“…but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:13-14)

For a time now I’m going to reflect on some favorite rock and roll lyrics that carry and challenge my spirit. I must begin with Bruce Cockburn, the Canadian troubadour who must be my favorite poet also. You must check out his music library.

These lines from his song “Lovers in a Dangerous Time” (album is Stealing Fire) have journeyed with me through life since my college days when they first appeared:

“When you’re lovers in a dangerous time Sometimes you’re made to feel as if your love’s a crime But nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight Got to kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight.”

They seem to ring true more than ever before, like loud clanging bells these days, in these hard years filled with challenge, most especially in and for the church. I’m of the opinion that we are in a profound re-formation that history will mark and remember. Some of the Church is gathered around a growing, driving impulse to be more inclusive as we become more and re-focused on the gospels and the love of Jesus. This impulse is being challenged, and appropriately so, by much of the Church that can’t locate that impulse biblically and theologically. So the debate rages on, often as we forget that what we are at odds about after all is love, and the will to love.

As I reflect on the Jesus of the gospels, it would be fair I think to identify him as “a lover in a dangerous time” who was certainly “made to feel as if his love’s a crime”. He was rejected, arrested, beaten and crucified in the end because his love for the world reached consistently beyond the borders of the religious establishment. His ferocious fight had only one weapon, and that was love. And he told his friends that it was love more than anything else that would bring light into a dark world. His was a stubborn and relentless love, intentionally directed at the unclean, unwelcome, and unwanted.

Now it’s our turn! And we should not be surprised that the journey we take to speak and act out the love of Jesus will bring division, rejection, and suffering. But we must persist, even if stubbornly, to “kick at the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight” and to fight for the love of Christ Jesus to light up the darkness that’s in each of us, and then through us the world around us.

In another one of Bruce Cockburn’s songs, he writes:

“There’s roads and there’s roads and they call. Can’t you hear it? Roads of the earth and roads of the spirit. The best roads of all are the ones that aren’t certain One of those is where you’ll find me ‘Til they drop the big curtain.” (“Child of the Wind”)

I am learning through the journey of life that the call to follow Jesus is a call to uncertainty in terms of how things will go in the world, and even sometimes in the religious world — but he road walked with Jesus is the road of all-healing love, and light, and so the best road of all. It requires a stubborn faith to keep going when the going gets tough when the days are dangerous and even love seems a crime.

This is our call, our life’s most central vocation. What do you think?

Peter Hawkinson