The first half of November is a season of remembrance. All Saints Day on the 1^st, All Souls on the 2^nd and Remembrance Sunday on 10^th. The Book of Wisdom, leaves us in no doubt that death isn’t the end.

“But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God,
and no torment will ever touch them.
In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died,
and their departure was thought to be a disaster,
and their going from us to be their destruction;
but they are at peace”. 

Wisdom 3:1-3

It tells of three powerful and connected truths: one, the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God; two, they are safe, and three, they are at peace.

Think of that for a moment, in terms of all those who we have loved but see no more. Thistext says: “They are safe”. In terms of those killed in war, both in the past and also in wars being fought at the moment, many died earlier than they should have. 

But now, says Wisdom, “no torment will ever touch them”, because “they are in the hand of God”. As the Book of Revelation, puts it, “God will wipe away every tear from their eyes…mourning and crying and pain will be no more”.

Wisdom goes on to say that they are “at peace”; there’s no more worry, no more anxiety, no more struggle, pain or suffering. Wisdom tells us that the faithful departed are safe in the hand of God, and are at peace.

A life of faith in Christ and his Way is possible only through a life of love – love for God, love for others, love for oneself. In death the faithful will truly know and be taken up into the God who is Love itself.

So for those of us that are left behind, it’s for us to ready ourselves, so that our death will be the way to perfect happiness and union with God and to make ready for that time by seeking and finding each day s the God of love, in every person we meet and in every experience we have. 

Blessings
James

Hoorah!! It is harvest time again!! There you are, hurtling along the A9 in your car on some mission of huge importance, muttering venomously at cyclists in helmets shaped like wasps’ bottoms, inconsiderate enough to want a bit of your road (you of course hoping they can’t lip-read) and cursing that you’ve already been caught behind yet another camper van, supermarket wagon or log lorry.

Rounding a bend you come up behind the ponderous majesty of a slow-moving tractor and trailer. On closer inspection over the next ten minutes, you realise that it’s not a single tractor and trailer, but is actually a convoy of three tractors and two trailers, and the glory of the aforementioned ponderous majesty begins to lose it’s shine!

Hoorah. It’s harvest time again. And I’d bet that sitting in that queue of cars, most of you don’t start singing hymns, psalms and songs of everlasting thanks and praise to our great God for his generous provision, or bless the farmers or the shop and factory workers or thelorry drivers for the work they do to put food on our plates!

So here’s the challenge for harvest and beyond. If you get stuck behind a tractor or a combine or a plough or any mysteriously shaped implement or a delivery wagon or a log lorry, take it as an opportunity for reflection, for thanksgiving and for praise to the God who lies behind all of it and give us so much that we often take for granted.

So let us make a start but praying a rather lovely prayer for the harvest of God’s love which is ultimately what gives us the all the wonderful things that we enjoy from day to day.

Lord, your harvest is the harvest of love;
love sown in the hearts of people;
love that spreads out like the branches of a great tree
covering all who seek its shelter;
love that inspires and re-creates;
love that is planted in the weak and the weary, 
the sick and dying.

The harvest of your love 
is the life that reaches through
the weeds of sin and death
to the sunlight of resurrection.

Lord, nurture my days with your love,
water my soul with the dew of forgiveness,
that the harvest of my life might be your joy.

Frank Topping

Blessings
James

From time to time in this season after Pentecost, we have a reading from the Wisdom literature in the Hebrew Bible. For instance a couple of weeks ago we had a reading from Proverbs and in a couple of weeks time we have another from the Wisdom of Solomon. In that latter there is a verse concerning reason:

“For they reasoned unsoundly, saying to themselves, ‘Short and sorrowful is our life, and there is no remedy when a life comes to its end, and no one has been known to return from Hades.’”

Just by chance I had read that Andrew Carnegie had this carved above the fireplace in his library at Skibo “He that cannot reason is a fool, He that will not a bigot, He that dare not a slave.” Having checked with someone that this was indeed the case, I set about trying to discover where the quote comes from.  In his autobiography Andrew Carnegie described a visit he made to the house of a Major Stokes who was the chief counsel of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Carnegie was deeply impressed by a passage he read displayed in Stokes’s residence:

“The grandeur of Mr. Stokes’s home impressed me, but the one feature of it that eclipsed all else was a marble mantel in his library. In the center of the arch, carved in the marble, was an open book with this inscription:

He that cannot reason is a fool,
He that will not a bigot,
He that dare not a slave.

These noble words thrilled me. I said to myself, ‘Some day, some day, I’ll have a library and these words shall grace the mantel as here.’ And so they do in New York and Skibo to-day.”

I wondered who had actually written it in the first place and in what context.  Eventually I found the answer.  Sir William Drummond the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Scottish poet and writer wrote a philosophical treatise published in 1805 called ‘Academical Questions’, which contains this passage: 

“Prejudice may be trusted to guard the outworks for a short space of time, while Reason slumbers in the citadel; but if the latter sink into a lethargy, the former will quickly erect a standard for herself. Philosophy, wisdom, and liberty, support each other: he who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not, is a slave.”

Now does that tendency to suspend reason and instead rely simply on prejudice, apply to so much that has happened recently and is still happening in our world today and is it not something that we should all guard against?

The Reverend Billy Graham apparently suggested as a discipline reading the chapter of Proverbs which matched the number of the day the month. Now it’s possible that perhaps it’s for no better reason than there are 31 chapters in Proverbs though of course reading a bit of Solomon’s Wisdom each day is probably a good thing anyway.

Blessings
James