary word to whisper into the face of unbelievable oppression. Hallelujah.  What is it about Jesus that draws praise from the lips of someone in the midst of such intense suffering?  Hallelujah.  I think it is this truth that there is no place to which God is not prepared to go to with you so that it can be healed and redeemed.  And in that truth is hope. 


Leonard Cohen sings of hallelujahs that are cold, hallelujahs that are broken, hallelujahs that are holy.  Choosing to praise the Lord does not always come from a place of joy and peace. Sometimes it may not even come from a place of hope.  But the hallelujah that emerges as a trailing whisper from the very end of ourselves will always connect us to the One who knows our end from our beginning, who holds our lives together. 

The Bible's boring bits

This year I am reading the Bible through in a year.  I try and do that every other year so I can keep in mind the big picture of the story of God and God's people, whilst on the alternate year I try and drill down deeper into themes or books.  Anyway, each time I read it through I of course find myself getting to the 'boring bits' that we can often just feel like skipping over. And I have to admit that I approached the start of the book of Numbers a couple of days ago with a slightly heavy heart. If you know me, then you know that I am the sort of person who finds it hard to skip past a footnote, and I want to work out the connections between things. So the book of Numbers can be a bit tricky because I find myself checking the numbers do add up and that the relationships between people match what we know from other parts of the Bible.  It makes for a lot of calculating and page turning!  However, leaving my personal quirks to one side, as I was reading Numbers 7 I was asking God: why on earth is this same list of gifts for the tabernacle just repeated over and again 12 times?! (and yes, I did check it is exactly the same!)


As the tabernacle is dedicated as the space for worshipping and meeting with God, each of the twelve tribes of Israel sends exactly the same gifts (see picture above) with their leader to be given to Moses.  But rather than saying that in a sentence, the Bible has 60 verses detailing the gifts.  And let's be honest...that is just not as gripping as a virgin birth, astonishing miracles, or the simple confirmation that God is love.


So what should we do when we are faced with a 'boring bit' of the Bible?  I think the answer is to read it with the same question in heart and mind with which we read the 'exciting bits': "Lord, what do you want to show me through what I am reading?" And as I read those 60 verses, the importance that this act had in the early life of the nation became clearer.  We are meant to dwell on the significance of the presence of God, and the worship that results, being at the heart of the peoples lives. Whilst a summary would've saved time, it would also have rushed past the 12 days of each tribe taking their turn to make their offering. I thought how wonderful that every tribe gave the same, whether the tribe was bigger or smaller, each gave exactly a twelfth of the offering.  Each tribe equal before God, named and valued, and fitting into the plan and purpose of God's intended life for God's people.  In its own way quite beautiful as a passage in its simplicity and constancy.   


I wouldn't want to read a passage like that every day, but that is the joy of the Bible, so much variety and different ways of telling this one amazing story.

Play

One of the things I enjoy about having young children around is getting the opportunity to play. It's a strange thing that as you get older it becomes less 'acceptable' to play as a way of learning and working things out. Maybe because I don't have children of my own it always seems like a great chance to play when spending time with other peoples children! This photo is the result of adults playing earlier as part of looking after some of the college children, I think one or two of them may have got a look-in, but it was mainly an adult activity!

I'd like to play more, it makes me more creative and helps me think in different ways. Jesus encourages us to come to the Father like little children, this seems to me to be about trusting but also curiousity, playfulness, looking for different possibilities because you haven't been programmed into a particular way of thinking yet. So maybe our worship of God should include more time to play for people of every age!