Wearing Purple in Advent

Why do we wear purple in Advent? Because purple is a royal colour, and Jesus is King.

I’d like to draw your attention to three sermons on the liturgical calendar, preached by Toby Sumpter (pictured above), one of the pastors of Trinity Reformed Church, Moscow, Idaho. They should be available for the next few weeks.

Old Testament Feasts and the Christian Calendar
Calendar and Culture
Calendar, Community and Mission

In the first sermon, Pastor Sumpter looks at what we who live in the era  when God’s people have  come of age can learn from the calendar of Israel, God’s people in their minority – the Sabbath days, the week-long festivals, even the year-long festivals – in much the same way that when you teach children certain rules, you don’t expect them to abandon them when they grow up, but become principles that they as adults continue to apply in their lives. At the heart of Israel’s festival calendar is remembering. As human beings, we are prone to forgetfulness, not least of God’s saving mercy, so he appointed days, weeks, even years so that Israel could not help but remember his rescue of them from slavery in Egypt and his gift to them of the Promised Land. And we need to remember so that we remember to be thankful. In the heart of the life of the church, that finds its focus at the Eucharist.

In the second sermon, Sumpter starts with the description of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2, and the New Jerusalem in Revelation 22. In Eden there was a river which divided into four and flowed out to the four corners of the earth, with treasure to be found in those lands where the river flowed. Adam was meant to start in the Garden but he wasn’t meant to stay there; the intention was rather that he would go out and discover and fill the earth. Similarly, in the New Jerusalem, there was a river running through the city, such that trees grew on its banks for the healing of the nations. What happens in the church impacts the world. Sumpter reiterates the principle lex orandi lex credendi – worship or prayer affects belief, if you like, but he goes further and says lex orandi lex credendi lex vivendi: worship goes on also to affect the whole of life. As Reformed types, we can easily leave things at the level of belief without letting it flow into the whole of life. Christ is Lord of all, including Lord of time, and the church lives in the overlap of two ages, the age when Christ is Lord of all, but also the age when that Lordship is not fully recognised. The Christian calendar is a way of shaping Christian devotion – we pray prayers and read Scripture and sing songs focusing now on one aspect of Christ’s life, and now on another. It is a new way of marking time, a way of marking time that is Christ-centred. As the church marks time in a way that has Christ at the centre, so this will flow out and transform the world. Sumpter goes on to warn against the particular danger of keeping the liturgical year which is people can use external forms as a substitute for being inwardly right with God, and use it as a cloak when that heart attitude isn’t there.

The third sermon is broader and focuses on the practice of the church in Acts 2, day by day attending the temple together, breaking bread in their homes, devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the prayers. Pastor Sumpter addresses the charge that this practice, and the vision of a church marking the church year, not just Sunday by Sunday, but through meetings in the week, feasts and so on, can become burdensome. Mobilising a family on Sunday alone can be tiring and the joy and focus on Christ can easily be lost in the effort just to keep everyone and everything together. He looks at the concept of ‘praying continually’ which is iterated a number of times in the New Testament, and how that corresponds to the morning and evening sacrifices in the tabernacle and temple. As one sacrifice is burnt up, it is time for the next. These two sacrifices form the basis for a sacrifice being continually offered to God. Similarly, praying without ceasing is fuelled by a pattern of morning and evening prayer, and prayer isn’t just asking God for things, but if we follow the pattern of the Psalms, is also declaring his mighty works. Sumpter suggests that families get into the pattern of morning and evening prayer together and says that we mustn’t be too ambitious to start with, which can often lead to the practice very quickly falling by the wayside. Amusingly, he recalls his wife humoring him when they got married and he said, “This is going to be our liturgy”, and leaving him to realise what exactly was achievable! He concludes with a vision for church life where it is natural for people to be inviting families to one another’s homes, showing hospitality to their neighbours, sharing meals, singing Psalms together (not just at organised events), a vision which will be attractive to the rest of the community, and draw them in.

These sermons are well worth listening to, and refreshing with their differences in style and emphasis, despite coming from a robustly Reformed and evangelical position.

Toby Sumpter has a weblog, Having Two Legs, which is well worth visiting regularly, and his recent post ‘Teaching Me Life‘, describing his three children, is simply delightful.

Here are a few extracts to close:

I ask my daughter, “Who made you?” She smiles. It’s exciting when dad asks her questions during family devotions. She keeps smiling until I tell her the answer. “God made you.” “God made me.” How many Gods are there? “Two!” she blurts out excitedly and holds up two fingers. She’s two years old of course, and we obviously haven’t gone over this enough. You can tell which liturgy we have practiced more. River corrects his sister, and there’s a momentary controversy over how many gods there are. We are wavering between monotheism and polytheism. The whistles are blown, and we come down on the side of orthodoxy. Heresy is averted for the time being. We move on to the next question. “What is God’s name?” She smiles. I begin, “Father…” And she picks up “Father, Son, and Spirit!”

***

Felicity is standing in her high chair. She holds very strictly to that little known decree of Nicaea which forbade sitting or kneeling in worship, since that would symbolically deny the resurrection. Christ is risen, and therefore all Christians must worship standing, the fathers declared. So my daughter stands in her chair. Sometimes she stands on the arms of the chair. She wobbles and bounces and gesticulates while standing on the arms of her chair.

***

“Jesus is God, dad,” my son explains. That’s right, I say. “But how does Jesus obey himself, dad?” He obeys the Father, I explain. “But Jesus is God.” Right, but God is three persons, I remind him. “Oh.” He seems satisfied for the moment. He’s like the early church, getting his trinitarian theology all straight. I fully expect that next year we’ll be working on Christology, and we’ll just make our way through the ecumenical councils, I suppose.

The Deputy of Christ

I hope to post a few reflections on George Herbert’s articulation of what it means to be a pastor, from his A Priest to the Temple or, The Country Parson: His Character and Rule of Holy Life. In it, he sketches an ideal minister, upon which he intended to model his own ministry:

I have resolved to set down the form and character of a true pastor, that I may have a mark to aim at: which also I will set as high as I can, since he shoots higher that threatens the moon, than he that aims at a tree.

- from The Author to the Reader

I find myself drawn to George Herbert. He exposes the folly of our attempt to place Christian believers, and ministers in particular, into particular boxes labelled ‘Evangelical’ or ‘Catholic’. As I hope we’ll see from Herbert’s writings, he had much in common with the Puritans, in terms of his emphasis on personal holiness, his delight in preaching and teaching, his commitment to precise application of Scriptural doctrine, his resolve, like the Lord Jesus, not to be swayed by appearances (Matthew 22.16). Nevertheless, he had a high view of the church and the sacraments: he was faithful in his commitment to the liturgical forms of the church, and was quite comfortable when describing the administration of the Lord’s Supper to talk about receiving God and breaking and administering him. His portrayal of the ‘true pastor’, was written in a pre-industrial time when the relationship between the church and the civil authority was very different from what it is now, but nevertheless, there is much to be learned from his writing about Christian ministry today. Really, you should just go and read A Priest to the Temple, but Lord willing, I will endeavour to draw out matters relating to the minister as a person and the minister’s teaching, as on family and community in general, which I have gleaned from reading it myself. I’ll start off by concluding this particular post with Herbert’s pithy definition of a Christian minister:

“A pastor is the Deputy of Christ for the reducing of man to the obedience of God.”

- Of a Pastor

Why not rather suffer wrong?

When I read about the property disputes between The Episcopal Church in America and those parishes that have voted to leave the denomination (and I hope that it never comes to that over here), I can’t help but think about the apostle Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 6. No, the Episcopal Church should not be taking parishes to court over their buildings. “When one of you has a grievance against another, does he dare go to law before the unrighteous instead of the saints? … If you have such cases, why do you lay them before those who have no standing in the church? I say this to your shame” (vv. 1, 4-5).

But then again, those parishes (even if they are orthodox) shouldn’t be allowing those lawsuits to proceed and going to court to defend themselves either. You can be wrong in your rightness. “To have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather suffer wrong? Why not rather be defrauded?” (v. 7). And this reflects the teaching of the Lord Jesus: “If anyone would sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well” (Matthew 5.40). Not only does that seem to me to be the right thing to do (which is the more important issue here), what a powerful witness it would be if those who are wronged would say, “Yes, we are sad about the loss of our beautiful building in which we have gathered and prayed and praised and received the word of truth, the building which we inherited from our forefathers, but more importantly, we really do acknowledge Jesus as our Lord and Saviour and so take his word seriously; we joyfully accept the plundering of our property, since we know that we ourselves have a better a possession and an abiding one, and we rejoice that we have been counted worthy to follow in the steps of him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself.”

Now, I appreciate that this chapter is talking about individuals taking one another to court, but I can’t see why that doesn’t apply to whole congregations and the denomination at large. Brother is still going to court against brother. Am I missing something obvious here?

And the Prophets

‘And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”‘ – Matthew 22.37-39

Those verses, or the parallels in the other gospels, are often referred to as the Summary of the Law. And so they are: they express the heart of our duties towards God and men. They correspond to the ‘two tables’ of the Ten Commandments, with commandments one to four addressing how we should behave towards God, and commandments five to ten addressing how we should behave towards our neighbour. Indeed, the rest of the Law in effect takes those principles, and pushes them into all the corners of the life of Israel in that particular era in that particular place, applying them to the whole of life.

But these two commandments, to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul and mind, and our neighbour as ourself, could equally be described as the Summary of the Prophets. “On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (v. 40). They express the heart of the message of the prophetic books of the Bible. They are, if you like, the hermeneutical key that unlocks their meaning. They were calling Israel back to the Lord as the only God who demanded their full commitment to him, rather than the idols of the nations around them. They were calling Israel to put away their oppression of one another, the injustice that they perpetrated in their wickedness and greed. This is to say that the purpose of the prophets was forthtelling, not just foretelling, proclamation and not just prognostication.

The Patriarchs and the Re-Creation of the World

‘And God said to him, “I am God Almighty: be fruitful and multiply. A nation and a company of nations shall come from you, and kings shall come from your own body.”‘ – Genesis 35.11

In this command and promise to Jacob, whom God renames Israel, we see that God’s intention for the patriarchs, and the nation of Israel descended from them, is the fulfilment of his original purposes for creation:

‘And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply.”‘ – Genesis 1.28

Following the judgement of the flood, this is God’s injunction to Noah and his sons:

‘And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them. “Be fruitful and multiply.”‘ – Genesis 9.1

This is the blessing that Isaac gives to Jacob his son:

“God Almighty bless you and make you fruitful and multiply you, that you may become a company of peoples.” – Genesis 28.3

Following the entrance of sin into the world at the Fall, then, Noah and Jacob are new Adams. The descendants of Noah, and more specifically of Jacob, are a new humanity. In them, we see God restoring and renewing his world. This was the identity and privilege of Jacob’s descendants, the Old Testament people of Israel. But it is in Jesus Christ, the descendant of Jacob, the descendant of Noah (Luke 3.34, 36) that we see the perfect new Adam, the last Adam (1 Corinthians 15.45), and we see constituted the ultimate new humanity (Ephesians 2.15).

Great obstructed vessels

“One thing is evident, that an English body, and a student’s body, are two great obstructed vessels, and that there is nothing that is food, and not physic, which doth less obstruct than flesh moderately taken.”

- George Herbert, ‘The Parson in his House’ in A Priest to the Temple

Tithing

‘And of all that you give me I will give a full tenth to you.’ – Genesis 28.22

We are often told (or at least I feel that I am often told) that while in the Old Testament, the people of Israel were commanded to tithe, that is, give ten percent, in the New Testament no particular amount is specified for Christian giving, just that we should give, our giving should be sacrificial, it should be generous and it should be cheerful (2 Corinthians 8-9). I can’t help but think that people might use that as a reason to give less than ten percent, not more.

Moreover, I think this overlooks a number of things. First, Christ came to fulfil the law, not abolish it, and he had some strong words for those who would relax one of the least of the commandments (Matthew 5.17-19). Of course, we have to interpret the law through the lens of Christ’s incarnation, death, resurrection and ascension. But we still obey the law as the revelation of God’s moral will.

Secondly, Paul takes the requirements of the tithing law as they pertained to temple service and applies them directly to giving to support Christian ministry: ‘Do you not know that those who are employed in the temple service get their food from the temple, and those who serve at the altar share in the sacrifical offerings? In the same way the Lord commanded that those who proclaim the gospel should get their living by the gospel’ – 1 Corinthians 9.13-14. (Incidentally, does that reasoning presuppose a closer underlying connexion between priesthood and Christian ministry than we protesting catholics are comfortable with?)

Thirdly, tithing preceded the giving of the law anyway. In Genesis, we learn of the history which gives the background to the experience and practice of Israel as a nation, and we see that Abram gave Melchizedek, the priest of God Most High, a tenth of everything (Genesis 14.20). Moreover, in response to God’s promise to bring him back to the land from which he in a way going into exile to flee from his murderous brother (Genesis 27.42-43) and to make his offspring like the dust of the earth and to bless all the families of the earth through him, Jacob vows to give a full tenth of all that the Lord gives him (Genesis 28.22). Like marriage and the Sabbath, tithing is an ordinance which precedes the giving of the law at Sinai, although it is of course reaffirmed there, and thus stands, I take it, and cannot simply be explained away as something that has been fulfilled in Christ, like the sacrifices, or doesn’t apply in the same way any more, like the civil administration.

At least ten percent, then, is how much God commands us to give; how exactly we give that – supporting Christian ministers, helping those in need, feasting before the Lord (see Deuteronomy 14.22-29) – is the subject for another time.

Epiphany and the Pentateuch

I like the season of Epiphany, or ‘The Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles’. Commemorating the visitation of the Magi and their acknowledgement and worship of Christ as the king, this season is all about God’s mission in the world, proclaiming his name to the ends of the earth so that light, glory, healing and blessing are brought to the nations through his Son. It is about the undoing of Adam’s sin and its consequences after the Fall, and the restoration of God’s original purposes for his creation.

This programme is built into the identity of the people of Israel in the Old Testament. The nation is founded on God’s covenant with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and the refrain that runs throughout Genesis is ‘in you and your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed’ (e.g. Genesis 12.3 18.18, 22.18, 26.4, 28.14).

This is codified in the law by which Israel as a nation was governed. There’s an awful lot in the Law about the inclusion of non-Israelites (’sojourners’). They were able to make offerings to the Lord (Leviticus 22.18, Numbers 15.14-16), participate in the Passover (Numbers 9.14) and the other Israelite feasts (Deuteronomy 16.11, 14, 26.11). Provision was made for their material needs (Leviticus 19.10, 23.22, Deuteronomy 14.21, 24.19-21, 26.12-13) and justice (Numbers 35.15, Deuteronomy 10.18-19, Deuteronomy 24.14, 17, 27.19). They were also able to participate in the assembly of the people (Deuteronomy 31.12, Joshua 8.33-35). And one of the purposes of God’s people keeping his law was evangelistic (Deuteronomy 4.5-8).

This programme is of course fulfilled through Christ, the true Israel, and in the church which, united with Christ in baptism, is the Israel of God (Galatians 6.16).

Archiepiscopalia

Belatedly, I want to highlight a couple of things of note recently written and said by the Archbishop of Canterbury, both relating in some way to the place of the church in the public sphere.

First, a couple of moving paragraphs from the Archbishop’s Christmas letter to the Anglican Communion on the implications of the incarnation for how we view human life, in all its stages (including the unborn child in it’s mother’s womb) and conditions (emphasis mine):

God chose to show himself to us in a complete human life, telling us that every stage in human existence, from conception to maturity and even death, was in principle capable of telling us something about God. Although what we learn from Jesus Christ and what his life makes possible is unique, that life still means that we look differently at every other life. There is something in us that is capable of communicating what God has to say – the image of God in each of us, which is expressed in its perfection only in Jesus.

Hence the reverence which as Christians we ought to show to human beings in every condition, at every stage of existence. This is why we cannot regard unborn children as less than members of the human family, why those with disabilities or deprivations have no less claim upon us than anyone else, why we try to makes loving sense of human life even when it is near its end and we can hardly see any signs left of freedom or thought.

From http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/2063

This is quite true: God made mankind in his own image (Genesis 1.26-27), designed from the outset to reflect and proclaim something of God in the world. That image was marred through Adam’s sin. But so that the image of God in man would be restored, in the incarnation, God the Son took upon himself a further, human nature, was born as a man, and lived the perfect human life; in him, we see perfectly in a man the image of God (Colossians 1.15), and so the image of God is restored in those of us who have been united with Christ in our baptisms (Colossians 3.10 cf 2.11-12). That Christ took upon himself all that it meant to be human, including conception and life in utero, in order to restore the image of God in man, indeed has profound implications therefore for how we view all of human life, including the status of the unborn child.

Secondly, the newspapers reported with some interest an interview the Archbishop gave for the New Statesman, in which he expressed his views on establishment. Many took that to mean he was in favour of disestablishment, but that doesn’t appear to be what he actually said. Rather, he acknowledged the benefits of disestablishment for the integrity of the church, having ministered in a disestablished church, but still affirmed quite strongly the place of the church in public life which establishment maintains. There is nothing of the me-and-my-private-relationship-with-Jesus approach to the Christian faith here:

At the same time, my unease about going for straight disestablishment is to do with the fact that it’s a very shaky time for the public presence of faith in society. I think the motives that would now drive disestablishment from the state side would be mostly to do with . . . trying to push religion into the private sphere, and that’s the point where I think I’d be bloody-minded and say, ‘Well, not on that basis.’”

Reported in The Times here: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/faith/article5360623.ece

For what it is worth, I would just add that it is striking that historically even the Independents following the first Civil War, did not want a settlement in which there was no influence of the church on the state (I have not yet read a justification of this, but would be interested to do so if anyone could point me in the right direction). Austin Woolrych writes of the Independents (again, emphasis mine):

They were all men of learning, trained in the universities and ordained in the Church of England, who had gone into voluntary exile during the Laudian regime and ministered to congregations of their fellow-exiles in Holland. There they had followed ‘the congregational way’, like their brethren in New England. Unlike the separatists, they fully accepted the authority of the civil power and valued a partnership with it, so long as it did not oppress the churches over essential matters of faith and conscience.

Austin Woolrych, Britian in Revolution, ch. 10, p. 297

Dwelling in the tents of Shem, or Post the Four Hundredth

Blessed be the LORD, the God of Shem,
and let Canaan be his servant.
May God enlarge Japheth,
and let him dwell in the tents of Shem,
and let Canaan be his servant. – Genesis 9.26-27

This will just be a brief post, as I have Finals in two weeks’ time. I may have had this thought before, and I may even have subconsciously plagiarised this from someone else. I have been enjoying reading again the first chapters of Genesis, and in the blessing Noah gives in the verses above, we effectively see the gospel in miniature.

These chapters of the Pentateuch set forth for the people the background to their own experience and mission. In chapter 10, the families of Japheth and Ham are delineated, and we see the origins of the peoples who will feature time and again in Israel’s history – the Jebusites, the Amorites, the Girgashites, the Hivites. As the descendants of Shem (as seen in the genealogies in chapter 10 and 11), Israel was to see its calling to be the place where the nations descended from Japheth would find a dwelling-place – shelter, protection, blessing. Their conquest of Canaan has to be understood in the light of Canaan, Ham’s son, being made the servant of his brothers. Israel the descendant of Shem was to be the means of bringing blessing to the world by ruling over it.

Through their turning away from the LORD, Yahweh, to other gods, straying from his ways, Israel failed in its calling. But all this comes to pass through the Lord Jesus Christ, the descendant of Israel, the descendant of Shem, who through his death and resurrection has conquered the world, and to whom, through that same death and resurrection, the nations of the world may come and find a dwelling place, shelter, protection, blessing – the removal of the curse on Adam’s race, the forgiveness of sins, deliverance from the wrath to come, a fresh start, a new power to walk in God’s ways, the prospect of life with him in heaven after death, and ultimately the hope of bodily resurrection and life in his new creation.

Witchwood

One of the more ironic blessings of my American connexion is being introduced to the writing of John Buchan, the first Baron Tweedsmuir. It is frankly scandalous that I hadn’t read anything of his before, given that he was at B.N.C. Strangely, College hasn’t made much of John Buchan; there is a bust somewhere in the Principal’s Lodgings and there is a plaque in memory of his brother the antechapel. The village of Elsfield is a short walk from Oxford, where he lived in the manor house, and where you can see his rather unusual gravestone: it is circular, set in the ground, and bears the inscription, in Greek, “Christ shall triumph”.

I have just finished reading Witchwood, apparently the favourite book that Buchan, himself a son of the manse (his father was a Free Church of Scotland minister, and his branch later rejoined the Church of Scotland), wrote, and which I thought was absolutely brilliant. I’ll endeavour not to spoil the plot too much. It is set in a town in Scotland during the time of the First Civil War, in the parish of Woodilee, and starts with the arrival of a new minister, David Sempill.

There are some moments of wonderfully dry ecclesiastical humour in this book. When the three local ministers come to welcome David, they tell him of his predecessor, who apparently spend a number of years on the text Exodus 15.27, a Sabbath for each of the springs and each of the palm trees. They conclude that he was probably “not strong in the intellectuals”. Mr. Fordyce, one of the neighbouring ministers who is continually beset by health problems, tellingly alludes to Psalm 17.3, when he says that God has “tried his reins in the night season”. Katrine, the niece of local nobility, who lives in Mr. Fordyce’s parish, says that she finds his sermons boring and impersonates him: “Seventhly, brethren, and in parenthesis”. And after a Presbytery meeting, Buchan paints a comical picture of Mr. Proudfoot, the minister of Bolt, who is trying to correct David, “still distinguishing and construing” as he is  carried off into the distance on his rather impetuous horse.

Most importantly, however, Buchan deals in this story with more serious issues in the church which speak to all generations. One can easily identify with David, who arrives, having had a classical education, with the intention, not only of pastoring his flock, but also writing a commentary, ‘Sempill on Isaiah’, to compare with Luther on the Galatians. However, it turns out all is not well in the parish of Woodilee. People know the right things to say. They appreciate the blood-and-thunder sermons of men like Mr. Proudfoot which describes the torment of the reprobate in hell. They comment that David is at times ‘an affectionate preacher’ and has ‘unction’. People are noted for their power of intercession. What matters is a good profession of faith to be sure that one has one’s title in Christ. The reality of village life is very different. David discovers that there is established witchcraft in the village and it turns out those with the godliest reputation are involved, even members of David’s church session. However, when David preaches against this idolatry, and on the practicalities of godly living, on charity, David is accused by one of his fellow ministers of denying the doctrine of election into grace and placing overdue emphasis on the filthy rags of man’s good works; when he responds by saying that he is only teaching that those who use their redemption as a licence for wickedness then they are doubly damned, the response he gets is that he must distinguish. A particular form of doctrine, and not godly living, is what matters to the leaders of the kirk. Preaching on how to live is ‘weak’.

What is perhaps most disturbing, however, is the way in which loyalty to the cause against the Royalists is the supreme marker of godliness. If someone has subscribed to the Covenant, then a word cannot be said against them. And when David offers shelter and care to a member of the defeated Royalist forces, and also angrily rebukes soldiers for their maltreatment of a woman on the side of the defeated forces, charges are brought against him in Presbytery, and he is ultimately dismissed and excommunicated. When he defends his behaviour from the New Testament he is told that he has fallen from the way. The ministers see Scotland as Old Testament Israel fighting against the pagans and use this to justify the atrocities that are committed, just as Samuel hacked Agag to pieces before the Lord at Gilgal; failure to support this (and such a failure certainly includes showing charity to an enemy soldier) is to be an enemy of Christ, they say. Their delight in bloodshed in the name of Christ is sickening. At the same time, too much is read into the events of the war: if there is victory against the Royalists, then God is upholding the cause of the faithful. If battle goes badly, then God must be displeased with his people and they need to fast and pray. When there is a plague in Woodilee, the sin that brought it upon them is naturally attributed to David the supposedly errant minister. He even gets criticised for his attempts to stay the spread of the plague and preserve people’s lives.

Buchan, who would ultimately be appointed Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, is not criticising Calvinism in his book, but exposing a harmful perversion of it. And when we encounter significant figures in the Royalist army, what he shows us is that they are not necessarily less noble, less godly, less committed to Christ’s cause, less committed to the kirk, even. What they are opposed to is the tyranny of the kirk over the people, the tyranny that places heavy burdens on them and drives them to hypocrisy, the tyranny that in its zeal against Rome exchanges one pope for one hundred popes. This story really challenges where your sympathies lie.

The experience of David Sempill, the earnest, faithful, loving minister of Woodilee and his conflict with his Presbytery, warns us of the perils of Pharisaism, straining at gnats and letting through camels. It warns us against so focusing on the minutiae of doctrine and badges of churchmanship, and emphasising grace such that we forget the need for godly Christian living, and practical love. It also warns us against over-reading Providence. And David’s interaction with the Royalists reminds us that those who are held to be enemies of the church aren’t necessarily ungodly, reprobate monsters who must be extinguished: reality is more complicated than that.

Tolle, lege!