Bible – Simon Carter

This article was written for This Week at St Mary’s – Sunday 18 June 2023.

ON EARTH as it is in heaven. Me, a scruffy infant school pupil, speaking those words for the first time. It was Mrs Barnden, or maybe Mrs Moses (I can’t remember), who taught us the Lord’s Prayer. The words of the entire prayer are burned indelibly into my brain now, some forty-four years and several thousand recitals later.

I’d always thought the line in the prayer made it our job to make earth be like heaven now. While we were still alive. Others think this line is not a now thing, more a future thing, foreseeing a time when every tear is wiped from our eyes, when there is no more death or mourning or crying or pain, when the old order of things has passed away.

I have a Christian faith. But the concept of there being a time when all earth is restored, a time where humanity will see paradise again, is one too enormous for my tiny brain to assimilate right now. The resurrection is mind blowing enough.

A promise of any such spectacular future doesn’t make living in the now easier. It doesn’t make the task of processing devastation and tragedy on our doorstep any simpler, or trying to be any kind of hope and gospel-bearer to people impacted by that devastation feel any less impossible, when the raw evidence of their eyes, ears, and senses may well lead them to say: ‘Where is God? And how can he be a loving God when there is this?’

This is Nottingham. June 13th 2023. I have no answers and words feel puny. Something happened at the heart of our city today, and it hurts so much. How glorious, how magnificent, this beautiful city is. How much stronger it is than what happened to it today, though it won’t remember it for a time.

The future doesn’t seem to matter today. Not to me. But I know in my gut that we should never stop fighting to make earth like heaven now, while real heaven waits in the wings.

Father?

On earth as it is in heaven, please.

You can start with Nottingham.

Link

Website for St Mary’s in the Lace Market, Nottingham

Photo credit

Flames c/o Engin_Akyurt (pixabay.com)

I SAW IT on Twitter. Vote! Who’s the best Batman ever? Adam West wasn’t on the list, which made me sad. A mistake, surely.

But then I realised Adam West wasn’t even my best Batman, let alone the best Batman ever.

The best Batman ever is the one in the photo, because this Batman is real. All the other Batmen are fake.

The Batman in the photo is the only Batman who’s ever rescued me when I’ve been in trouble. He’s rescuing me as I write this, as I become the child in the Batman suit again, the child in the photo dad took of me in the place where I grew up.

Jesus held children in such high regard. No human being aside from Jesus will ever be perfect, but Jesus knew that a child is the closest thing; the closest thing before the world takes hold, before the awe, the wonder, the abandon, starts to ebb away. Before grown up happens.

I can still do awe and wonder, but life can be tough, and often I need Photo Batman to jump in and show me a time when awe and wonder was easier because it just poured out of me. It’s how he beats up my baddies. My baddies don’t stand a chance when Photo Batman’s around.

For you, maybe it’s not Batman. For you, maybe it’s a different costume, in a photo of a different you, in a different time and place.

‘Let the children come to me,’ says Jesus in the story. ‘The kingdom of heaven belongs to ones such as these.’

Maybe coming to Jesus is easier when we make ourselves children.

If heaven can be customised, mine is me as Batman, brown balaclava replacing the hood long since gone, playing on a school field in the sun in 1981. Everyone I’ve ever loved and lost is there with me. We’re all of us the same age in my heaven. We won’t get any older. Nan is still beautiful, but now she’s nine. Jesus is there, and he’s Mr Davies, my favourite primary school teacher.

Playtime goes on forever. Batman doesn’t need to save everyone because Mr Davies has already done it.

Category: Bible

June 13th.

Superhero