Psalm 129. On the narrative you live by

Three stories with a common theme to kick us off this morning – one in the form of a video, one a story and one a photograph.

We'll start with the video first.

(At this point I showed a short clip of Fernando Torres missing an open goal against Manchester United the previous weekend - a glaring miss).

For all his ability, the only narrative that's playing out around Torres is 'here's the £50 million player who's turned into a flop'. He seems stuck in a story he can't get out of.

My second story comes from my visits down to our local nursing home - Balmedie House. There's a lovely lady there who I'll call Mary and she's at the stage in her life where she can't really remember things from day to day, and we have the same conversation every time I'm down there. She sees my collar and says "Are you a minister?"  "Yes" I say. "Church of Scotland?".  "Yes - that's right. Belhelvie's my parish".  "Aw – I’m a Piscy" (Episcopalian!) she says, "but it’s nae sair!" (it's not a problem)

Why that memory, I wonder? Why ‘it’s nae sair?’ Did she feel awkward or different growing up a 'Piscy' if everyone else was Church of Sotland or RC?

My third story comes from a recent visit to Belfast with two colleagues. We did a bus tour of the city, and were taken into both the Loyalist Shankhill Road and the Republican Falls Road, and many of the gable ends of houses there are painted with cultural and paramilitary murals. We all agreed that the one below was the most striking of all. Black and white images show some of the atrocities perpetrated against the loyalist community over the years of the troubles, and questions how justice is - or isn't - being worked out in their favour.

Where are our inquiries. Where is our truth? Where is our justice?

Those words read like a howl of pain from a community that's trapped in the past and can't get past the things that have happened to it. It sounds like they are defined by the ways in which they have been wronged.

So those are our three stories. And the common theme is that in different ways, and to different degrees, all three describe people who are trapped in narratives they can’t seem to escape from. One story has become the dominant story that they are living out of.

One of the most perceptive and probing questions I think I’ve ever heard came from the lips of the Irish poet and mystic John O’Donohue. “What are the seven thoughts that have shaped your life and made it turn out the way it has?” he asked. There’s something to mull over by the fireside as the long dark evenings start to draw in! “What are the seven thoughts that have shaped your life?”

I’ve thought about that a lot, and I’ve never managed to get past the first two or three!

And for today, maybe it’s enough to simplify O’Donohue’s question and ask: “What one thought is shaping my life just now?”. What’s the story I’m living out of?

And the reason I ask is because it’s all too easy to get stuck in a bad narrative. One way of thinking, or of understanding ourselves and our situation, can end up swallowing all the others.

Our Psalm this morning starts with a bad narrative – one about pain and enemies and oppression.

“Israel, tell us how your enemies have persecuted you ever since you were young”.

And if you know a wee bit of your Biblical History you’ll remember some of the stories. The way their baby sons were taken and slaughtered by their Egyptian taskmasters. The forced labour, bullied out of them by beatings and murders. The many battles they had to fight to finally enter the promised land, and the constant threat of war and invasion on their borders once they’d settled there.

Israel knew a thing or two about enemies and persecution.

And that thought makes me want to pause for a moment to give our struggles a little perspective.

I doubt that there’s anyone here who doesn’t have some difficult folk to contend with in life. We all have. And when you’re in the thick of those situations it can feel intolerable. And sometimes that’s exactly what it is – intolerable. By any rational measurement, things are genuinely awful for you. You need the help of friends and family, maybe even professionals, to help sort things out.

But much of the time, I think we only feel it’s intolerable. Examined in the cold light of day, the things we get so het up about don’t really amount to much, yet we get irate about them.

We magnify little things and get enraged by them; we read a significance into things that simply isn’t there. We do the exact opposite of what the Scriptures say and instead of dealing quickly with any anger we feel towards someone, we store it up and let it fester. And we end up making mountains out of molehills.

May God spare us from ever making real enemies – the kind that Israel had, and that some folk in today’s world still have. The kind who come knocking on your door at midnight to thrash you within an inch of your life and leave your back looking like a ploughed field.

Unless we’re very unlucky, in this part of the world I think the enemies people have most problems with are the ones within, rather than without.

Maybe it’s your pride that’s the enemy – that’s made life difficult for you. Maybe it’s your temper. Your rare ability to start a fight in an empty room.


Maybe it’s your stubbornness, or your low self-esteem, or your need to take over and be in control.


Maybe it’s what the apostle Paul calls the belly gods – the gut-level desires and hungers that take us over if we let them.

Any one of these, unchecked, can come to be the dominant narrative of our lives.

I knew a man in Glasgow years ago and it was a standing joke among his friends that if you hadn’t seen him for a while and you asked him how he was doing, he’d always say “Well, I’m alright NOW”!

He was caught in a bad narrative where he was always a victim. And nothing ever seemed to change.

Mike Yaconelli tells a story about a nine year old girl called Margaret who for some reason kept irking her teacher. And one day, in a rage, the teacher made her stand at the front of the class, and forced the other 25 girls to come up and write cruel things about her on the blackboard. Margaret is fat. Margaret is stupid. Margaret is a bad person.

It took that woman 40 years to escape the shadows that were cast over her soul that day. Those words became the narrative of her life.

It’s all too possible for one narrative to take you over.

How can you know if that’s happening to you?

The simplest answer to that, I think, is to listen to yourself. What do you talk about? What do you keep gravitating back to, in your speaking and your living and your thinking?

Are there times when you catch yourself halfway through a sentence thinking “oh no. here I go again”. That’s a strong clue that one narrative is beginning to take over.

But the good news today is that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Psalm 129 begins with the Psalmist saying “Israel, tell us how your enemies have persecuted you ever since you were young”.

The Psalmist is inviting Israel to tell a story. And you know as well as I do, that the only time you encourage someone to tell a story is when you already know there’s a good ending!

What does Israel say?

V2 – “Ever since I was young, my enemies have persecuted me cruelly.”

Those are the facts. The facts are a given. But it’s what you do in the face of those facts that matters.

“my enemies have persecuted me cruelly, but they have not overcome me. They cut deep wounds in my back and made it like a ploughed field. But the Lord, the righteous one, has freed me from slavery”.

How do they get out from under this narrative of oppression? They pick up the strains of another, better narrative and they begin to live out of that.

How did Israel escape from slavery in Egypt? Moses – trembling, stuttering Moses, gathers his courage, makes his way back to Pharaoh and speaks the word ‘God’ into a situation that seemed godless. And as he does so, memories are stirred, and hope is kindled. There IS another story they can live out of – the God story.

Or think of David, who wrote many of the Psalms – hiding out in caves because the King he used to serve, King Saul. has turned on him for no reason and wants him dead. David could so easily have chosen the victim narrative, or the revenge narrative. They were a good fit in those circumstances. But he chose the God story. He chose the way of trust, patience, forgiveness and honour.

Or think of Jesus – living in a country under Roman occupation where it seemed that there were only two options: submission or waging a near-suicidal guerilla war. Again – the victim narrative or the revenge narrative looked like the only possibilities.

But Jesus showed how to live out the God-story. He embodied a third way, a defiant pacifism that forced the authorities to recognise the Jewish people as people.

When you study his teaching about turning the other cheek, and going the second mile you realise that these are deeply subversive practices. They force the Romans to see the Jews as people – people who refuse to accept the narrative role they’re expected to play, because they have a better story they’re living out of. One that tells them that first and foremost they’re not Roman subjects but the beloved children of God.

The Psalmist has a good story to tell this morning

The enemy oppressed. But they have not overcome.


The Lord, the righteous one, has freed me from slavery.

I wonder what oppresses in your life just now?

Time? Work? Responsibility? Something to do with how you perceive yourself? Someone who’s making life difficult? We all have our stories of oppression.

But the good news today is that they needn’t be the dominant narrative of our lives.

The Lord , the righteous one, can set you free. says the Psalmist.

And he will do, if we set ourselves to listening for the strains of his story.

As I was thinking about this morning, I remembered a movie I haven’t seen for absolutely ages - Shirley Valentine.

Shirley’s a middle aged housewife, living out of a narrative she’s grown tired of. Her husband Joe and her daughter take her completely for granted, and whatever spark and individuality she once had has been all but extinguished by dull routine. She’s unhappy, but she’s more or less resigned to how things are.

And then her friend wins a competition where the first prize is a trip for two to Greece, and she offers to take Shirley with her. It sounds like an impossiblilty - Joe would never allow it. But a little part of her begins to dream.

She puts a brightly coloured poster of Greece on her pantry door, and it lights up her drab kitchen. She looks at it all the time, wondering what it would be like to go there, and eat different food and meet different people, and drink a cold glass of wine sitting beside the sea in the evening sunlight.

And then something happens that makes her decide that that’s exactly what she’s going to do. Thursday night is always steak night in their house, but Joe freaks out when she dares to cook him egg and chips for a change and he literally throws it back in her lap.

Shirley’s had enough. She goes to Greece with her friend, and falls in love all over again – not so much with the place, or even the local womaniser she has a dalliance with. She falls in love with life again, and with being Shirley Valentine.

The movie ends with Joe, her husband, walking stiffly down to the harbour in his black suit, shirt and tie, and walking right past Shirley as she sits, having that glass of wine by the sea. He doesn’t even recognise her any more. It’s only when she speaks that he realises who she is. And the film ends with him, bewildered at the change in her, joining her for a drink by the sea.

We don’t know how things will pan out, but we know that for Shirley, and we hope for Joe, things will end well because she’s found a better narrative to live out of.

And the image I want to leave you with this morning, is that poster of Greece on Shirley’s pantry door. Something that pointed beyond the drab or difficult now to something better.

There are times when I feel like a broken record. Sometimes I feel like all I do in my preaching is encourage you to read and reflect and pray. But I want you to realise that’s not because God demands it of you. It’s not meant to be a dull duty, like washing up or cooking egg and chips.

For a believer, prayer and reading and reflection are like the poster of Greece, reminding us that there are other, better stories to live by. They open up possibilities; they make us realise that there are other ways to be, And in the humdrum of our everyday lives, with their burdens and their pressures, that’s a message that all of us need to hear again and again and again.

I began this week feeling pressurised by the weight of things not done. And when I feel that pressure, my regular temptation is to get the head down and crack on with it, prayerlessly and grumpily. I live too much of my life out of that narrative.

But this week something, most likely the Holy Spirit, nagged me to sit down and keep company with God before I began to do anything. So I did. And I read these words in a little book I use when I come to pray:

“It is a great loss if we greet every day with clenched hands stuffed with our own devices. We will never know what is out there waiting for us if we don’t extend an empty hand to the world and wait for the wonder to happen”.

That metaphorical glance at the poster was enough to remind me to live out of God’s story that day, and not my own. To unclench my hands a little and wait for the wonder.

I’ll probably have to learn the same lesson again this week, and the week after and the week after that but thank God he never tires of drawing us into his story and setting us free.

Love Your Enemies

Some say he’s now in paradise, enjoying the ministrations of 72 virgin handmaidens. Others are sure that God has thrown his soul into the depths of hell. Some doubt that he’s dead at all and reckon it’s all a conspiracy cooked up by the powers that be.

Some are pleased that justice has finally been done. Others argue that by killing him in this way, justice has not been done.

The death of Osama Bin Laden last weekend is one of those events that provokes a kaleidoscope of reactions and if you’ve had an eye on the media this week you’ll have seen the colourful fragments of opinion tumbling and forming and re-forming on your screen as the story is given twist after twist after twist.
And for all that it’s being presented as something of momentous importance, I’m not sure that Bin Laden’s death has really changed very much.

The hatred he represented is still at large; the myriad forces that spoil and deform our world are still at work in the boardroom and the corridors of power and the back alleys protected by gunmen.

Few believe that this is the end of anything other than the man himself. But for the few days that this story has been headline news we’ve had a rare opportunity to reflect on a matter of grave importance. A matter on which Jesus had something to say. How do we deal with our enemies? What should we wish for them?
As I’ve thought about that question this week, some other scenarios and images have come to mind.

I thought of the snarl on Neil Lennon’s face as he and Ally McCoist exchanged words after that recent Old Firm game, and the attempts someone’s been making to kill or maim him by sending him parcel bombs.

And I thought of our beloved General Assembly where next week the battle lines will be re-drawn as those gathered in Edinburgh will debate, among other things, the Special Commission’s report on Same Sex relationships and the ministry.

And we’re at a place now where, depending on the Assembly’s ruling, some may decide that they have to leave the Church of Scotland. Some may leave because we’re not supporting gay clergy, others may leave because we are. There’s a genuine possibility of schism next week and we should be facing that prospect with a heavy heart.

For what it’s worth, I think it’s important as your minister to say that I can stay with the Church of Scotland regardless of the Assembly’s ruling, as long as they maintain a ministers’ right to freedom of conscience and interpretation in these matters. If they start enforcing dogma on highly debateable subjects like this, I may have to think again.

But I digress.

We’re thinking about enemies this morning.

How does the world train us to deal with our enemies?

Well, by and large it trains us to return hatred for hatred.

In extreme circumstances, we take the enemy out. You killed our people, so we will put a bullet in your head. You bombed our country so we’ll bomb yours.

But where bullets and bombs aren’t the currency we deal in, we take them out in a host of other ways. We kill them, or their reputations, with our words. We say what’s designed to hurt or threaten or ridicule. We look for opportunities to get one-up on them or make them feel small. We shout down their arguments without actually listening to them.

And when, as often happens, the heat goes out of a situation, but the enmity remains, we settle into patterns of ignoring one another. We avoid, we minimise contact, we close down on conversation. As far as we’re able to, we live as though the enemy didn’t exist.

So that’s the world’s way of dealing with your enemies. A spectrum ranging from a bullet in the head, to doing your level best to ignore them. That’s what we are discipled in from the cradle to the grave. That’s the best we can do by ourselves, it seems.

But there is another way. A way that’s far far harder, but that leads, in the end, to a better outcome.

Even in the midst of the blood and gore of the Old Testament, we see glimmers of that other way, shining like a golden thread: running all the way through the fabric of the story ‘til it reaches its full expression in the life and teaching of Jesus. It’s the glimmer of God’s surprising mercy.

We looked at this one a few months back. Adam and Eve transgress and get banished from the garden as God’s enemies. What does he do next? The author of Genesis tells us that he makes clothes for them! They are not forgotten. They’re still within the compass of his care.


Moses and the Israelites escape from Egypt, leaving Pharaoh and his people floundering in their wake. But in the annual celebration of the Passover event – Israel’s great deliverance - the suffering of the Egyptians is also remembered.


The second cup of wine in the Passover feast is filled only half-way; Israel’s gladness, say the rabbis, is diminished by any human suffering: even the suffering of her enemies.


The writer of the Book of Proverbs says


“Do not gloat when your enemy falls;
when he stumbles, do not let your heart rejoice,
or the Lord will see and disapprove
and turn his wrath away from him.”


Later in the book of Ezekiel as, God pleads with Israel to live faithfully, he says “Why will you die, O house of Israel? I take no pleasure in the death of anyone”.

So even in the Old Testament, which is so often caricatured as bloodthirsty and unforgiving, we find this golden thread of mercy running through the text. With this God, the enemy is not abandoned for ever; the enemy’s pain and suffering are seen to matter; the enemy’s death brings God no pleasure, and should being us no pleasure too.

Totally countercultural and counterintuitive. But grace always is.

And Jesus takes this golden thread, and with it he weaves the Sermon on the Mount, from which today’s reading is taken. A manifesto for a way to live in the world which is totally countercultural.

Matthew 5: 43 “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your friends, and hate your enemies.’ But now I tell you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

It sounds so insipid, doesn’t it. Love your enemies? Love these people who are persecuting me? Who day and night make my life a living hell? Are you kidding?
I wrote this sermon earlier in the week and then watched Newsnight which had a report from the families who lost loved ones in the carnage of the 7th July bombings in London. Part of me wanted to scrap the sermon and write about something else.

But it’s there in the text – Love your enemies – and in the face of the sheer brutality at work in our world that sounds like so much simpering do-goodism until you remember who it was who said it.

A man, the manner of whose birth allowed his enemies to label him a bastard, even if they didn’t dare call him that to his face; a man who lived out his life in the sweltering tension of a country under military occupation; a man whose teaching was so threatening to the religious establishment that they thought it best to have him killed.


A man who was beaten, flogged and crucified for no good reason, and was mocked by those who came to watch him die. He knew a thing or two about enemies, did Jesus.

And he gives us this instruction to love our enemies not to weigh us down under the burden of an impossible command, but to remind us that if we take upon ourselves the name of God and claim to be of the family of God, it behoves us to mirror the character of God. And you know what, God loves his enemies, and it’s a good job he does because sin makes all of us enemies of God, including you and me.

I tell you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

WHY? So that you may become the children of your Father in heaven. For he makes his sun to shine on bad and good people alike, and gives rain to those who do good and to those who do evil.

The shocking truth is that the God we worship, far from being in the tit-for-tat business, the eye-for-an-eye business, is in the business of showing unmerited kindness to the ungrateful and the wicked. Not my words – Jesus’s words.

God bears with the enemy, not because he likes their behaviour or because he’s soft on sin. He is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked because he knows that love is the only way in which broken people are mended.

“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” – words of Martin Luther King.

Love your enemies, says Jesus. Why? That you may become children of your Father in heaven.

A Father who looks at us, and our enemies, and sees us for the people we are: half-formed, confused, wedded to our pet sins. But he sees further than that. He sees right down to the flickering core of his own image that’s buried deep within every human being. And he refuses to give up on us. He has determined to love us into submission. It’s the only way.

Again, some words of wisdom from Reverend King, speaking to the white supremacists whose racist thuggery was drawn out of the backwoods into the glaring light of day by the Civil Rights movement.

“We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.”

Love your enemies, says Jesus, Pray for them. Pray not just to defeat them, but to convert them so that they recognise the divine image within themselves and within the people they profess to hate.

Hell for Osama Bin Laden? Perhaps hell for Osama Bin Laden is not the traditional lake of fire, but a long, long corridor with thousands of doors leading off it to the left and to the right. And behind every door is a husband or a mother or a sister or a son who was in one of those planes, or working in one of those towers, or enjoying a night out in one of those clubs, or travelling through one of those cities, or serving in one of the armed forces, when death came brutally, suddenly and obscenely.

Maybe hell for Bin Laden begins with the long walk down that corridor, spending as long as it takes in every single room with every single person, hearing their testimony, learning the names of their families as they show him photograph after photograph, sitting in silence before the awful monument of their pain and loss until he gets it into his atrophied heart that every single man and woman and child he had murdered bore the image of the God he claimed to be serving.

Could that kind of hell mend him? God alone knows.

All I know today is that Christ, against all our intuition, commands us to love our enemies.

And it’s important to say that that doesn’t mean we have to like them or approve of what they do. At its simplest, loving your enemy means dealing with them in the faith that somewhere deep within them there still burns the image of God, no matter how hard it might be to recognise it.

So who are your enemies this morning?

Do you hate them? Do you ignore them?

There is a better way, says Christ. Learn to love them. Learn to pray for them. It’s the only way we can break the vicious circle of hate, though it may end up costing you all you have.


I watched a remarkable film just before Easter and I think that next Easter I’ll try to find an appropriate time in Holy Week for us to watch it together. It’s called “of Gods and Men” and it’s a true story of a small community of Trappist monks living in the mountains of Algeria in the early 1990’s.

Though they are Christian they’re accepted and fully integrated into the lives of their Muslim neighbours in the local villages. The monks help with education and medicine, and in turn they’re welcome guests at weddings and birthdays and village festivals. It’s a happy picture.

But with the rise of fundamentalist Islam, the monks come under increasing threat and they reach a place where they have to decide whether to stay or to leave. And after much debate over many months, each of them comes to a peace about staying, even though they know it will not end well.

Anticipating the end, the prior of the monastery, Christian de Cherge, wrote these words to be read by his family in the event of his death. Listen out particularly for the last paragraph which anticipates his death and addresses the man who would kill him. De Cherge and six of his fellow monks were taken from the monastery and murdered by extremists in May of 1996.

Obviously my death will justify the opinion of all those who dismissed me as naïve or idealistic. “Let him tell us what he thinks now!” But such people should know that my death will satisfy my most burning curiosity. At last, I will be able – if God pleases – to see the children of Islam as He sees them, illuminated in the glory of Christ, sharing in the gift of God’s Passion and of the Spirit, whose secret joy will always be to bring forth our common humanity amidst our differences.


I give thanks to God for this life, completely mine, yet completely theirs too: to God, who wanted it for joy, against, and in spite of, all odds. In this Thank You – which says everything about my life – I include you, my friends past and present, and those friends who will be here at the side of my mother and father, of my sisters and brothers – thank you a thousandfold.


And to you, my friend of the last moment, who will not know what you are doing. Yes, for you too I wish this thank you, this commendment to God, whose image is in you also, that we may meet in heaven, like happy thieves, if it pleases God, our common Father.

Love your enemies, said Jesus. And pray for those who persecute you, that you may become the children of your Father in heaven.