Dear everyone,

From the midst of the present crisis in the Parliament of the United Kingdom a Peer in the House of Lords for whom I have a deep regard most kindly e-mailed to encourage me in my present storm of leukemia. He shared the following statement: ‘we live in sad and difficult times. The Scripture in my mind is “Him that honoureth me I will honour and he that despiseth me will be lightly esteemed.” ’ The Scripture quoted from the First Book of Samuel was like an arrow in a sure place – I was deeply challenged by it. We often quote the first part of this Scripture but seldom the last part.

It all got me thinking about sitting in a former time in Westminster Hall early one morning with the Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin chatting to him at the National Prayer Breakfast. There too at the breakfast table sat Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of Dr. Billy Graham, the National Prayer Breakfast speaker for that morning. ‘Did you attend Dr. Graham’s meetings at the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow?’ I asked Speaker Martin, gently. ‘I was only a wee boy then’, he replied, ‘but a fellow metal worker called Jack Mitchell went forward at one of those meetings and subsequently went into the Christian ministry’, he said.

‘It was good seed, your father sowed 50 years ago, wasn’t it?’ I said to Anne. I mused in my heart at how that seed had surfaced 50 years later in our discussion of the spiritual life of Jack Mitchell in the Hall where Kings and Queens of the United Kingdom lie in state. The potent power of the seed of the Word of God is actually, when you muse on it, eternal in its influence, never to speak of 50 years. So, sow it, Christian, sow it. Don’t go through your day without scattering some of it in corners only you can reach.

The Deputy Foreign Minister of Israel also turned up for breakfast at the same table that morning with his bodyguards. He had his kosher breakfast food wrapped in cling film. He was a Rabbi and asked a very surprised Anne Graham Lotz if he could borrow her Bible. He started thumbing through it obviously looking for something. I wondered if that’s what Rabbi’s did at that time of the morning but, no, it subsequently turned out that he too was to speak that morning. He got up later and addressed us from the life of Abraham reading from Anne’s Bible! All in all it was truly a most memorable breakfast.

At an extraordinary gathering near Windsor in 1215 a famous document emerged known as Magna Carta. It was signed under force by King John and it allowed for the formation of a powerful Parliament. It was the first written document expounding democracy on these Islands. Now that very democracy Magna Carta gave birth to is under threat by the current scandal in Parliament.

At the same time across the Irish Sea the systemic crimes committed by some Irish Roman Catholic clerics which have been mercilessly and forensically presented in the Ryan Report has sent a chill across the world. The now grown up children’s own testimonies coming out of the pit of these crimes are deeply harrowing. I find them unbearable to listen to on the media but for those children there was no escape. Disgrace is too light a word for it all.

Having preached across South Korea and Margaret and I having to make sure we were indoors by curfew time, lest we end up in prison, I have a deep interest in news from the Korean Peninsula. In Seoul city the main thoroughfare can be turned into a fighter jet runway in minutes. Will they have to use that thoroughfare soon as a result of North Korean nuclear aggression? God forbid.

Our times are truly disturbing times. Powerfully, a poem has been surfacing in my mind during the current moral crisis in these Islands: it is by William Wordsworth and I learnt it at school. It is worth meditating on

Milton! Thou shouldst be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men ;
Oh! Raise us up, return to us again ;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart ;
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea :
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life’s common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.

Wordsworth obviously turned to Milton’s life and work for inspiration at a time when he felt everything in national and domestic life was becoming ‘a fen of stagnant waters’. When the Godly peer sent me the Scripture on his mind, it sent me to read across the life of Samuel again from which the Scripture he quoted comes. I found inspiration there at this disturbing time.

When you think about it the story began with suffering. Samuel’s mother had been barren for ‘the Lord had closed her womb’. She became the object of the most unbelievable cruelty. Her ‘rival’ we are told, ‘kept provoking her in order to irritate her. This went on year after year’. I take it that the ‘rival’ was a fellow Israelite for ‘whenever Hannah went up to the house of the Lord, her rival provoked her till she wept and would not eat’. Is it not amazing who the Devil gets to do his work for him?

Think, though, of the religious hypocrisy around Hannah and the corruption of Israel’s national life. It included the gross sexual behavior of Eli’s sons and those women of Israel who were implicit in it. Priests were at that time taking more than their fair share of meat sacrifices brought by the people to the Lord in their worship. God pointedly accused Eli, the High Priest: ‘why do you scorn my sacrifice and offering that I prescribed for my dwelling? Why do you honour your sons more than Me by fattening yourselves on the choice parts of every offering made by my people Israel?’

In the very heart of all this corruption Hannah, the Scriptures say, ‘stood up’. I love those two words! (Who, in our nation, is going to ‘stand up’?) She had had enough. She decided to go to the temple of the Lord at Shiloh (the tabernacle, as it was then) and pray to the Lord about her problem. When she got there the High Priest was so far away from the Lord he did not know the difference between a praying woman and a drunken one. ‘How long will you keep on getting drunk?’, he accused her. If any person had the right to walk out of a place of worship and wash her hands of the whole thing, Hannah measured into such a right. To her eternal credit she stood firm and looking into the face of that lazy, miserable priest of Israel she said ‘Not so, my lord’. Here was a woman who was prepared to stand up to the most powerfully positioned spiritual leader in Israel and not let his position, power or insults divert her from the truth. How did she do it? Well, as the poet put it:

‘Faith came singing into my room;
Other guests took flight.
Fear and anxiety, grief and gloom,
Sped out into the night.
And I wondered how such peace could be,
Faith said gently, ‘Don’t you see?’
They really could not live with me!’

Things would have been very different had Hannah reacted naturally. As it happened, she reacted spiritually. She asked the Lord for a son by faith and when he came it was in his boyhood that God shared state secrets with him. Think about it: God shared state secrets with a boy. Even Eli, on the third occasion we are told suddenly ‘realised that the Lord was calling the boy’. We read: ‘the Lord was with Samuel as he grew up, and let none of his words fall to the ground. And all Israel from Dan to Beersheba recognized that Samuel was attested as a prophet of the Lord. The Lord continued to appear at Shiloh, and there He revealed Himself to Samuel through His word’.

Think of it: God bypassed the clever, the rich, the influential, the many ranks of Israel’s leaders in ‘altar, sword and pen’ and shared His mind, heart, and intentions with a child and used him to turn a nation around. God can still speak to a child and use that child to turn a nation around: even your child in your nation or children under your spiritual influence. Be encouraged.

Did Samuel’s mother ever realize that her son would one-day judge Israel from the town he originally came from? ‘Samuel’, says Scripture, ‘continued as judge over Israel all the days of his life. From year to year he went on a circuit from Bethal to Gilgall to Mizpah, judging Israel in all those places. But he always went back to Ramah, where his home was, and there he also judged Israel and he built an altar there to the Lord’. In truth Samuel became the kingmaker in Israel. Under God he eventually anointed David from whose descendants the Messiah came in whom our hope and destiny is placed. But remember it all began with Hannah’s tears and her amazing spiritual reaction to her suffering.

Dr. M.R. De Hann once calculated that if all the tears shed in the world could be barreled and poured into a canal such a waterway would stretch from New York to San Francisco. He maintained that it would make a river in which barges could be floated. Few would doubt him.

You and I may be near the point of despair at times and although we profess to know God in Christ our adversary comes like Job’s wife and says ‘curse God and die’. Let’s do no such thing. Let’s not be diverted. We remember in the dark what God has taught us in the light. We press on with the work that lies to our hand inspired by the fact that God literally changed history through a broken hearted, childless, sorely provoked Hannah. He can do the same through us, if we let Him.

As for me, I can’t go to a church service at the moment because of the risk of infection. I have missed the fellowship of fellow Christians across the last three months. I have had spelled out to me recently the nature of the cancer in my blood which though currently in remission I have been warned can return exceedingly swiftly and aggressively. I have also had spelled out to me the side effects to expect from the trial chemo drug I will be given by injection beginning on June 8th and continuing across the best part of a year. But then I read Hannah’s words coming out of her experience:

‘My heart rejoices in the Lord;
In the Lord my strength is lifted high…..
There is no - one holy like the Lord;
There is no - one besides You;
There is no Rock like our God…..
He raises the poor from the dust
And lifts the needy from the ash heap;
He seats them with princes and has them
Inherit a throne of honour …..
He will guard the feet of the saints’.

Hannah’s song makes my spirit lift and the truth it expounds steadies my mind and heart in my leukemia storm. One thing clearly shines out of the story of Hannah and Samuel: beautiful things can emerge out of suffering. Even mine. I am so grateful that godly Peer in the House of Lords took time to send me that wee verse from the first book of Samuel.

Onward!

DERICK