New school year/New Creation

I am hoping to manage to keep something resembling a regular blog this year. I didn't manage it last year; I think I had too many thoughts running around in my head all the time to get any of them on virtual paper. But this year I will have only two classes per semester and then maybe I'll have some time to blog the stray thoughts away.

The first Chapel of the year is always a good one: probably somewhere around 200 or 300 people all joining together in song and prayer. It's a beautiful thing. The message today was given (as it always is at first chapel) by Regent's President Rod Wilson, and this time he spoke to us from 2 Cor 5:11-6:2, exhorting us to live as new creations, not seeing people and Jesus in the old way (the "fleshly" way), but seeing them through the eyes to the eyes of heart (I'm paraphrasing liberally here). The "take home" passage, if you will, though he actually deliberately made an effort not to give us "ten easy steps to the new creation" was from 2 Cor 5:16-18, particularly the little phrase "All this is from God." He repeated it a number of times, and let it ring out and hang in the air for us. It's impossible in one of those situations not to reflect on one's surroundings. I thought : "Yes, all this is from God: this group of people all committed to growing in and glorifying Jesus, singing their hearts out, studying and laughing together. And all that surrounds us is from God: a place of natural and urban beauty seldom surpassed and a city filled with a multicultural throng that sometimes disturbs my sense that I am in Canada (and exposes the subtly racist image of "what Canada is" that lay somewhere in my subconscious)."

Okay, it's a bit of hyperbole to suggest that I actually thought all that stuff, colons and all, in that moment, but hopefully you can play along with me.

Finally, our absolutely incredible worship leader, a woman with a knack for finding the best possible song or hymn to close a worship service, gave us the following hymn to leave on. It's sung to the tune of "Good King Wenceslas" so you can sing it at home if you like to get a sense of how it might have sounded being sung by a large group of worshippers heavy on the bass and tenor side (Regent is a theological graduate school sometimes mistaken for a seminary, so there are more men in the mix than is usual in most North American churches). I thought the words to this hymn were lovely and beautifully apt and something worth thinking more about, so here you go:

Text: Christopher Idle, based on Isaiah 35
Music: from Piae Cantiones, 1582
The words of this are copyrighted, so if you want to use this in a worship setting, please do so only with a CCLI license
Its CCLI number is 105540

When the King shall come again
All His power revealing,
Splendour shall announce His reign,
Life and joy and healing:
Earth no longer in decay, hope no more frustrated;
This is God's redemption day longingly awaited.

In the desert, trees take root
Fresh from His creation:
Plants and flowers and sweetest fruit
Join the celebration;
Rivers spring up from the earth, barren lands adorning;
Valleys, this is your new birth, mountains, greet the morning!

Strengthen feeble hands and knees,
Fainting hearts, be cheerful!
God who comes for such as these
Seeks and sakes the fearful:
Now the deaf can hear the dumb sing away their weeping;
Blind eyes see the injured come walking, running, leaping.

There God's highway shall be seen
Where no roaring lion,
Nothing evil or unclean
Walks the road to Zion:
Ransomed people homeward bound all your praises voicing,
See your Lord with glory crowned, share in His rejoicing!