Genesis Through Wordle

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One of the most fascinating tools on the internet is Wordle, which allows you to create "word clouds". You insert a text and it takes the key words and transforms them into a picture.

This is fun, but also interesting. I've just pasted the entire book of Genesis and the most prominent nouns and verbs are revealed above in graphic form.

And here's the entire Brothers Karamazov:

Strike While It's Still Hot

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It is a dangerous myth that the utopian dreams of the 1960s and 1970s either evaporated amid yuppie excess in the Eighties or were left buried beneath the rubble of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

The last half century should not be read as the death of idealism at the hands of unfettered capitalism and unrestrained militarism, and nobody with a love of freedom should mourn the collapse of Soviet totalitarianism.

Forty years ago today, Betty Friedan and thousands of fellow feminists took to the streets of New York for the Women's Strike for Equality. She had documented the loneliness, isolation and dissatisfaction of women living in a society in which they had no other role than to somehow make homes.

The notion that women would want equal access to employment and education seemed radical and laughable to many, and feminists are still burdened by caricatures, but they stormed the Bastille and the evidence of liberation is everywhere.

It was reported earlier this year that women now make up the majority of the US workforce for the first time in history and most managers are also female.

Commentators now fret about the under-performance of men when compared with the success of women in bastions which had until recently been the preserve of males.

Last year, of those in the UK entering higher education, 49.2% were women while only 37.2% were men.

Once in university, women outshone their male counterparts. Some 63.9% of women won a first or 2:1, compared with 59.9% of male colleagues.

Whether we realise it or not, all of us who enjoy the benefits of living in a society where arbitrary stereotypes no longer block the freedoms of sisters, friends, daughters and mothers owe a debt to the campaigners who took to the streets.

Yes, there have been other trends in the post-war West which have brought misery, such as family breakdown and the misuse of drugs, but to quote Martin Luther King: “Let us realise the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

No amount of glucose-gold nostalgia should make us want to turn the clock back to a recent moment in time when blacks were segregated in the American South and routinely discriminated against in Britain. Earlier, simpler times were for many people painful days of ever-present prejudice, just as millions of men had their ambitions thwarted by a regressive class system.

Now is not the time for people on either the left or the right to abandon progressive ideals or shirk from battles that look unwinnable. Progress was pushed forward with courage and commitment and such sacrifice is needed as dearly today as it will be tomorrow.

A Thursday column

Eye Times and Misdemeanours

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The winter of 2009-10 was as cold as the door of a bank safe. But it swung open in the springtime with a blast of gelignite sunshine.



Which was doubly fine as two great souls were getting married.



I learned a new word this year - pterygium! Apparently, I had one and it needed to be removed from my left eye.

The overnight at the hospital was the longest I've spent in a ward since I was born, and that was under the Callaghan Government! But it was an experience in which I was showered with love and goodwill that I'll never forget - particularly the spectacle of my high mileage parents driving down from Middlesbrough to check I could count how many fingers they were holding up (I never was very good at maths).



Days later I discovered a lady I love and respect deeply had been raising lion cubs in her garden. Check out the happy wolfhound!



A Welsh journalist of scarcely fettered brilliance made recuperative muffins worth more than any Fabergé egg and the magnificent Gareth Hughes helped me eat them. In the company of such great souls I realise, as I think Clive Anderson said of Jeffrey Archer, there is no beginning to my talents.



The whole eye-shebang meant that for the first time in my life I wandered around many places in sunglasses. And when the most marvellous quintet without a tuba, the Mullan family, swept through the Welsh capital I fear they may have thought I believed I was a surfer in Malibu. Ah, but they bring waves of altogether more wonderful warmth.



And it was a true delight to accompany a dozen or so people who a little while earlier had been living in China and India to Gower, a peninsula as otherworldly as it is beautiful.



It is quite unlike anywhere I know in Britain.



On a Saturday its great beaches are empty, almost. Here, you could nearly start believing in fairies.



And there's at least one sea-dog in the vicinity.



Somebody, please, tell me what's going on here.



Of course, a moment of monumental glory was the wedding of Mike & Alex, but before that there was the matter of the stag weekend. Mike introduced me to the concept of the smoking jacket a decade ago so I expected maybe a scramble up Pen y Fan before finding a great fire and some fine ales.

But within minutes of arriving, still clad in the cashmere socks a winsome dietician had dropped through my letter box, I was out of my canoe and floating down the River Wye faster than contraband from Canada. The next day we went gorge jumping and lunchtime was like a scene from the Deer Hunter (not one involving any deer hunting, I should add).



But it was a grand day...



...in the grandest of company.



I believe at this moment the trailer for the A-Team was playing on a very fancy phone.



But high culture and exploding helicopters can mix, and we detoured home via Dylan Thomas's boathouse. The man had a view of such untrammelled beauty, looking out across sandflats that blaze with fire when the sun sets, that you wonder why he said goodbye to Caitlin and the kids and left for New York. And yet, you take the short walk from his boathouse home to the writing shed from where he stared out at that horizon and you know why he went wandering.



We swerved through Cardiff Bay for a melting ice cream and a flash of the Senedd, and it was time to say goodbye to the kings of the road who had survived Wales' coldest waters, tasted its whiskey, and enlivened a nation. It was all over, as they say, in a blink of the eye.

Seizing the "Not Yet"

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Nature's shock and awe eclipses almost any destruction that can be achieved with the product of a munitions factory.

The flooding in Pakistan presents a vision of an apocalypse in which normal life is brought to a devastating halt. Twenty million people have fled their homes and a country and a region now wonders whether it stands on the verge of a nightmare of disease and starvation.

Pakistan is no stranger to crises. This nuclear state was already racked by terrorism, and enduring turmoil in Kashmir and Afghanistan has the potential to swell into catastrophic war. But today, this week, this month, the doomsday scenario has not been triggered. In the strangest of ways, this is a time of opportunity.

The nation is at a crossroads and in the midst of the tragedy of the floods there is the possibility to help an ally and avoid future calamity.

The neo-conservative hope that the overnight transformation of Saddam Hussein’s regime into rubble, would result in the emergence of a prosperous, pro-western government has proven an expensive pipe dream. People were shocked that their electricity was not turned back on in the months after the invasion and did not respond to outrages such as the Abu Ghraib prisoner scandal with emotions of awe.

But for a fraction of the cost of the occupation, we can provide aid that could house the homeless, prevent the spread of cholera and bring hope to 20 million people who will look to Islamist radicals for assistance if the country’s own government and the rest of the world do not help.

The United Nations has asked for £294m of assistance, which is the type of money – even in an age of austerity – the G8 should be able to gather in less time than it takes for a finance minister to sneeze. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost US taxpayers upwards of $1 trillion.

As political commentator Michael Ford commented in the Huffington Post, such a sum is the equivalent of paying $1m a day for 3,200 years. This would take us back to the time of the overthrow of Theseus as king of Athens.

In the UK we have demonstrated our willingness to bail-out our banks rather than risk financial meltdown.

But if we truly want to restore Pakistan to a position where neither a humanitarian catastrophe nor a nuclear armageddon loom on the horizon we should spend some of our loose change. If governments cannot get their act together, then corporations which want to see the region become the home of consumers and not extremists should foot the bill.

And if even the commercial world won’t move to save lives and win hearts and minds, then ordinary citizens should stump up the cash.

A Thursday column

The Wedding of Mike & Alex

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A few reflections on a very happy day...



When the chiefs at Nasa told Neil Armstrong he would be the first man to stand on the moon I am sure the toes on those feet of his which would soon take such a historic step trembled with excitement.



But tell me, which is the greater honour? Planting a plastic US flag in some grey moondust and then jetting home or getting to stand beside Michael and Alex in the heat of the Technicolor drama of their wedding day?

This is a moment of take-off! Today we have gathered at the Cape Canaveral of 21st century matrimony. The booster rockets are firing and before us we see the spectacular launch of a coalition which will eclipse in wonder, beauty and panache any tango move performed by David Cameron and Nick Clegg in the Rose Garden.



No spaceman has ever set foot on a star, but – Mike and Alex – today you are two luminous lights whose combined brilliance can be seen even in the darker neighbourhoods of Alpha Centurai.



The moon is just a round object which orbits the earth. Yet for so many of us here today, in our lives you are a pivot of joy, around which spins fun, adventure and the incandescent delight of decades-spanning friendship.



When I arrived in the city of Aberdeen in the final years of the Major Government, Scotland was draped in an ink-black winter. The comet Hale-Bopp was in the sky and in our now-demolished student hall there were greater opportunities to indulge in the consumption of lard than at any previous moment in my life, but such phenomena were poor compensation for the comforts left behind on the far side of the Irish Sea.



Yet before I set out for Scotland, I heard rumours of another Ulsterman who was about to make the crossing. While I was selling shoes in Ireland’s oldest footwear emporium, people of good standing and intelligence took me to one side and told me to look out for Michael Waring, using tones of voice usually employed only to describe Mother Teresa or Frank Sinatra.



When I first encountered this great man he was standing at the top of a flight of stairs leading out of the carbohydrate haze of the dining room. With hair hanging to his shoulders and a fine cardigan sashaying to his knees, he appeared a Moses in the age of Britpop, a seer and a sage with the panache and pizazz to lead even Aberdeen into a promised land of vitamins and Ingmar Bergman box-sets.



And later that evening, as we waited to go to a ceilidh where great-hearted Scottish women would thrash us about like kittens in the grip of tartan rhinos, I turned to him and said, “I hear you’re into films? Who’s your favourite director?”

Michael cocked his head and said: “I think it has got to be Woody Allen.”



In the Hebrew scriptures there is a moment when a woman spontaneously volunteers to water a herd of camels for one of Abraham’s servants and is immediately identified as perfect marriage material. In a world in which Steven Seagal’s Navy Seals received an order of veneration to rival Citizen Kane, it was a moment of wild, camel-watering relief and happiness to encounter someone who shared a delight in a New York filmmaker in whose movies beautiful women fall in love with funny little guys with a line in self-deprecating humour.



When Mike writes you a letter a tapestry of wit and pathos that would wow Woody Allen on a Thursday tumbles into your lap. But Mike is no Cyrano de Bergerac who can only woo with the written word.



At a time in life when most of us were trying to impress womenfolk by growing goatee beards that made us resemble the results of illegal genetic experiments in cloning hamsters and aardvarks, Mike had the gliding grandeur of a matinee idol; it was as if Dean Martin’s younger brother had come to Scotland in search of the Famous Grouse. Did he need a Sammy Davis Jr?



There are men who can play bagpipes, and women who can throw knives at remarkable speed, but Mike’s greatest trick is not his ability to wear outrageously colourful shirts of crushed velvet that would dazzle a peacock or even his skills at constructing a chocolate cake by stirring Jack Daniel's and butter; rather, he knows the phrase which instantly puts anyone at ease, brings shining humour out of the murk of the everyday, and sprays curiosity and a scent of adventure in every direction.



It is true that during two very cold but consistently interesting years in which we lived in a subsiding tenement building that had once been the childhood home of Annie Lennox he would sometimes put on a pair of angel’s wings after eating a jelly prepared by a future medical negligence lawyer, but conversation with Mike takes flight without any dietary requirements.



This has inevitably led many women on different continents to fall into advanced states of besotedness with our dear friend, and I understand an animated series featuring Mike eating different types of cereal is still big in Cambodia. But a little over half a decade ago, while watching Happy Gilmore, a comedy about the golfing exploits of a sociopathic hockey player, I gained the distinct impression that he might have fallen for a marvellous woman on the same sofa whose four-letter name straddled both ends of the alphabet.



The correct spelling of Alex is an important point in this story. As the third year of our studies rumbled towards its end, Mike and I decided that our CVs needed proof that we had used our time at university to do more than meditate on the psychedelic glory of level one of Mario Kart. We made a bee-line to a pub where the sophisticated ladies of the English Studies society were on the desperate search for new committee members.

In the darkness of this tavern the bright eyes and gleaming cheeks of a girl from the distant and near-mythical city of London glowed liked Edward Hopper’s lighthouses. We tried to give the impression that we would run across the Arctic dressed as voles if this would further the cause of their society, but, actually, we wanted to understand this mysterious damsel’s uranium-bright joie de vie, even if it meant learning French.



When we stumbled back into our flat on Hutcheon St – and there is no other way to enter a building in which each room slants at a 30 degree angle – a future intellectual property lawyer who could identify 30 types of light sabre looked up to ask how our evening’s adventure had progressed. “It was good,” Michael said. “But there was a really hot chick called Alice.”



It took weeks to discover we were half-wrong about her name, but in the subsequent years the qualities which scorched Mike’s eyebrows to cinders that night and the treasure trove of subsequently discovered delights have blazed true and deep and it has been a blessing of a Himalayan-high order to know her kindness, hospitality, loyalty, wit and warmth and eat her outrageously good pasta.



In the song Shelter from the Storm, the poet of Minnesota, Bob Dylan, tells the listener to “try imagining a place where it’s always safe and warm.” I don’t need to. I’ve sat in front of roaring Christmas fires in Michael’s homes in first Ballyrashane and Cairnlough and then Coleraine, and spent some of the most contented afternoons of my life in the garden of Alex’s family home in Streatham.



Jim Waring, Michael’s dad, is the man we all wish would be US president. But if his ancestors had boarded the Mayflower Northern Ireland would have lost a cracking badminton player, a pastor with a message of love and eternal life who has sufficient reserves of wisdom, compassion and encouragement to fill the Gulf of Mexico, and an extraordinary father of three amazing children.



In the opening moments of Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, we hear Ray Liotta’s character say: “As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster.” But if Ray Liotta had met the Waring clan he would have encountered people bonded together by something stronger and more wonderful than a Mafia oath and then there would have been no need for him to enter the witness protection scheme and nobody would have got whacked.



As far back as I can remember, I’ve loved this family. An evening with Jim, Stephanie, Phillip and David is more exciting than any bank heist and their company sparkles brighter than a haul of diamonds.

When I started coming to London for job interviews and whatnot, staying at Alex’s house was a jump into a magic cauldron of food and family and laughter and debate.



In a metropolis famed worldwide for capitalist bustle and can’t-stop-to-chat urgency, it was a tonic and joy to be seized by Alex’s mum Susie and bear-hugged by her brother, Ben, and charmed by his great friend Sara. As so many of you will know, together they cook up a magic potion that fills you with a confidence which makes you think you can take the globe for a Michael Jordan dribble and slam-dunk it through life’s most challenging hoops.



Alex’s grandmother, Margit - who is a paragon of elegance, a dynamo of inspiration and a true veteran of courage - told me: “You’ll get a job because you’ve stayed in this house. Everyone who stays in this house gets a job.”

I’ve now been happily living in Wales for almost a decade so I don’t think I got the job I was going for – and Michael knows the last time we played basketball I ended up sprawled on the court with a broken fibula – but in the two houses of Mike and Alex, which are today united in love and hope, you can discover something much more important than monetary employment.



Generations of love, forged in the fires of the trials and turbulence and pain and promises of centuries, have fashioned families which throw wide their arms to embrace and transform us.



We are indebted to you for this, and such love is already burning bright in the lives of Mike and Alex. I’ve seen them take this magic to places as far apart as New York, Vancouver and Bushmills. Wherever fires can be lit and cardigans may be worn they will bring the crackle of life at its most exciting, laughter at its most illuminating and friendship at its most warming.



On the first morning of the second millennium and the 21st century I woke up on a mattress in a very narrow space in a Belfast bedroom into which had been squeezed a future James Bond-double, a dude with the most fantastic purple dungarees and the man whom a decade later would win the hand in marriage of Alex Romeo. Now, in the first year of the second decade of this century, a new chapter has opened.



May your mattresses be soft but expertly sprung, your love strong, your children happy and your memories of this day as darn fantastic as you look together right now. Mazel tov!

Encountering Edward

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The faintest rumour that dynamite and bulldozers were en route to Snowdon to carve out images of the greatest British Prime Ministers in the rockface of the national mountain would trigger spectacular riots.

Britain does not have a Mount Rushmore. Nor is there great demand to create one.

Certainly, large numbers of us do not beat a path to the former homes of political leaders to pay respects.

This is one reason why this year the home of the late Conservative PM Edward Heath will close to the public. The charitable trust which has maintained the large Salisbury property plans to sell it and use the proceeds to support musical and educational charities.

Westminster is still filled with Thatcherites and Blairites but I have never met a self-described Heathite, which makes it seem odd there was any attempt to make his home a tourist attraction. Surely a man who had few disciples is unlikely to draw pilgrims?

But regardless of your political stripes, it is worth making the journey to the house he knew as Arundells before the gates lock shut.

Its two acres of grounds are located in one of the world’s most beautiful neighbourhoods, Salisbury’s Cathedral Close. The spire stands over the gardens like an Apollo rocket and the view creates an instant sense of both awe and serenity.

This is not a tour of a home where history was made – there is no armchair from which he decided to sink a Belgrano or invade Iraq.

Rather, we glimpse what a private and enigmatic individual wanted to reveal. We see models of his racing yachts; there is his beloved Steinway and the dining table is laid out as if in preparation for one of his famed lunches.

On the top of the piano there are photographs of world leaders he met, including Bill Clinton, Fidel Castro, Indira Gandhi Willy Brandt and Richard Nixon.

Visitors are shown his giant CD collection, the once state-of-the-art hi-fi, and the paintings by Churchill in which he took immense pride. It is as if Heath wanted to show us that he was a man with passions and loves.

We learn more about an Englishman who was at the country’s helm as the sun sank on the British Empire by looking at the curios, trophies and knick-knacks that – for at least several more weeks – fill his home than the grandeur of Rushmore can tell us about the secret life of Lincoln.

In trying to make sense of how his books on art and his musical instruments brought him pleasure that could address the isolation and disappointment which defined his later decades, you encounter not an Alpha Male PM but a very human being; and that is worth any price of admission.

A Thursday column

Plaid @ 85

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Eighty-five years today, six people with a passionate concern for the survival of Welsh identity gathered in a room and Plaid Cymru was born.

Within half a decade the party committed itself to winning dominion status for Wales.
Canada had achieved de facto independence in 1867, the Australian colonies had a formed a self-governing federation in 1901, and the Irish Free State was launched in 1922.

True, Welsh autonomy would require radical changes to the way the island of Britain – then the pivot of an empire – was governed, but this was an age of revolutionary possibility.

The unprecedented savagery of World War I had stripped communities across Wales of fathers, sons and brothers and exposed the need for a new recognition of the rights and dignity of the individual.

Furthermore, far from being a staid society of unflinching deference, Britain was in the throes of transformation.

In 1920 the Church in Wales was disestablished and in 1928 the suffragettes won women the same voting rights as men.

Against such achievements, what seems most extraordinary is not the wild dreaming of Welsh nationalists but the fact that Britain in 2010 still has a hereditary monarchy with splendiferous levels of pomp, an ermine-packed House of Lords and a first-past-the-post voting system for the Commons.

Of course, reform does not equal progress and it is worth noting that this chimerical system of tradition and democracy held together a country which succumbed to neither fascism nor Communism, fought Nazis, delivered the wonder that is the NHS, decolonised without detonating and is now integrating into Europe.

However, if the six people who came together to form Plaid in 1925 were transported into the present they might marvel at multicultural Wales but ask why Canadian-style self-rule still seems more of a concept than a prospect.

Did Cold War politics and the post-1945 rebuilding of the UK effectively push the pause button on the evolution of Britain? Is this why Plaid had to wait until 1966 to win a parliamentary seat; until 1997 for Wales to vote for an Assembly; and until 2007 to enter power as Labour’s junior partner?

Would they be excited at the prospect of Plaid sending its first representatives to the Lords or would they call for the abandonment of Westminster and a bold focus on the Assembly? This would mute the influence of the party’s three MPs but send a striking message that the party considered an imperfect Assembly nevertheless a true expression of Welsh sovereignty.

In 2025, the party will probably be alive to celebrate its 100th birthday. But the questions it will confront and the dreams it chooses to pursue in the next 15 years will be some of the most important in its history.

A Thursday column

Is Christianity Relevant?

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Christianity is a world faith.
Some of its manifestations are beautiful and life-changing.
It has inspired people to build cathedrals and hospitals on every continent.



Some of the one billion people who describe themselves as Christians do fantastic things.
Others are nutcases and rogues.

Christianity as a religious expression is
Sometimes relevant to the needs and desires of the 21st century
And sometimes it completely misses the mark.
Forms of Christianity which excite people today will be completely irrelevant soon.
And that's nothing to worry about.

Tony Jones made an interesting point:

"There are under a million pay phones in the United States today. In 1997, there were over two million. Of course, the death of the pay phone doesn’t mean that we don’t make phone calls anymore. In fact, we make far more calls than ever before, but we make them differently. Now we make phone calls from home or on the mobile device clasped to our belt or through our computers. Phone calls aren’t obsolete, but the pay phone is—or at least it’s quickly becoming so."



He continued:

"Similarly, the modern church is changing and evolving and emerging. To extend the analogy a bit, no one is saying that the pay phone was a bad idea. Most people would agree that it was a good idea at the time — it was an excellent way to communicate. But communication was the goal, and pay phones were merely a means to an end.
The modern church—at least as it is characterized by imposing physical buildings, professional clergy, denominational bureaucracies, residential seminary training, and other trappings—was an endeavour by faithful men and women in their time and place, attempting to live into the biblical gospel. But the church was never the end, only the means. The desire of the emergents is to live Christianly, to build something wonderful for the future on the legacy of the past."

In his famous poem Church Going,
Philip Larkin wondered what would happen to these buildings
That dot most lands where Christians have lived.



Deciding that the empty church he dropped into
Was "not worth stopping for", he remarks:

"Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?"

The day may well come when
"churches will fall completely out of use"
But this will be because the Church
Has moved on
To find new ways of serving and worshipping.
Besides, Theology 101 will teach you
That a Church isn't bricks and mortar.
It's people who are born, live and die
But who share a faith in Jesus of Nazareth.

Attempts to make Christianity relevant
Which are not efforts to communicate with honest clarity
The bold and disturbing message of this carpenter's son
Are doomed to disaster.

Jesus is not someone to be sold like a set of encyclopaedias
Or a savings plan.
He's a person to be encountered anew
By everyone in every generation.

If you are put off church by the hard-sell efforts of tele-evangelists
Or the outrages of faith-exploiting politicians
Or the calamitous moments of intolerance in church history, ancient and modern
I don't blame you.
But it's like being put off a football team
By the hooligans who wear the scarves and riot in the pubs
But rarely show up for matches.



And if you are horrified by the shlock excesses
Of a Christian subculture
Where the faith is peddled
As a shortcut to higher self-esteem
(Or even a thinner waist or a better love-life)
You're not alone.

As the great Christian writer CS Lewis snorted:
"I haven’t always been a Christian.
I didn’t go to religion to make me happy.
I always knew a bottle of Port would do that.
If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable,
I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.”

Jesus famously kicked the money-changers
Out of the Temple.
And many Christians wish he would do the same in his Church.
And if neither the glam-rock theatricality
Of high church worship
Nor the raving tambourine-breaking attracts you,
Trust me - there are Christians everywhere who cringe their way
Through such sessions.

Why do they stick with it?
It is not because some theo-marketeer has convinced them
Cfhurchgoing will make them chirpier.
Rather, they have encountered in Jesus someone
Who is supremely relevant.

How come?
Let's look down the other end of the telescope for a moment.
Why would God consider humanity worthy of his attention,
Never mind his love?

When God elected to save humanity from its sins
With the sacrifice of his son
How do you think the angels of heaven responded?



It is easy to imagine these great winged messengers
Turning to each other,
Pulling faces of shock and saying:
“What?! Is he going to do that for them?”

Each year we learn more about the
Extraordinary expanse
Of the universe and the microscopic nature
Of our tiny planet.



Schoolchildren know how it orbits an unexceptional star
In an otherwise mundane
solar system in one
Of at least 170 billion galaxies.

I am sure angels can appreciate the full wonder of the created universe.
But they have also seen the power which forged the cosmos.
They have worshipped before the throne of the triune God.



So the revelation that the God whose glory and genius drives all existence
Would send his son to die a humiliating,
Unanaesthetised
Criminal’s death
On a cross
To rescue
Men and women from
Eternal death
Must have had these celestial beings
Scratching their heads.



“Why?” they might well have asked.
“Why endure such pain to save a species which has
So little going for it?
They messed up the Garden of Eden.
They systematically slaughtered God’s prophets.
Why bother with them?
They are so irrelevant.”

In perhaps the most famous chapter (John 3:16-17) of the Bible Jesus gives an answer to the “why”.
This is why the divine became human:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son
That whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
For God did not send his son into the world to condemn the world
But to save the world through him.”

This is why we are relevant to God: He loves us.

Before going to war or launching an epic rescue operation,
Presidents, Prime Ministers and generals ask the question:
“What is in the national interest?”
Before spending blood and treasure on a foreign adventure.

But God's rescue mission was motivated by sheer love.

If I had been a nearby angel who overheard Jesus, I might still have shouted:

“Why?
Why love these people
When you know the horrors of the sin
They inflict on each other and will
One day inflict on you?

Why save these people who will force a crown
Of thorns onto your head?
Who will whip the flesh from your back,
Nail you to a cross and thrust a spear into your side?
Tell me why you love them!”

If an angel would struggle to comprehend why God loves us,
A human mind can merely boggle.
But in the very first chapter of the Bible, in Genesis,
We are told that God created us “in his own image”

And when we look at the love which burns against the odds in human families
Perhaps we can gain a faint but true insight into the extraordinary love which God displays towards each one of us.

With good reason,
A sceptic can ask if it is rational to believe that a
Father God would love his creation with such zeal.

But is the love that explodes
In the hearts of mothers and fathers
When they cradle a screaming scrap of flesh in a maternity ward
In any sense rational?



What relevant gift
can children with their snotty noses and consuming appetites
Give to their parents?
How could they justify the phenomenal exertion
Involved in raising the most straightforward son or daughter?

If a child is sick,
Why do parents with work the next morning
Sit up through the night at his or her bedside?
What is the secret power behind the forgiveness
Which parents show when a stroppy teenager screams and swears in their face?
Why, when a son with a brand new driving licence
Writes off the family car is the dad’s first reaction upon seeing him
To hug him instead of suing him?

The everyday heroism of parents is powered by a love which is tender and yet fierce,
And is a distant echo of our creator’s devotion to his creation.
An infant daughter cannot comprehend
The love of the mother who lifts her to her breast,
But she depends on this love and is transformed by it.
The most relevant fact in her universe is the truth that she is loved.
It sustains her life and enables her development.

From our perspective as mammals who have been given the use of a
Very lovely blue and white planet
We are unlikely to ever grasp the reasons why God loves us,
Yet this does not mean that we do not depend on his love
Every day of our lives.

As the Irish philosopher Peter Rollins put it:
“We are like an infant in the arms of God,
Unable to grasp but being transformed by the grasp.”

One of the staples of schlocky reality TV
Is the moment when a screen is pulled back
And a grown-up is united with the parent
He or she has not seen in decades.
The son or daughter had made a go at living a good life
In the intervening years,
But their whole world is now transformed by the
Certainty their parent is alive and wants to know them.



Billions of people today are trying their best to lead
Useful lives and love their friends and family,
But they do not know that the God who loves them with a
Desperate power wants to break into their world,
Free them from the disease of sin,
And give them a hope which stretches beyond the grave.



How would it change your life if you truly believed that
This God was the king of the universe?
What fears would this perfect love drive away?
Which new colours of joy would the discovery of such a Father reveal?

The writers who chronicled the story of Jesus described it as
Good News and what message could be more relevant to the 21st century?
Great thinkers have used
Logic to argue that a Supreme Being exists,
But only through the words and life of Jesus Christ
Can we begin to know God as a loving father.

For the apostle John,
Life-giving and self-sacrificing love is the most
Perfect expression of God’s identity.
He wrote in the fourth chapter of his first epistle:

“Whoever does not love does not know God,
Because God is love.
This is how God showed his love among us:
He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.
This is love:
Not that we loved God,
But that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”

These verses reveal that the consequence
Of not dealing with sin was so horrendous that God
Was ready to see Jesus die in our place.

In chapter 21 of the book of Revelation,
A voice from the throne of God’s new Jerusalem declares
The beautiful hope which has opened up for humanity
But also a terrifying “second death”.

The voice states:

“To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life.
He who overcomes will inherit all of this,
And I will be his God and he will be my son.
But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral,
Those who practise magic arts, the idolaters and all liars –
Their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulphur.
This is the second death.”



Jesus was clear that anyone
Who hated a brother
Might as well be a murderer.

There is no one alive who has not lied,
Turned a desire into an idol,
Or flashed with cowardice.

We know that there is a dark current in the world,
Pulling us towards destruction.
We want to reach the spring of life,
But our thrashing doesn't us far from the lake of death.

And in the consequent guilt and dread
Our horizons are clogged with sulphur.
Its fumes fill our throats until we thirst for a better life,
For a love more pure than we could ever know,
And a hope beyond anything we deserve.



The message of Christ is of direct relevance
When we're caught in these waves.
That thirst was planted by a Father
Who wants us to know him and know life in all
Its fullness, justice and beauty.
This is why we can look to the fulfilment of history
Not with the wild-eyed terror of an apocalyptic cult
But with the confidence of children who
About to meet the Father who loves them and his son
Who suffered death in their place and is now
Lord of the universe.

It's heady stuff,
But this is what it's all about.

As Jesus himself put it in the sixth chapter of the gospel of John:

“All that the Father gives me will come to me,
And whoever comes to me
I will never drive away.
For I have come down from heaven
Not to do my will
But to do the will of him who sent me.
And this is the will of him who sent me,
That I shall lose none of all that he has given me,
But raise them up at the last day.
For my Father’s will is that everyone
Who looks to the Son and believes in him
Shall have eternal life,
And I will raise him up at the last day.”



If the trajectory of history runs not towards nuclear annihilation,
The devouring of our species by a rogue virus
Or simply the death of our sun
But in the revelation of Jesus as returning king
Who knows us by name and will reach down and lift us up,
How should this affect the way we live today?

Once again, Jesus had plenty of clear advice during his three years of public ministry.

In Luke 12, he told his followers:

“Do not be afraid,
Little flock,
For your Father has been pleased
To give you the kingdom.
Sell your possessions and give to the poor.
Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out,
A treasure in heaven that will not be exhausted,
Where no thief comes near
And no moth destroys.
For where your treasure is,
There your heart will be also.”

The apostle John would later write in the third chapter of his first letter:

“This is how we know what love is:
Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.
And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.
If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him,
How can the love of God be in him?
Dear children,
Let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.”

If we are convinced that Jesus is alive and that his Spirit has the power to set eternal life in our hearts alight today,
Then we should ask if the lives we now lead are relevant to his kingdom.
If idols, cowardice and lust lead to death
We should pray for the power of the Spirit to lead us into truth, courage and love.

Great Father,
Remake us, Lord, as your children.
Rewire us,
Retool us,
Reboot us for your purposes.
Cleanse our minds of fear and foolishness,
Purge our hearts of evil and regret,
Lead us into life everlasting,
Into a new family
Of people blessed to know your love.
Amen.