Emoji

Gotta love emojis.  These guys.

Saving us emotionally stunted people from having to find actual words to express ourselves for years.  With only a small price of cheese to pay for the privilege.

So, in and of myself, I'm a bit snobbish about emojis.  I refuse to concede that anyone can crystallize my emotions into one crude yellow circle.  I'm uncategorizable.  The profound nuances of my moods defy the art of the emoji-maker.  Or so I say.  I'm still looking for the emoji that says "insouciantly nonchalant and yet responsibly flirtatious, with depths that none can quite fathom, listening to Charles Aznavour in the original French," which is how I would like to be feeling this evening, rather than "a bit flat after a stomach bug, up for a laugh but don't expect any replies to your texts."  See, I'm complex, me.

Or not.

But they're still brilliant, these emojis.  Which one comes closest to how you feel tonight?  When were you last any of the above?

I wonder whether emojis have the whole human emotional spectrum sewn up yet?

And - putting aside the crude ones for a while - I wonder whether Jesus ran the whole gamut?

Most of my recent sermons hang around Hebrews 4 and the confident assertion that:

we do not have a high priest who is unable 

to sympathize with our weaknesses, 

but we have one who in every respect 

has been tested as we are.

Let's just untangle the double negative in the first line:

we do have a high priest who is able 

to sympathize with our weaknesses

Everything we feel, Jesus felt the equivalent.  I say the equivalent because he was patently never pregnant, but I'm imagining a certain empathy between different kinds of pain or pride or passion.

So.  Jesus was hungry (in Luke 4, chiefly).  Jesus was tired.  Jesus needed company (in the garden).  Jesus got angry (John 2 is a good start).  Jesus laughed (probably at his parables and disciples).  Jesus hurt (crucifixion will do that, as will denial and betrayal).  Jesus was tempted, possibly by attraction to women or men or both.  And there's a whole 30 years with very few clues (but some wild Catholic fan-fic where he's bullied or a gardener or something).

(and he's not a bad Marti Pellow impersonator either)

Oh, and yes.

Jesus wept.

Jesus ran the whole course of human emojis, which means there isn't a thing that we can feel that he didn't.  Betrayed by friends?  Stabbed in the back?  Misunderstood?  Abandoned?  Grieving?  Asylum seeker?  Shunned?  Lionised?  Got a cross to bear?

Check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check, check.

Got the t-shirt.  

No distant God is our God.  Among all the proposed deities in world mythology and truth and philosophy, the Christian God alone is the one who submits to human experience.  I'd call it slumming it, but God made this world and called it good, and who am I to disagree?

And the point of these sermons becomes the punchline of Hebrews 4:

Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, 

so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.

When you are bleeding, look for someone with scars (said Leela in Doctor Who).

When you are praying, look for a God who understands.  Who's lived through it.  Who knows, from the inside out.  Look for the one and only candidate for Godhead who spent 9 months in a womb, who had his cord cut, who took that first breath, who was weaned and slapped and changed, who survived losing milk teeth, who made it through puberty, who would have had calluses and blisters and sweat and zits and his voice breaking, who lost his dad and grieved him, who was a big brother to many, who didn't become a rabbi's disciple at 14 and who talked sense about life.

Look for a God with dirt under his fingernails.  Splinters from work, scars from life, smiles from being one of us.  There's not an emoji you can claim for yourself that he doesn't understand.

"What if God was one of us?", asked Joan Osborne.  "I was," says God.  "I still am," says Jesus.

Draw near to him with confidence - not in yourself but in him.

Draw near to him and you will find mercy.  You will find grace.  You will.

Earworms

Ever had an earworm?

No, not whatever it is that happens in Star Trek: The Wrath Of Khan.

"It's in my head!"

But that moment when a song infiltrates your brain and you end up singing it again and again.  

Living alone, I suffer from a heck of a lot of them.  As a cyclist I sing a lot, and when a song gets lodged in my head, it's not easy to shift it.  And is it ever a good one?

Nope.

On Sunday morning I was sore afflicted by the theme tune from Rupert the Bear.  You know: 

"Rupert, Rupert the Bear, everyone sing his name!
Rupert, Rupert the Bear, everyone come and join in all of his games!"

And being me, a bit OCD, it wasn't just the chorus.  It was the whole song: "There's a little bear that you've never met before, who's a lot of fun…"  Oh dear.

"It's in my head!"

Double the trouble, because the theme tune from Rupert the Bear (The New Adventures Of, I think) sounds remarkably like a song from Come And Praise, the relevant (read: oh dear) songbook from my school assembly days.  The song in question: 

"There's water, water of life,
Jesus gives us the water of life…"

I'm not suggesting any infringement of copyright by either writer, just a certain kinship of chords.  More on that another day.

But back to my terrible crisis.  How to dislodge an earworm?  Chewing gum, they say, but I don't believe in clergy chewing gum around church on a Sunday like that Veruca Salt girl in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

An unpleasant gum-chewing spoilt child, yesterday.

Good news: In the end I dislodged the old song with… something more powerful!

Bad news: I dislodged it with a worse earworm.

So now I was singing "One Of Us" by Abba.

"It's in my head!"

"One of us is lonely, one of us is only waiting for a call… blah blah blah… one of us is lying, one of us is crying…"  I never said I knew all the words.

So, mixed result.  Rupert the Bear is gone, and in his place… Agnetha.  Or Anni-Frid.  Interchangeable, surely?

Ah.

But there's a happy ending.  Once the service started, the Gloria got into my head and stayed there, kicking out Anni-Frid.  Or Agnetha.  It was as if Jesus had stood up and addressed Abba, saying, "The power of Christ compels you!"  Not that earworms and exorcism have anything in common.

In Matthew 12 and Luke 11, Jesus tells a parable about a demon being driven out of a man (much like an earworm), but the story ends badly when the evil spirit, having wandered the world looking unsuccessfully for a new home, comes back to the gentleman in question to find that he hasn't replaced that spirit with anything new… and with no stronger presence to overwhelm either the man or the spirit, the end situation is worse than the beginning, because the spirit, finding the house (as it were) swept clean, moves straight back in and invites some friends.

The peril, says Jesus, of just trying to throw out bad old habits or demons or ways, unless we replace them consciously and deliberately with something - someone! - new and stronger.  Just as my earworms  went round and round, with an annoying one being replaced by another, no less annoying, so does life work.

That's why giving up smoking is so much easier if you have something to do with your hands to replace all that fiddling around with cigarettes.  That's why people smoking their sonic screwdrivers seems to be the future.

One of these will help you stop smoking.  And one will unscrew things, sonically.

If you want o dislodge a strong man, says Jesus, you need a stronger man.  He keeps on proving that by driving out illness and demons and doubt in the gospels, and still driving out addiction and idolatry and darkness today.  But he's equally clear that we need to keep something - someone - stronger in our hearts and heads, because otherwise the old habit will take hold again, perhaps more powerfully.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and if we don't let Jesus into heads and hearts, we'll let someone or something else in instead.  G.K. Chesterton famously said:

“When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.”

G.K.: crazy hair, brilliant thinking on the human condition.

I'm glad the Gloria happened along that Sunday, because it gave Anni-Frid the boot.  I'm glad Jesus happened along when I was 17, because he's given - and still gives - the boot to all sorts of things I don't like that I give house-space to.

Life without Jesus revolves.  It's a carousel of one distraction or addiction after another.  Politically, that's why revolutions are called revolutions: they revolve one lot of sinners out of office and revolve a whole new set of sinners in.  And we wonder why the promises of the children of the revolution disappear.

It's because Jesus alone delivers, and he won't be running the world until he comes back.  But in the meantime, we can claim some space in our own hearts and heads by throwing out the old crap and refilling that space with Jesus.  Or else life is just a long and pointless series of earworms, and it'll be hello Barbie Girl before long...