Bringing The Living To Life (BTLTL) is a working title for a series of
blogs on reading the Scriptures imaginatively. When I was a young child I began
kindergarten at a Methodist Sunday School down the street. The only family
connection with Methodism I know of is that two of my maternal
great-grandparents are buried in the ‘Primitive Methodist’ section of a country
cemetery! Perhaps it was simply that my loving parents, both products of ‘mixed’
marriages, thought, like so many others, it might be good for me and give me a
basic religious background rather than just a blank! But within a year or two
of my beginning there, the church of which the S.S. was part was torn down! Had
I been more aware than we normally are at that age, I might have asked one of
those deep questions of life: ‘What did I do to cause that?’
Soon after, we moved house and again I was sent to another nearby
Methodist S. S. When we moved again
(W.W.2 was raging by now, and there was a lot of moving going on) I was sent to
yet another S.S. only to find, puzzlingly, that it was my original one re-built
on a new site! Its resurrection there played its part in my own journey of
being brought to life.
Each of those three churches with its S.S. symbolises change and challenge
in life. Church No.1 moved to what was
seen to be more fruitful ground. Church No.2 was found to be surplus to the
needs of the new Uniting
Church and taken over by
another denomination. No.3 (No.1 resurrected) too was found to be surplus to
the U.C’s needs and became a mosque! Moving
on can have surprising consequences!
I’ll always be grateful to those
good Methodists and their S.Ss. for giving me a sound grounding in biblical
stories. Though I now understand many of them differently from the face-value
approach I took as a young child, these are the stories I have grown up with
and grown into and hope to explore in BTLTL. They represent a stage I’ve
now reached in understanding key parts of the Scriptures, starting with the Hebrew 'Older Testament' (O.T.). I
am still finding new life in the stories, as I believe anyone can. Even those who
don’t know the stories at all, or only vaguely remember them, as well as those to
whom they’re long 'dead and buried' or simply in the 'too hard basket' is welcome
to take the risk of opening those graves or baskets, and give the stories a chance
to live again. Church Home Groups and ‘Bible Study’ groups may also find seeds
of new life in them.
The title ‘Bringing The Living
To Life’ comes from Charles Causley's 'Ballad of the Breadman' [1] in which he imaginatively
distils the essence of Jesus. Causley invites us to look at Jesus more
imaginatively than we often do, so we, too, become as fully alive to God as
Jesus is. I take him to be not too subtly suggesting Jesus raising Lazarus from
death in the Christian 'Newer Testament' (N.T.) is a sign it might be easier
for God to bring the physically dead to life than some living spiritually dead!
So BTLTL aims at bringing those Hebrew people of old and their Scriptures to
life and us with them. But that’s another
story…
1] 'The Sun Dancing',
ed. Charles Causley, Kestrel, Harmondsworth,
England, 1982
p.132.
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