Three Heads are better than Two

I wonder who it was that introduced the tossing of a coin as the way of making a decision? I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was one of the many things the Romans did for us, but I don't think I'll find it in my Christmas present book about the origins of common sayings called Red Herrings and White Elephants. It's got me intrigued though, so perhaps before this holiday is out- yes, one more day to go tomorrow!- I'll see if I can track down the answer somewhere or other. If not, well maybe it's time I post another question to the Guardian's Notes and Queries. I was quite amazed that several people took the time to respond to my query about warming teapots and cups before use a while back. Not that all of the replies were entirely complimentary, mind!

The trouble with tossing a coin is that it only works where the number of choices available is limited to two. Just goes to show there is nothing new in computer logic when it comes down to it, the simple binary state: on/off, yes/no, alive/dead : this way/that way. Or even black/white.

If only life were that simple, that there were only ever two choices available to us. Maybe one day someone will decide there is a use for a three-faced coin, but I'd like to see them try to make it. The Romans on their coinage tried to have a two-faced man: is that where that particular saying comes from, I wonder: not sure, but I do know his name. Janus. Sound familiar? It ought to, as you're probably reading this in the month named in his honour- January. Janus was actually a real man, becoming after his death deified as the God of doors and gates, or endings and beginnings. It's therefore very appropriate that his should be the inspiration for the first month of a new year and why he is one of my subjects in this first blog posting of 2005.

In case you're wondering, I haven't just recovered from a major hangover and forgotten all about the 1st January. Although I've had my moments in the past, I'm not really in to bingeing these days, though did enjoy a tincture or two both before and after midnight as New Year's Eve morphed into New Year's Day. The more down to earth answer is that I just did not get round to writing a posting yesterday, which was really a rather strange sort of day. Of course, with Blogger I could cheat if I so chose, and give the impression that something I'm writing today was actually done yesterday. But what purpose would that serve? Honesty is the best policy, which is why I'm writing on what weather wise is an altogether more pleasant day than the first of the year. Today has brought some lovely bright winter sunshine which really restored my soul along with a good, sensitively handled service at Christ church at the end of this peculiarly difficult Christmas week.

The almost spring-like weather sent me down to the lovely riverside village of Sunbury on Thames after church to enjoy a spot of reflection and contemplation listening to the birds of the air and watching their waddling cousins on the river. Spelthorne Borough Council have done a grand job of restoring the walled garden inside Sunbury Park, which has become another of my favourite prayer retreats when I am back here in Middlesex. It was here that I came in the week following my Dad's death over five years ago and on several troubled occasions since. They say you are closer to God in a garden than anywhere else on earth, and I'd probably agree. Even in the depths of winter, there are signs of new life here, and colour. The pansies and primula are to be expected, but more of a surprise in January was the delightfully fragrant delicate blossom of a vibernum and several other botanical sights to gladden a saddened eye.

It should I suppose come as little suprise that a garden can do so much to soothe a jaded soul. It occurred to me while sitting there, hand over eyes to shield them from the almost blinding mid-day sunlight, that the Bible pictures God creating man in a garden. When man's disobedient actions soured the serenity and the perfection of that place, it might have seemed there was no way to restore the glory of those early post-creation moments when he and his maker were at one and everything in the garden was lovely.

And yet, it was in a garden that God chose to demonstrate the agony and the ecstasy of his love for mankind and to restore us to something of that relationship we were born to have with Him. Jesus's final hours on earth started in a garden, where he wept for himself and found himself abandoned even by his closest friends, sleeping and oblivious, uncomprehending of the horror which yet had to happen. We are just the same if we take the Christmas story as it is with the niceness of the baby in a manger and forget all about the cruelty of Calvary coming so soon after. It's an early Easter this year, and my thoughts are already turning to my next preaching engagement in seven weeks time.

Gethsemane was creation crying, Jesus the Lord praying, hoping, wishing he could do anything but take up the cup of suffering he was being asked to endure as the climax of his mission on Earth. He wept and agonised simply because He Was. He was Man. Yet still he knew, and obeyed, his Father. Because he was also God- another side of the coin. An innocent man- the most innocent of any- was killed brutally and painfully, without mercy, by Roman sentence the next day. He who was love itself died on a lonely cross, and God's will was done.

But hang on in there. Could this really be the will of God, that evil should triumph in a moment of horror on a spring afternoon? Of course not. God's will was and is that man should not perish, but have eternal life. It's a concept difficult to get to grips with in the wake of the most catastrophic "natural" event within living memory. Where can a God of love be in all this? That has been the question on legions of lips and countless heads these last seven days, as played out on the world screen has been the tragedy of so many lost lives and others devastated in an instant. It all seems a very long way from a cosy, pleasant Sunday afternoon stroll beside the waters of Old Father Thames in leafy Middlesex to the debris of a waterfront home in faraway Phuket and death and dying all around. So far that most of us are numbed to it all, just as in the grief of our own losses we all have to face sooner or later, a kind of inner defence mechanism takes over to keep us going with ordinary life.

It's a mystery beyond the understanding of the greatest brain where God is in all this, and yet why in all the despair and questioning of the past week, God has come and is with us- Emmanuel. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. God is here because a charity appeal raises in three days the equivalent of £1 for every man, woman and child in the United Kingdom and the figure is still growing. God is here because the basic human need for fresh drinking water is met in an instant, just as Jesus himself asked for a drink of a despised foreigner- the Samaritan woman- at a well in the Holy Land. God is here because in Sri Lanka fighting factions who have been at each other's throats for two decades come together in common humanity and shared need. And he is here because the binary miracle which is the internet brings news of these momentous but horrendous events to the attention of all in an instant and amidst all the tragedies, miracles do still happen as families find one another and life goes on.

The Christian versions of the funeral services which may be the last dignity of those able to receive them in the muddy muddle of corpses and bundled bodies say that in the midst of life we are in death. Indeed we are. Nobody eight days ago could possibly have forecast the extent of the damage, the loss of life, the international impact of the Boxing Day Tsunami 2004. Still at times it is impossible to comprehend the magnitude of what has happened. But who too could have predicted- not even his own nearest and dearest-, nearly 2000 years ago, that God's Son sent into the world was his irrevocable guarantee that man no more need die. Believe and live as we are meant to live- loving one's neighbour as oneself- and life finds its true meaning. Painful though it is for a time, many years for some, death has lost its sting.

The astonishing outpouring of compassion and caring, fellow feeling and sheer humanity of the last few days belies the old funeral oration to the core. In the midst of death, we are in life.

THE THIRD HEAD...
God is Our Father. God is Our Lord. But God is also Our Friend- our counsellor, our helper. At the beginning of another year, everyone in the Sunday papers, the political soapboxes and the informed commentators of many disciplines are offering their two penny worth on what will happen in the twelve months ahead. No doubt it's a lucrative diversion for the scribes to pay off the post-Christmas credit bills we now all have to face. How often I wonder will they be saying of some of the issues to be faced in the year ahead that it could go either way- patently obvious, perhaps, in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict where there is a better chance of peace now than at any time in the last 57 years.

And yet, for all the punditry and the postulating, such predictions seem pretty pointless compared to how a West for too long complacent to the needs of others should respond to the African and Asian nations who have lost families, breadwinners, mothers, fathers, children to illness, famine, war and disaster. It will take more than the toss of a coin to solve their problems. It will take a determined commitment to look back at the mistakes of the past, and respond practically but creatively to the meeting of their needs and the rebuilding of shattered lives in the future. It will take international co-operation on an unprecedented scale. It will take courage. Along the way, there will be worries and setbacks and those determined to wreck the good which can undoubtedly be done. Many may fear the dark world that still lies before us. The threat of terrorism has only been masked, not subdued, by the present understandable attention on a force far more deadly than Al Qa'ida, nature itself.
But a solution and an answer to at least some of these questions lie within our grasp because God has made a third face to the coin. Jesus did say the poor you will always have with you, but he also showed in the most unlikely of persons, a hated Samaritan wanderer tending to a mugger, that love wears no masks of race or creed. The Holy Spirit is his guide to us, and should lead all our decision making and actions. A leader facing a new year at another of the most troubled points in history knew this full well when he quoted this wonderful poem. George VI was the man and the occasion was the first Christmas of the second world war:

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year
'Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.'

And he replied, 'Go into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way!'

So I went forth and finding the Hand of God
Trod gladly into the night
He led me towards the hills
And the breaking of day in the lone east.

So heart be still!
What need our human life to know
If God hath comprehension?

In all the dizzy strife of things
Both high and low,
God hideth his intention."

In the lone east of Asia, or in the lone lounge of island Britain, wherever you read this I pray that God's everlasting arms will support and surround you this year. We may think we have little cause to say it this year, and certainly the succession of silent remembrances on New Year's Eve were a poignant reminder of what we all share on this tiny planet. Because He is with us, though, I confidently wish you a HAPPY New Year.