Daily Worship

If

Keith Ross November 15, 2016 0 0

1 Corinthians 15:14

If Christ be not raised then our preaching is in vain…’

“If a picture paints a thousand words then why can’t I paint you”, sang Telly Savalas in the monster 1975 hit ‘If’.  

 

Painting pictures with words, concepts, and notions has been my stock in trade as a preacher for over thirty years. During teen hood I used to listen to the charts every Sunday evening in the secrecy of my bedroom. I both loved, and hated this song. The words are the guilty gushy romanticism of youth and the talking song by the actor who played my favourite TV cop, Kojak, is a form of mystical fakery that defies logic. My singing along to it in different keys made it sound better! 

 

Earlier this year I saw a tapestry of Jesus with such vivid colours, texture, shape, artistry, and depth that it formed a picture which expressed the many ‘if’s of our understanding of the woven nature the complexities of the relationship we have with the risen Christ.

 

www.sanctuaryfirst.org.uk/audio

 

Prayer

Be with us Jesus. We don’t have a photo of you, but a picture. 

 

An image, which is only an outline of who You may be and what You truly represent.

 

A scene where You can be centre stage, the object of our eyes. Where the focus and setting of our portrayal can alter constantly.

 

Lord don’t disappear from our panorama, lost in past horizons or crowded out by the demigods of multimedia.

 

May the deep love of our relationship reflect from the feelings, the vocabulary, and the subtitles we place on the parts of the picture we live by and bring to mind.

 

Christ, leap from the pages of our memory banks. Jesus, enrich our life’s experience today. Be the virtual living Lord who walks from one person’s montage into another’s - as we share our visual canvas with You, of You, and with each other. Amen. 

 

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