11^th June 2006

“Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world,
but in order that the world might be saved through him”         John 3: 17

 It happened here in Edinburgh.   In Gorgie actually.

Parts of what happened appeared in The Evening News. I heard the story from the lips of the man who lived it. The man himself is from Livingston. He stays in Bathgate now.

This man had been on drugs since he was a teenager. His childhood had been horrible. He used alcohol in between popping pills and taking hits….just to stay numb. ….. When this story I’m telling you occurred, he was living on a stair in Gorgie in a ground floor flat. He trusted no-one. He had cut himself off from everyone. He spoke to no-one.

This Livingston man told me he had reached the addiction stage where he was paranoid and in acute emotional pain…. and the drugs and alcohol weren’t numbing it away any more.

He also said he had moved from the phase of vague thinking about wanting to die to making preparations for killing himself.

His room , he said, was piled with containers of kerosene. He was determined. With a box of matches in one hand he was splashing kerosene over the furniture when there was a persistent knocking on the window.

“Go away!” yelled my friend from Livingston, “I’m busy”……in Good Scots with plenty of expletives which I won’t repeat here.

This tramp kept on knocking and yelled back. “I’m desperate.  I’ve been walking all day. Just give me a drink of water. I’m parched”. He wouldn’t stop his yelling or his hammering.  Cursing, our man from Livingston went and got him some water, opened the window and gave it to him. Then, he slammed the window back down and went back to splashing kerosene on the walls and floor.

The next thing he remembers is sirens, fighting, then waking up in the Royal Edinburgh hearing himself being “sectioned”. 

(For the younger generation who may not know this word: “being sectioned” is when The State decides you are a danger to yourself or others and need treatment with or without your consent – on the advice of a psychiatrist – and you are kept for treatment in a locked hospital ward until you are well enough to get your freedom back. The section of the law which allows this is read out to you at the time.)

There had been no fire. He was not burned. He was in a locked psychiatric ward and on the compulsory detox programme as well.

Neighbours visited. They described the police, ambulance and fire service drama on the street. They showed him the report in the paper. No-one acknowledged calling the emergency services….   Our friend kept on wondering about the man at the window.  No-one else had noticed him around.

The man from Livingston struggled through the detox programme, the after care and so on…. making such good progress he was offered a place at Castle Craig……He holds down a job now and is a caring grandfather……That is his story……..

but none of that is the point of this story………my telling it to you today,  a sunny Sunday in Christ Church, Morningside…..

Who do you think was the man knocking at the window?

Who was that person who had walked for miles, then down that particular road in Gorgie ?

What made them choose that particular time, that particular stair and that particular flat window? ….

Why knock so hard on that particular window-pane and demand a drink of water?

This is a true story.

It happened here in Edinburgh.

It happened about eight years ago and was reported in part in The Evening News.

It was Jesus wasn’t it….the man knocking on the window yelling – demanding a drink of water to get a desperate man’s attention – and getting it. Remember Jesus said anyone offering a cup of water in His name would be saved.

It was the total glory and majesty and capacity of God wasn’t it…identifying the street in Gorgie, the time, that stair, that flat window…It was GOD.intervening in history …reaching out to a man in desperate straits…..….offering a chance to be born again of water and the Spirit.

It was the power of The Holy Spirit wasn’t it….activating the emergency services in time to redeem a man bound on a wheel of pain and determined to kill himself…..The Holy Spirit getting him to hospital and onto the one track that offered healing and hope.

Do you hear me in faith and discern The Holy Trinity at work in Edinburgh in our time  - in this true and attested story ………………..?

OR

Are you sceptical?   Your intellect affronted…..horrified  at something that seems sickly-sentimental………dredged up from Readers’ Digest maybe…?

I tell you,   I have heard many such stories in my life, told quietly by people who have lived through horrendous suffering. Miraculous, unexplained and inexplicable events have intervened in their lives. I have learned to marvel and worship God. I no longer dismiss such stories.   So,

I don’t want you to be seduced by rationalism into discounting the awesome power and activity and glory and majesty of God –  The Living God -

the  3 in 1 and 1 in 3  as the theologians have decided to identify 

God-At-Work-In-History.

The people who lived in the time of the Psalmist understood and experienced God as

“glory and strength”. The psalmist ( Psalm 29) told us to “ascribe to the Lord the glory of his name”.          Accept God for the COSMIC strength God IS!

Also in today’s readings we hear Isaiah having to accept God in punishing mode ….none of us particularly wants to hear or accept that do we….but Isaiah had to and did accept ….and accepted the invitation to work alongside God over that time period…. during a particular episode in documented history.

There are many many many aspects of God.

((Another way of understanding an aspect of God is in today’s gospel. Yet, the more sophisticated of the Pharisees (like Nicodemus in today’s gospel) accepted the signs and wonders Jesus performed but couldn’t agree he was Messiah. Nicodemus  preferred rational and metaphysical discussion on the way into the kingdom of heaven to facing the simple fact that God = Humankind = God in Jesus)) .               

Accept Jesus and God are somehow one and the same thing regardless of space, time death and matter!….and Jesus was in Edinburgh eight years ago.

Accept the witness of the Book of Acts to the work of The Holy Spirit and you will become more skilled at discerning the three persons of The Holy Trinity! ….just.3 of the ways we have experienced God In History over hundreds of years in the Judaeo-Christian tradition …..working to reconcile the world to GodSelf.

Finally we come to the “Why?” question. Why all this strenuous, tremendous and complicated activity, this great disturbance in Gorgie and The Royal Edinburgh?

 “Indeed God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world but in order that the world might be saved through Him”    John 3: 17

 Amen!

                                                                    Margaret Raven
                                          11^th June 2006

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