Taking notice

Passage for reflection: Isaiah 52: 7 - 9

Several times this week the need to suddenly take notice has been important. 

On Thursday evening I had to go into Harrogate to pick up something from B and Q we’d ordered on line. There had been a few claps of thunder before I went out, and as I got in the car it was raining heavily but I wasn’t expecting to drive through hail and to have to negotiate really bad floods across the road. I had to take notice of the car in front of me which kept braking suddenly and going in the middle of the road to avoid the worst of the water and the flashing lights of fire engines trying to get to a lorry and the 36 bus which were stranded on the other side of the road. 

After I woke up last Sunday morning, I noticed a little note in the letterbox of the front door. It was from a police lady letting me know both our front and rear car number plates had been ripped off. I spoke to her later and told her I assumed it had been done in the middle of the night as her note was written about 4am. She told me our number plates were spotted on a car towing a stolen caravan in Masham about 8.50pm the night before! I’d been out to water plants about 9 and hadn’t noticed anything amiss. 

On Monday we had to take notice of Chris Whitty and Patrick Valance who in a press conference were very gloomy as the number of people testing positive for Covid 19 is going up really fast. Then on Tuesday evening, the Prime Minister shook his fist a lot and told us in a Churchillian manner it isn’t good but we can get through a second spike. In this uncertain climate we have to make time to take notice of important information that affects all of our life. Some of us fear more drastic restrictions being enforced sooner rather than later even though Mr Johnson said he was “spiritually reluctant” to curb our freedoms. I wonder what he meant by “spiritually reluctant”?

 

The Bake Off was back on Tuesday, some light relief in the gloom. The bakers have to take notice of the recipe else there will be disaster. 

Does God sometimes call us to take notice of him in a sudden and dramatic way? I’ve been enjoying a book on priesthood by Stephen Cottrell, the new Archbishop of York, in which he reflects on different models of ministry. One of his models is being a sentinel. A sentinel was someone who gave warning to people that something that they should take notice of was coming, usually gloom and doom and danger, interpreting the world in the light of God’s purposes so usually God and humanity are far apart, hence the need to repent, but in Isaiah chapter 52, the sentinel has a different message. 

There will be peace and salvation, for God is coming in victory! Out of the ruins of Jerusalem, the people are told to break forth into singing. To most people that would seem mad, but here the sentinel sees a longer view and a larger vision than what is happening today.

Walter Bruggemann, my favourite Old Testament theologian in his book “The Prophetic Imagination” talks about us being robbed of the courage or power to “think an alternative thought” and he says before any new vision can be implemented it has to be imagined. He says it is the vocation of the sentinel to keep alive the ministry of imagination and to believe in an alternative futures to the single one  which some urge as the only ones thinkable.

What do we see and from what we notice can we dare to see God’s future and God’s blessing? I love the words of George Bernard Shaw: “You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?”

I drove along Harrogate Road in Ripon to visit someone who needed a pastoral visit. I noticed a huge notice on the church advertising Harvest this Sunday and a welcome to the new minister, whoever that is. The notice was so large and bold I could do no other than react to it. 

I wonder in a world of competing voices and signs, who are those people who make us sit up or stop and take notice of the divine script? And maybe those people for others might be you and me. More than ever before I think people need a different message. I think it’s out there. We just need to be alert to it and have the time, the commitment and the vision having noticed it to live it and believe in it.