For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority. In him you were also circumcised with a circumcision not performed by human hands. Your whole self ruled by the flesh was put off when you were circumcised by Christ, having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through your faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead. (Col 2:9-12)
Do you like my lovely ammonite?
Not one of the tribes of Canaan, whom Joshua set out to slaughter. Least, I assume not. Cos that would have been a completely different narrative in the early books of the Bible. "And then Gideon smashed the shell of the ammonite, which lay there all wriggly and squiddy on the floor." Not the same at all.
No, this one, It's lovely innit? Just 3.5 centimetres across but such exquisite detail. I found it with Melissa Sparrow on that holiday in Somerset. The one where she spent the whole evening in Pebbles Tavern, trying to imagine what it was like to be dead for 200 million years, and concluded that we'd find out in time. And then speculated on her favourite forms of body disposal. Suffice it to say that I agreed to her request that we shoot her cremated remains, compressed into a small, dense pellet, from a trebuchet into the sea at low tide. I have no idea how we're going to get the trebuchet down the beach. We may have to float it out from the harbour or something.
Still, Melissa's funerary instructions aren't really the subject here. I'm really thinking about the ammonite itself. The sheer detail of it. The growth lines so beautifully etched into the stone. It's like the Creator sat down one day and chiselled it out of the rock. I mean, that's not literally what happened. God has tools far more subtle than a chisel. In God's workshop, the ammonite was gradually filled in and surrounded by a matrix of stone, that preserved the shape of its shell. The calcium carbonate that made up its shell was transformed into calcite. That little creature then sat there down the aeons, through climate change and extinctions, through dinosaurs and deserts, down to when the first Beaker Folk were parked up on Glastonbury, through empires and rulers and then one day was washed out of a rock by the sea and left there for me to find. Makes you wonder doesn't it? I mean wonder in the sense that your mind goes - wow.
Our faith says that, before anything came into being, God is, in a loving union of three persons. One who brooded over that space where the world came into being. One who spoke the Word of creation. And one who is that Word of creation.
Because that God creates everything, holds everything, sustains everything - that God is the supreme ruler in the way no worldly king or ruler could ever be. Everything depends on God. The Pharaohs tried to get their bodies to last forever, but they look a bit sad today - after just a few thousand years - tatty and grinning uncertainly through their bandages. The Kim family of North Korea lay in their atheist mausoleum in their glass coffins. They won't make it past the next war or revolution. But my little ammonite, without even trying, sat there through its millennia looking so beautiful.
Of course, I've given that little ammonite a new lease of death by picking it up. Its mates are already getting smashed on that beach. Which reminds me when you see the sea - particularly on the days when it smashes into the beach - you see the power of God. I have always loved the words of Ps 107: "They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep."
And our faith makes a stunning claim - a claim so big it dwarfs even the skies on a gray day in the Bristol Channel. A claim so odd that when the early Church made it you either had to say it was a heresy against the Jewish faith, or utter foolishness to Greek philosophy - or else, against all sense, it was true. They said that the God who is the Word of creation, was revealed in a human being in a particular time and place. That the Jewish man called Jesus of Nazareth was in fact the one in whom all the fullness of God was revealed. Which means that all the power of God, all the authority of God's name, has been given to a man who was arrested on cobbled-together charges and executed at the order of an empire.
Not one of the tribes of Canaan, whom Joshua set out to slaughter. Least, I assume not. Cos that would have been a completely different narrative in the early books of the Bible. "And then Gideon smashed the shell of the ammonite, which lay there all wriggly and squiddy on the floor." Not the same at all.
No, this one, It's lovely innit? Just 3.5 centimetres across but such exquisite detail. I found it with Melissa Sparrow on that holiday in Somerset. The one where she spent the whole evening in Pebbles Tavern, trying to imagine what it was like to be dead for 200 million years, and concluded that we'd find out in time. And then speculated on her favourite forms of body disposal. Suffice it to say that I agreed to her request that we shoot her cremated remains, compressed into a small, dense pellet, from a trebuchet into the sea at low tide. I have no idea how we're going to get the trebuchet down the beach. We may have to float it out from the harbour or something.
Still, Melissa's funerary instructions aren't really the subject here. I'm really thinking about the ammonite itself. The sheer detail of it. The growth lines so beautifully etched into the stone. It's like the Creator sat down one day and chiselled it out of the rock. I mean, that's not literally what happened. God has tools far more subtle than a chisel. In God's workshop, the ammonite was gradually filled in and surrounded by a matrix of stone, that preserved the shape of its shell. The calcium carbonate that made up its shell was transformed into calcite. That little creature then sat there down the aeons, through climate change and extinctions, through dinosaurs and deserts, down to when the first Beaker Folk were parked up on Glastonbury, through empires and rulers and then one day was washed out of a rock by the sea and left there for me to find. Makes you wonder doesn't it? I mean wonder in the sense that your mind goes - wow.
Our faith says that, before anything came into being, God is, in a loving union of three persons. One who brooded over that space where the world came into being. One who spoke the Word of creation. And one who is that Word of creation.
Because that God creates everything, holds everything, sustains everything - that God is the supreme ruler in the way no worldly king or ruler could ever be. Everything depends on God. The Pharaohs tried to get their bodies to last forever, but they look a bit sad today - after just a few thousand years - tatty and grinning uncertainly through their bandages. The Kim family of North Korea lay in their atheist mausoleum in their glass coffins. They won't make it past the next war or revolution. But my little ammonite, without even trying, sat there through its millennia looking so beautiful.
Of course, I've given that little ammonite a new lease of death by picking it up. Its mates are already getting smashed on that beach. Which reminds me when you see the sea - particularly on the days when it smashes into the beach - you see the power of God. I have always loved the words of Ps 107: "They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep."
Which side is God on? The temptation is always to be fair between an oppressor and the oppressed. To give both sides an equal hearing. But God is always on the side of the poor, the victim of injustice - whether legal or economic. God is on the side of the slaves and the wage slaves and the dispossessed. Because God is one of them. A member of a conquered race. A convicted criminal. A man who suffered a slave's death. If we are to be on God's side, we are to be on the side of the ones he sides with.
But Jesus didn't just die a noble death, as a good example to us all about how we should struggle against oppression. It might be worthy of notice if he did, but utterly useless in the long run. Just another failed hero. But he died and was raised from the dead.
I'd like to go back to my lovely ammonite, if I may. It lay buried under a sea bed. The sea bed was raised up to become a hill. The hill was worn away to become a cliff. And the sea's action, overwhelming that coast as it does twice a day, brought the ammonite back to the light of day.
In baptism, we plunge into water, and are dragged back to the surface. In the resurrection Jesus, having plunged into the darkness - into the waters of death - is brought back to birth from the ground, back into the daylight. Paul says, we were circumcised with Christ - brought into his tribe, his family - when we were buried with him in baptism, and then were raised with him in his resurrection. Through those actions, we are filled with God's fullness, which is poured out by God's Spirit from Jesus Christ, in whom is all the fullness of the Deity.
In his resurrection, the full power of empire is defied and shown for what it is. The Roman empire that sentenced him to death is long gone. But Jesus is alive. Since that day empires have risen and fallen. But Jesus is alive. Our own civilisation faces some of its greatest challenged - globalisation, climate change, mass migration, populism - and Jesus is still alive. One day the human race will vanish from this planet - and Jesus will be alive. One day the universe will end - and Jesus will still be alive. Because he is the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end - the one who holds all things in his hand.
And we are alive with him. And though one day we will be as dead to this earth as my ammonite - yet because his fullness is in us - and all the fullness of God lives in him - we will not pass from God's mind, we will not be forgotten by the God of the living. We will live, and we will rise from the dead - however that happens - and we will be like him, and live with him, forever.
Want to support this blog? Want a good laugh? (or to shudder at death at any rate? Then here's two ways you can keep the Archdruid in doilies...
If you want someone to share the terrors of death while making you laugh, we have "A Hint of Death in the Morning Air" - 97 poems to make you wonder, laugh or shake your head sadly. At only £1 on Kindle. Or if you want to know what the people in the pews really think, and you prefer your words printed on paper, why not try "Writes of the Church"? The letters to the Church magazine the vicar really didn't need.
Maybe skipping the compressed pellet across the water would be simpler than a trebuchet
ReplyDeleteWe're gonna need a giant catapult then...
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