I’d sell my shoes
I’d give my body to be back again
In the rest of the room
To be alone with you
To be alone with you
To be alone with you
To be alone with you
You gave your body to the lonely
They took your clothes
You gave up a wife and a family
You gave your ghost
To be alone with me
To be alone with me
To be alone with me
You went up on a tree
To be alone with me you went up on the tree
I’ve never known a man who loved me
My son took me to
see Sufjan Stevens at the Royal Festival Hall last week. I am a somewhat
reluctant convert, having vaguely liked the artist for a long time, but never
quite getting the passion. I now get it. The musical style isn't always immediately
my scene, but the lyrics are extraordinarily freighted and perfectly carried by
the painfully delicate singing.
Sufjan’s following
is (so far as I can tell) a broadly hipster, post-modern swathe of humanity
aged from 20s to 40s. It isn’t obviously loaded with Christians, which is kind
of odd, because his songs are heavy with faith. Here is good music by a
Christian, as opposed to Christian Music. No comment on the latter!
I have never felt
so much like I’d been to church without actually going to church. I cried a
lot. Perhaps I was predisposed – many songs dealt with death, and we were
laying my Uncle David to rest the next day – but I think I would have cried
anyway, touched by words that convey such a weight of God's love and grace.
The lyric above is
one of Sufjan's best-known songs. It seems to be thought of by many as a human
love song. And I suppose it is, though the identity of the man who wants to be
alone with me is pretty plain. I knew the song, but heard live, I really got
it, and was overwhelmed.
Yes, it could be
criticised for being over-individualistic. Jesus did not die to be alone with
me; he died to gather his congregation around him, the eternal, global,
international qahal of his people. But the song stripped things back to the
heart of the matter for me, and I am lost again in amazement (even as I write, on
the platform at East Croydon) when I contemplate the weight of love.
You gave your body to the lonely
They took your clothes
You gave up a wife and a family
You gave your ghost
To be alone with me
To be alone with me
To be alone with me
You went up on a tree
My own Christianity
fell apart ten or more years ago because I replaced “to be alone with me” with “so
that I could serve you”. I changed the content - from being to doing - and I
changed the direction - from his desire to my action. From my receiving to my
giving, in fact.
And still that
tendency is there. Saved by grace, how quick I am to swap out grace for law,
receiving for giving, being for doing. We hardly stop to enjoy his coming close
to us before we are “pouring out our lives” and talking about the “debt we owe”. When
our reaction to received grace is a reflex response of trying to give back, it
throws into question whether it is really grace we have received, or whether we
have really grasped the graciousness of grace.
And when we talk
about debts and pouring our lives out, we generally mean service “out
there", in activity. Serving. Being useful. Being busy. Being driven,
even. That is what did for me, in Christian ministry. That is what I allowed to
steal away my enjoyment of God. And I’m still a bit of an activity addict. (Is
writing this blog a symptom???)
I am not denying
the rightness of grateful service to our gracious God. I’m just saying that if to be alone with me he went up on a tree
doesn’t resonate deeply any more, if his love at his cross doesn’t move us more than anything else, we are in trouble. And I think many of us may
be. Indeed, many are wounded, scalded, damaged, broken, repelled, excluded, by
churches where the ethic of driven activism has usurped the enjoyment of a God
who comes close in amazing grace and self-offering.
The church where I
now find myself is perhaps the quintessentially activist church. The Salvation Army
is gloriously hands-on. For love of Jesus the love of Jesus has been carried in
word and action to millions around the world who are often the most unloved and
unwanted by anyone. I feel humbled and honoured and utterly insufficient to be accidentally
grafted into this tradition.
But any movement
this busy does run a risk. I have lost count of the number of times people have
said to me “we don't think much about theology, we just get our hands dirty”.
There is a certain pride abroad that we are the church that does what other
churches don’t do. We disagree with Billy Bragg – we certainly do want to
change the world. And I sometimes even wonder if our activism is actually the
very glue which, for better or worse, holds this old boat together – we have
liberals, we have evangelicals, we have fundamentalists, but we have no time to
talk, let alone split, because we are too busy. We stay together because we work
together. And we have band practice.
It may be that we
need to re-centre. To find the place of just us and our God again. I am not arguing for an inactive pietism, but
for a recovery of a constant still place at the centre of our perhaps
inevitably busy lives, where the only thing that matters is our God, what he
has done for us in Christ, what he has shown us by his Spirit and simply revelling
in the company of this blessed Trinity. That
joy, not debt, is to be at the heart of our activity, or work and rest, our
lives as a whole. To borrow from another tradition, it is the Westminster
Shorter Catechism that expresses the chief purpose of life as to "glorify
God and enjoy him forever." Calvin's catechism is more succinct - it
is to "know God". To be alone
with you. As Vernon Higham put it “our God is the end of the journey”.
I never want to
lose this again. I don't want to go back to Egypt; I want to live in the
promised land. Not a child of the slave woman but of the free. Serving, yes,
but out of a constant, conscious gladness that I am his and he is mine. And that we are close. And
that HE paid for that.
We laid my Uncle
David to rest on Friday the day after the Sufjan gig. His serving days were
long past, but not his alone-with-you days. Many times throughout his life and
especially in his final months he was overwhelmed by God’s love for him in
Jesus. And now he is fully home. That is how I want to go too.
This is an “if the
cap fits” blog. If activity has not robbed you of the simple enjoyment of
Christ, then I am so glad for you – you are way ahead of me and I want to learn
from you! But if you are busy in the work, so busy, so engaged in serving, that
you have lost touch with the simple joy of being loved and accepted by God, you
need to come home too. Whatever your theology, evangelical or liberal, a
service-driven Christianity will ultimately be barren, unless you recover the
centre.
To be alone with me
He went up on a tree
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