Interruptions (June 2022)

Dear Friends

I am writing this in the garden with the warm sunshine and the bees on a Saturday afternoon. OK, so I know the grass needs cutting and there are plenty of other jobs to be done. Indeed, there will always be something more and something else to be done. But this is a moment to savour the day.

You’ll remember that I shared a few impressions of May’s gathering of over half of the URC’s active ministers. We went to Yarnfield, near Stone in ???? This is the training and conference centre that BT use for their engineers. It’s a sprawling complex with a car park overflowing with Openreach vans and a field of telegraph poles used to practice climbing on. We had our first of these URC gatherings in 2018 at the same place. The venue worked well so here we were again.

Another of the contributors who shared beautifully with us was Pádraig Ó Tuama. A Roman Catholic from Belfast, he used to be the leader of the Corrymeela Community and has continued doing peace and conflict resolution work. He’s also a marvellous poet and writer. One of his sessions links back to me sitting in our garden writing this.

He wondered about time; about how we handle time and how time handles us. He suggested that we don’t really know what time is. We do know that time feels different in different contexts. Time waiting for a medical procedure feels different to time in prison, which feels different to time having a meal with friends and that feels different to time on holiday.

What did Jesus do with and to time? How did time touch Jesus? Pádraig took us to several gospel passages to explore this and I found it utterly captivating. In Luke 19: 1-9 Jesus visits Jericho and encounters Zacchaeus the tax collector watching him from the branches of a sycamore-fig tree. Jesus interrupts himself. He’s moving on but stops because he notices this man up his tree. But Jesus interrupts more than himself. As he talks to Zacchaeus and invites himself to the home of this highly visible, truly despised, collaborator, exploiter and traitor, Jesus interrupts the people of Jericho. He confronts Zacchaeus with the possibility of the love and mercy of God. Zacchaeus confronts the community with his repentance and plea for forgiveness. Jesus lets himself be interrupted and people are changed.

In John 8: 2-11 we’re with the woman taken in adultery. Her life has been revealed to be no more than a commodity for men to control. She’s a pawn in the game of trapping Jesus. The hostility of those who want to stone her interrupts Jesus. Twice, Jesus stoops down and writes in the dust with his finger. He lets time stretch and linger, heavy with the silence of accusation and the threat of violence.

Jesus is also interrupting the sense these men have of their own righteousness and power. As they drift away, ashamed, Jesus lets the woman know that he cannot condemn her either.

Out of these encounters and some others we explored, Pádraig invited us to consider how time touches us. How open are we to being, ourselves, interrupted? How willing are we to improvise as a plan unravels and something we didn’t expect happens around us? And what grace might we discover, what gift from God, in the time that suddenly encounters us and begs our attention. He left us with a beguiling phrase that I will play with for the rest of my life: “Are we willing to be part of the craftsmaking of the cathedral of belonging?” In other words, are we available to others in such ways that we can respond to them in their need and, together, shape something beautiful for God? And can we do so not knowing the outcome, not guaranteed to ever know the results, just like those who laid stone for cathedrals but never lived long enough to see them finished?

Wonderful and evocative thoughts.

Yours in Christ,

Neil