Stinking of Incense & Original Sin: Richard F Watson

THE KEY TO THE TARDIS?

2011-05-15T23:31:00.001+01:00

EASTER 4

On Thursday morning, as the children from St Mary’s School were all here in church, I asked them what this is....Does anyone know? Actually it’s the key to the TARDIS. You can tell because its got a map of the constellation of Kasterborous on the back, where the planet Gallifrey (the home of the Timelords) can be found. At least its what the Key looked like in the time of the 7^th and 8^th Doctors – as of course it changed each time the TARDIS regenerates itself…..you don't need me to explain that surely? Well, the children were very excited. But I must admit that if Jesus actually had said “I am the key to the TARDIS” then my talk would have been more coherent – but it did convey something of what Jesus meant when he said things like “I am the gate for the sheep”. There’s something about him, he seems to say, that is fundamentally essential. Like bread. Like water. Like a gate, a door. Like a key.

In today's gospel, Jesus makes much of the imagery of the sheep and the shepherd, and the gate and the fold – and of course that imagery extends beyond verses 1-10 of chapter 10 as it is not till later that Jesus finally gets round to saying “I am the Good Shepherd….” In this first section though, Jesus sets up a contrast between the shepherd and the thief. The thief doesn’t use the gate, but climbs in over the wall to attack the sheep – whereas the shepherd approaches the flock from the front so he can be recognised and the sheep are not alarmed. The sheep know the shepherd’s voice and he knows them by name and leads them; and of course, the thief is a stranger, and they not only don’t recognise him but fear him. But the most important and all–encompassing difference between the shepherd and the thief is held in the last line of today’s passage in verse 10: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly”

The theme of LIFE and LIVING is hugely important throughout John’s Gospel. When Jesus meets the Samaritan woman in Chapter 4, he describes himself as the living water. In chapter 6 Jesus is described as the bread of life. (those fundamental essentials again). You’ll remember that John records seven signs to demonstrate who Jesus is – the first being turning water into wine at the Wedding in Cana, and the seventh and final sign is the Raising of Lazarus. Aside from the story of Christ’s passion itself, ‘The Raising of Lazarus’ in Chapter 11 could be seen as the essence and climax of the whole gospel. In a way, the Raising of Lazarus puts into action that astounding claim of the Jesus who said I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly” It’s not so much about raising Lazarus from the dead…..but raising him to life.

A few weeks back, on Passion Sunday, we heard the story of the Raising of Lazarus. I referred then to the sundial on the tower of the church next to the retreat centre at Offchurch, where a number of us have been a number of times! Above the dial on the side of the tower are the words “Don’t forget to Live”. In a way it seems out of place: metal letters in a modern typeface – and they could have made it sound a bit more oldy-worldy, but it’s a simple and direct statement. “Don’t forget to Live”……. and it is surprisingly easy to do. But Jesus says: I came that [you] may have life, and have it abundantly”

It’s worth pausing there to ask ourselves a few pertinent questions: Is that your experience of Christian faith – that it has given you abundant life? Or at least got you a bit closer to it? Is that your experience of the Church – as life giving rather than life-quenching? And in what ways can we see our ministry as a church giving abundance of life to our community and the wider world? When did you last stop and check on the things you are spending most of your time on….are they life-giving or life-quenching? You might also like to make a list of all the things which for you are life-quenching, draining….and then think how you’re going to get shot of them!

If Christ came to bring fullness of life, then that is what Christ’s church (and that’s us) ought to be bringing to the world - in his name and in his strength. But what is ‘life in all its fullness’, or ‘abundance’? Well I think on one level – a very human level - it is about life which is authentic, honest, and true to itself. And so as Christians and as a church we ought to be actively involved in denouncing anything which robs human beings of that dignity. The gospel this morning reminds us that we have a lot of work to do if we are to faithfully follow the Good Shepherd.

That’s the first thing I’d like to draw from the gospel this morning: that as members of Christ’s church we are called to enable others (whether they believe or not is actually immaterial) to live their lives as fully and authentically as possible.

The second thing is that, whilst that is true, Jesus actually meant so much more than that. For Jesus – and certainly for the author of the fourth gospel as he pieces all of this together, the answer to the question ‘What is life in all its fullness?’ is quite clear. And just as I’ve suggested an answer on a human level, this finds its answer on the divine level. Life in all its fullness and abundance was how Jesus lived. Running alongside the theme of life in John’s gospel is the theme of Jesus’ relationship to and with and in the Father. Life in all its fullness is about a life in complete union with God – being in relationship with God just as Jesus was in relationship to God.

John 10 v 10 reminds us clearly what we ought to be about – as individual disciples, as congregations, as national churches….protecting and upholding the rights and integrity of others, and inviting them to draw closer to the mystery of God’s ever-embracing love. In fact that’s a pretty good summary of what our Bishop has called ‘Living God’s Love” (and you'll know that in the very instant I mention those words, a light is flashing on a map at Abbey Gate House in St Albans and I just scored an extra 30 points!)

Life in all its fullness and abundance was how Jesus lived. Life in all its fullness is about a life in complete union with God – being in relationship with God just as Jesus was in relationship to God. Life in all its fullness can never just be for us as individuals alone, but is always about protecting and upholding the rights and integrity of others, and inviting them to draw closer to the mystery of God’s ever-embracing love. And today you are invited to draw closer and encounter afresh the One is fundamentally essential to your life. The key, if you like, to who you are, what you are, and who and what you can and will be. The Good Shepherd. The gate for the sheep. In your hands, the bread of life.

Jesus said: I came that [you] may have life, and have it abundantly”

He calls us to live God’s love.

May God give us the courage and the vision to do it – in the name of our Good Shepherd, Jesus Christ. Amen

AN ECCLESIASTICAL 'BLAIR WITCH PROJECT'....?

2011-05-08T15:42:00.000+01:00

EASTER 3: Becky's Farewell

‘The Roman Emperor and philosopher, Marcus Aurelius observed that as human beings “…we shrink from change; yet is there anything that can come into being without it”, and Edmund Burke believed it to be the most powerful law of nature”.’

Those were the opening sentences of my Rector’s Report to this year’s annual meeting at the beginning of April. The ‘change’ referred in the first instance to our building development project as it builds up a head of steam. But more importantly, my report went on to say this:

“But of course the most continual and vital change is always that which goes on among us and within us as the People of God. The Bishop’s Challenge to Go Deeper into God, Transform Communities and Make New Disciples reminds us that none of us can stand still. That is of course especially apparent when it comes to parish clergy, and we will soon be saying goodbye to Becky after almost three years of energetic, visionary and caring ministry among us, and to Amanda as she is ordained Deacon. Please pray for them, as we know they will pray for us. Difficult though farewells may be, they are a very powerful reminder that it is we who are the body of Christ, and that standing still and remaining the same are not options available to us if we are truly following him.”

…and yes, when I wrote those words, I knew there was the possibility of a third farewell…..

So beginning with today, these next three months are going to be odd, to say the least, as one by one we are picked off in a kind of ecclesiastical Blair Witch Project.

Of course there is a sense in which over the years, St Mary’s has seen clergy come and clergy go, and one or two of you have said that rather stoically in recent weeks. But as much as that is true, I’d like to suggest that it’s not the most helpful way of looking at things. What’s more I’d like to suggest that having 3 departures in as many months could - perhaps surprisingly - be a way of understanding more deeply what it means to be the Church, the People of God. Because the ‘clergy come and go’ way of thinking tends to imply that this place is static. A fixed point which others visit for a while, and then move on from. But of course we know that is not the case. St Mary’s isn’t the same place it was 8 years ago – and more importantly to remember today, St Mary’s isn’t the place it was 3 years ago. So actually, everything is moving. Everything is changing.

As I tried to think of an illustration of what I wanted to say this morning….I thought of Terry Barker. At the end of this week, Terry begins his sponsored walk along the Thames Path to raise money for our 1000+ Appeal (If you haven’t had a chance to sponsor him then today is not too late!). But as well as sponsors, Terry has had promises from various people that they will join him on the journey. Not for all of it, but for a little while walking with him – to keep him company, to encourage him, to inspire and support him….and to make sure he’s going the right way! In much the same way, for the past 3 years Becky has walked with us, encouraging, caring, inspiring, supporting - and it must be said, getting an awful lot done at the same time! And having walked a while with us, it’s now time to follow another path and accompany others on their journey. As well as Terry’s walk being the perfect illustration, we have this morning’s gospel reading, the story of the disciples' encounter with the Risen Christ as they journeyed to Emmaus. A shared journey, through which we encounter Christ.

So yes, clergy come and go. But perhaps a more accurate and more helpful way to express it is to say “St Mary’s travels on – and as we do, we bump into some interesting people on the way. People in whose face we see the face of Christ.” And of course, that works both ways. It is a huge understatement to say that ‘we’re glad we bumped into Becky’ on our journey – and I know that Becky is glad to have bumped into us. The wonderful mystery of the presence of Christ with us as we travel on the road is that as much as Becky has brought Christ to us [as individuals, and together as a community] so we have brought Christ to her. And as much as Becky has been used by the Holy Spirit to shape and change us, so we have been used to shape and change her.

At the end of our Eucharist this morning, the last part of the liturgy is titled ‘Praying our Farewells’. It comes from the Franciscan tradition, and the plan is that we will use the same words together at the end of June when we send Amanda off to be ordained deacon, and again in July when I pop off. It’s a simple liturgy which embodies that sense of mutuality in thanksgiving, forgiveness and blessing – and I think captures very well the sense of travellers at a cross roads. Travellers who glimpse in one another the presence of the Christ who walks with them.

THE GIFT OF GRIEF

2011-05-07T12:34:00.000+01:00

Easter Memorial Service - Saturday 7th May 2011

It is now almost 19 years since my Mum died. I was 24, she was 54, and it was six months before my ordination. We had two weeks between the diagnosis that her cancer had returned with a vengeance, and her death. Travelling back from Bristol to East London I had the totally unreal experience, which some of you will be familiar with, of packing the latest photographs of our year old son to show to Mum, and also packing my suit and the tie Id chosen to wear at her funeral.

There’s something uniquely human in the experience of bereavement. And although it hurts unbelievably, there is something about it that is a gift. No one in their right mind wants to be hurt. But neither do we want to forget. Almost 19 years on, I’m still getting used to the fact that she’s not around. And there are still those things: objects, photographs, places and even phrases and expressions on my teenage children’s faces that somehow – and sometimes for no obvious reason – bring the memories flooding back once more. These are defining moments of grief, when somehow everything we feel, remember, miss and celebrate is suddenly there encapsulated. Tangible. Made Real.

The last week or so has been momentous: aroyal wedding, bank holidays coming one after the other like buses, blazing sunshine (until this morning!), the death of Osama Bin Laden and, it seems, the demise of Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems. So much going on that we may have already forgotten that just two weeks ago we celebrated Easter. For the Church, Easter is one of those defining moments when somehow everything we feel, remember, miss and celebrate is suddenly there encapsulated. Tangible. Made Real. Crammed into the space of a week we re-live the very human story of fear, betrayal, suffering, death and grief in the life of Jesus.

But as we re-live that very human story, we celebrate afresh the divine story – the unfathomable yet insuppressible truth that God raised Christ to life, and that death itself is defeated. It may already seem like ages ago with all that has happened, so it’s just as well that that in the Church’s calendar Easter lasts for no less than seven weeks.

We gather here this morning from many different places, from different experiences, and different stages on our journey. And all that we do here, and in fact this ancient place of prayer itself, is framed in the Christian hope of Easter. We’ve just heard the Easter gospel, the experience of Mary Magdalene who through her tears and in the midst of her grief realized that the risen Christ stood with her.

My hope and prayer is that for each of us, today will be one of those defining moments – a moment in which we bring our feelings, memories, griefs and prayers - but also a moment in which we capture a sense of the closeness of Christ’s presence and the joy of resurrection life. Amen

THERE'S A LOT OF UNWINDING YET TO BE DONE

2011-04-09T16:10:00.000+01:00

LENT 5 - Passion Sunday

I’m hopeless at making choices. Whether it’s at the pick'n'mix counter in Woollies (grief, that dates me!), or deciding which tie to wear (on the very rare occasions I get to actually wear a tie!) it takes me ages to choose. Give me a restaurant menu, and the whole evening could pass before I’ve chosen my starter. So faced with this morning’s gospel reading, I’m spoilt for choice. The story of the raising of Lazarus offers quite a few pegs to hang a sermon on. We could ponder why Jesus seems to take so long to respond to the request to come to Bethany. Alternatively we could reflect theologically on what Jesus meant when he somewhat blithely says that Lazarus has only ‘fallen asleep’ – what’s all that about? Or we could look more closely at the response that Jesus receives from Martha and Mary, both of them saying separately ‘Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died’, but each of the sisters meeting with Jesus being different none the less. Then of course we might dwell on the mechanics of raising a body from the grave, and focus on Lazarus emerging from the tomb. What a choice……

It’s a bit like climbing the Eiffel Tower – or for the more sophisticated among us, the Blackpool Tower. You can either meander up slowly – pausing to take in the view at each stage along the way – or get the lift straight to the top and take in the whole panorama in all its breathtaking expanse! It’s the same with John 11. We could meander through this passage – or we could go straight to the peak…..and that is the very climax of the story. Not only Lazarus emerging from the tomb, but the authoritative words of Jesus: Unbind him and let him go! Somehow, those six words hold the key to the whole episode.

Firstly, on a physical level of course, Lazarus – as he shuffled out of the cold tomb – needed someone to loosen his grave wrappings and set him free. Just as death had been unbound, so physically he needed to be set free from the trappings of death. Secondly, on a religious level, Jesus had moved way beyond the scope of jewish law. Coming to the tomb and breaking it open would have made them all – everyone present - ritually unclean. Jesus, once again was stepping outside of the accepted religious norms. Just as Lazarus was not to be bound by the rigid laws of his orthodox burial, so Jesus was leading his followers beyond the laws of Judaism and refusing to be bound by the socially and religiously acceptable rules of his day. And thirdly, on a spiritual level Jesus offers his disciples a new life – a new freedom – in their relationship with God, their creator. As St Paul was later to expound, that new life was not to be based on Law but on Grace. Not a relationship we earn or improve by our efforts (however pious) but rather a relationship which has its beginning and end in God’s accepting and forgiving love.

Unbind him, and let him go! Six words, which in the context of Jesus ministry reverberate physically, religiously and spirituality. Unbind him, and let him go.

You will have noticed that the crosses are veiled in purple –as today we begin the final leg of the Lenten race known as Passiontide. Veiling crosses and statues in Passiontide is a very old liturgical custom in the church – in fact many would say ‘old fashioned’. But it is, I think, a helpful visual marker that we are moving beyond the drudgery of Lent and closer to the events and devotions of Holy Week. Those veils are perhaps even more appropriate in conjunction with this morning’s gospel reading. Instead of veils, think of them as shrouds, or bindings…Passiontide, with its traditional bindings, looks ahead to the events of Holy Week and eventually the shrouding of Jesus in the tomb. John’s account of the raising of Lazarus looks forward not just to Holy Week, but to the breathtaking, heart-stopping, earth-renewing wonder of Easter-Resurrection. But not yet. For now, at least, we are left with the wrappings. Waiting. Bound.

A few years back we held the parish retreat in Offchurch, near Leamington Spa. On the tower of the parish church next door to the retreat house there is a sun dial, and above it ate the words “Don’t forget to Live”. It is surprisingly easy to do. The theme of LIFE and LIVING flows through each of the readings this morning – Ezekiel’s vision of the Valley of Dry Bones, and Paul’s mind-blowing understanding that Christian life is about the resurrection going on inside you through the work of the Holy Spirit here and now. And that same theme of LIFE and LIVING is hugely important through John’s Gospel – just the week before last Jesus described himself to the Samaritan woman as the living water, and Jesus is described as the bread of life. And you’ll remember that John records seven signs to demonstrate who Jesus is – and this is the seventh and final sign. Aside from the story of Christ’s passion itself, the story of ‘The Raising of Lazarus’ is the essence and climax of the whole gospel. It puts into action that astounding claim of the Jesus who said “I have come that you may have life in all its fullness”. The gospel today is not so much about raising Lazarus from the dead…..but raising him to life.

What are the things which bind you? The things which stifle and constrain you? Maybe it’s the past, looming over you. Maybe it’s a fear of the future stretching ahead of you? or just the weight of the present moment. To a certain extent we are all ‘shrouded’ - bound by past failures, old hurts, lingering grievances and disappointments. And no matter how much we try we can’t quite grasp for long enough, the liberating truth that it is not law we need, but grace. That relationship which has its beginning and end in God’s accepting and forgiving love.

The words which this morning’s gospel leaves ringing in our ears are the most powerful of all: Unbind him, and let him go. Unbind her, and let her go. And that means to Unbind you, and let you go….

I hope that as many of you as possible will be involved in as much of Holy Week as possible. Those who did so last year have said often in the past year of how much more powerful and meaningful Easter was as a result. Now that might be on a superficial level, down to drama and liturgical quackery (not I surely!). But actually it is because the story of Holy Week and Easter is our story – as much as it is Christ’s.

Easter celebrates the breaking through and the triumph of a relationship with God based on God, rather than on our good intentions and achievements (however spiritual and ‘christian’ they may be). Easter celebrates that amazing truth that death is now bound, and Christ and all who follow in his steps are free. Like Lazarus, we are unbound, and set free. But the reality for you and me is that it is a long job, and for each of us there is a lot of unwinding yet to be done. But Christ has spoken.

Today, on this Passion Sunday, as you receive Communion or a blessing ....listen – and hear Jesus saying to you: I have come that you may have life in all its fullness……So don’t forget to live….Unbind him, and let him go.

SHIFT IN THE BALANCE OF POWER

2011-03-14T09:01:00.001Z

LENT 1 - Sermon at Sung Eucharist, St Mary the Virgin, East Barnet

I guess that like me, many of you would have been amazed by the images broadcast on Friday’s news of the tsunami in Japan, and the resulting devastation. To see the aerial shots of acres of warehouses being engulfed, and thousands of cars being swept up in the same mighty surge that brought great ships inland, and razed buildings to the ground as if they were balsa wood models was absolutely incredible. The Fukushima nuclear plant had harnessed the power of the sea to cool its reactor, but the effect of the earthquake meant that in the minutes before the tsunami the sea drew back and the reactor was irrevocably and dangerously damaged. So now a terrific natural disaster is coupled with the threat of nuclear pollution, and the damaging potential that unleashes….and of course while all that is being reported, we are still hearing about the acute political upheaval in the Middle East. Just over a month ago Facebook and Twitter were hailed as making possible a people’s revolution – but what soon became apparent was that political change in Egypt has led to the destabilising of the whole region, with Libyan forces turning their weapons on their own people – weapons which, of course, were supplied by Western governments, including our own.

As ever, there are one or two ‘fringe’ voices proclaiming the end of the world is near. It’s hardly surprising given the epic scale of what is going on – be it the result of unbridled nature or misguided humanity. But the earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the unfolding rebellion in the Middle East haven’t come from no-where. Both are the result of a shift in a delicate and precarious balance of power. The potential has always been there. All that was needed was the trigger. As a race, it is our presumption that we have got all bases covered, and all things in control that almost always leads to our undoing. The pride that comes before a fall is inherent in our human condition, a power struggle with the world around us, and those we share it with.

As we begin the season of Lent, we are invited once again to look at the balance of power not just in the word around us, but in our own lives. Events in Japan and the Middle East might serve as reminder of that – combined with this morning’s Gospel reading, which is itself a study in the use of power. Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness, and confronted by the devil. We’re so familiar with this episode in the Gospels that too quickly we grab hold of a picture of Jesus that is strong, resilient and triumphant – whereas what the text of Matthew 4 gives us is a picture of frail human vulnerability. It is after Jesus has fasted forty days and forty nights, and is already famished, that the temptation begins. Of course the devil cannot take Jesus’ power away from him, but he can try to upset the balance, nudging Jesus to exploit and abuse his power: “…command these stones to become loaves of bread….throw yourself down from the pinnacle of the temple….all the nations of the world I will give you, if you fall down and worship me…”.

It starts off simple and reasonable enough – sensible really, just making provision for basic physical need. But the third and final temptation is what it is really all about: wholesale idolatry. “Worship me, and all this will be yours” says the devil. It’s always important to grasp what the Gospel writers are trying to do as they writes, and here Matthew is no exception. The earliest account of the temptation, in Mark’s version is very brief. Mark 1.12 says “And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.” That's it. In Mark there is no dramatisation at all, just a statement that it happened. Writing some years later, Matthew and Luke both get their information from a different source and so are able to embellish the scene (with Luke deliberately changes the order of the temptations so that the 3^rd and greatest temptation takes place at the temple in Jerusalem, which is where of course Jesus is heading…)

But Matthew writes for a predominantly Jewish audience, and throughout his gospel makes an implicit comparison between Jesus and the people of Israel in the Old Testament – wandering for forty years in the desert, and then having reached the promised land struggling with idolatry; an idolatry that threatened not only the balance of power among God’s people, but struck at the very heart of their relationship with YHWH itself. So with each temptation, Jesus responds by quoting verses from the Old Testament. They’re not random verses, but each is carefully selected from chapters 6 and 8 of the book of Deuteronomy, passages specifically concerned with Israel’s need to remain faithful. So Matthew’s message is clear. Where God’s people have failed (and will continue to fail), Jesus remains true. The balance of power is maintained. And of course it’s this same theme that the writer to the Hebrews picks up on in later years: “…we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weakness, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (4.15)

To our ears, Jesus’ response to the devil’s temptation is fired solidly and surely from the hip: no hesitation, no doubt…no real effort almost, no struggle. Is that how you experience temptation? I suspect not, and that’s why we need not only to recognise Matthew’s intention in writing, but also the fact that at the beginning of Lent some 2,000 years later, we come at it from a different place entirely. I do believe there is a real danger with this passage of scripture, that we go away thinking that all we need in order to withstand temptation, is to know the right bible verses and apply them firmly. (In fact, I don’t just believe in the danger, I know it to be true - and it is quite simply rubbish.)

If, as the church has taught through the ages, Jesus fully shared out humanity, then I think we need to bring our understanding of humanity to this text and allow the Holy Spirit to fill in the gaps. I think in reality the confrontation between Jesus and the devil would have been far more of a struggle, rather than a tit for tat exchange of challenge and scriptural texts. Rather it would feel, for Jesus, the way it feels for you when you are really torn between doing what you can and want to do, and doing what you think is the right thing to do. Yes, sometimes it will be a clear-cut decision and relatively easy. But other times it is far more subtle, and drawn-out. Surely Jesus didn’t deal with this all in one go and then get on with ministry? Or could it be that what Matthew 4 reflects is actually the struggle Jesus engaged in day by day of his earthly life?

In our Christian discipleship, you and I may not be tempted to turn stones into bread very often – but we do face all kinds of challenges where the easiest solution is to put our physical and material ‘wants’ first, at the expense of others – be it to do with food, drink, sex, prestige or money. We may not be tempted to display superhuman powers by throwing ourselves off the church tower, but we may settle with drawing attention to ourselves in more subtle yet equally effective ways. And the lure of power may not be so great that we are prepared to sell our souls, but there are times we might consider a time-share agreement with the devil in order to get what we want.

As we begin the season of Lent….as we see the shifting balance in the word around us… and as we reflect on the real human experience of Jesus, we are invited to consider that same balance of power in our own lives. The little things we have chosen to deny ourselves in these next few weeks, or the things we have taken on as part of our Christian discipline may be small – my very real struggle to go to bed before midnight and your determination to give up chocolate, or coffee, or alcohol or whatever you’re doing may well pale into insignificance as we watch the news, but none the less they are sure reminders that we need to maintain a precarious and delicate balance of power in our lives as well as in the world around us.

So pray for Japan. Pray for the Middle East. And pray for yourself and one another, in Christ’s name. Amen.

THE FULL AND FINAL ANSWER OR INSIPID ARROGANCE?

2011-02-13T14:51:00.003Z

All Saints, Borehamwood: Fourth Sunday before Lent

“For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building” (1 Cor 3.9)

It’s a particular privilege to be with you this morning to personally welcome you into the ‘new improved’ Deanery of Barnet – ‘improved’, that is, because since the beginning of this year, Elstree & Borehamwood are a part of it!

Last Autumn I was lucky enough to have a 3 month sabbatical, and returned to the parish and deanery having made one or two ‘notes to self’. One immediate (and so far long-lasting) effect was a more or less daily visit to the local gym which so far has been of great benefit. As well as providing me with a ready excuse to watch Loose Women every day on the TVs in front of the treadmills, I’m subjected to the continuous information feed of Sky News. But even if your news information intake has been of a more moderate level in recent weeks, you won’t have failed to notice that something has happened in Egypt. After 18 days of tumultuous public protests and hard, stubborn refusals to leave a position he's held for 30 years, Egypt’s President Mubarak gave up power on Friday, handing over authority to the nation's military leaders. In the latter days of the unrest, Mubarak's regime attempted to disconnect Egypt from the Internet. Why? Because they perceived that social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter were key tools in marshalling support to topple their long-time ruler. (see subsequent article posted on 25th February 2011 by Sarah Charlton, Arab Revolt - Social Media and the People's Revolution.)

My apologies if this means little to you, but in its simplest definition, internet social networking is the means by which an unlimited number of individuals are able to exchange ideas, opinions and information across the globe within seconds, and with a wide mix of people. Three years ago, an activist started a page on Facebook in support of striking Egyptian workers. Since then that page has drawn in more than 60,000 people concerned with issues like free speech, the country's poor economy and a growing frustration with the government. The result was to motivate a vast body of people into action, not just on the internet, but in the real world too. And culminating in this last week, we have seen the amazing end results of that action.

St Paul wrote to the Corinthian Christians “…we are God’s servants, working together….” He doesn’t exhort them to be motivated by social networking, or to be bound together by information imparted in 140 characters or less. Rather he calls them to recognize and realize (to ‘make real’ in concrete terms) their common purpose as disciples of Jesus, and members together of the body of Christ – despite their differences and rising above their disagreements.

The deanery of which you, this church, are now an important part, along with the other churches of the Elstree & Borehamwood team, is in itself a microcosm of the worldwide Anglican Communion. We’ve got anglo-catholics and we’ve got conservative evangelicals; we’ve got liberal-catholics and those of a central churchmanship; we’ve got open evangelicals and prayerbook churches; we’ve got forward in faith parishes and inclusive parishes; and we’ve even got one church that in practical terms refuses to have anything to do with the rest of us because we’re not ‘proper’ Christians. So welcome to a very diverse family! As you can imagine, when it comes to working together, we have to work quite hard. But because as a deanery we are committed to St Paul’s vision of being ‘God’s servants, working together’ it works, and we are seeing results.

Just this last week our Deanery Synod met for the second in a series of talks based on Bishop Alan’s 3-fold charge when he came to the Diocese - which has subsequently developed into the diocesan initiative Living God’s Love. We invited 3 speakers from dramatically different points on the Anglican spectrum – with potentially conflicting standpoints – and asked them to talk about what it means to Go Deeper into God, Transform our Communities, and Make New Disciples. The first speaker was Dr Mike Ovey, the Principal of Oak Hill Theological College. He spoke about those three priorities from the standpoint of a conservative evangelical. At the end of the evening, one of our anglo-catholic clergy said in all sincerity: “I think I must have been a conservative evangelical all my life because broadly speaking I agree with everything you have said tonight”

This last week our speaker was Bishop Lindsay Urwin, Administrator of the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham – a polar opposite role to that of the Principal of Oak Hill in so many ways! The next day I had an email from one of our conservative evangelical clergy saying “Thank you so much for organizing last night. What an inspiring guy to listen to. So much of what he said moved me and challenged me”

“For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building”

I think it’s fair to say that the same rapid internet communication and networking that brought political change for Egypt has in recent years has played a part in undermining the ‘bonds of affection’ that held together our Anglican family across the world. But I think it’s also fair to say that, as we have experienced within our Deanery, if we are prepared to work with our differences and disagreements, then we are able to move beyond them and discover afresh our common purpose in Christ. Significantly, the things which Jesus speaks against in Matthew 5, this morning’s gospel passage, are all things which divide: anger, insult, unfaithfulness, falsity. They are all things which break down relationships, communities, churches, and nations – rather than build them up. And St Paul is unequivocal as he writes to the Corinthians that such divisiveness, whether it is based around individual personalities or particular issues within the Christian community, such divisiveness is clear and simple evidence of immaturity. “For as long as there is jealousy and quarrelling among you” he says “are you not of the flesh and behaving according to human inclinations?”

So how do we do it? Well in those few words of 1 Cor 3v9 Paul gives us the clue we need. “For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building”

This is God’s church, not ours. The Church, our mission and ministry, everything is always bigger than we are and our understanding of it. And when we forget that, when we believe we have the full and final answer, ‘the definitive position’, then in truth all we really have is an insipid arrogance that both harms and hinders our growth as the people of God. Sometimes as Christians we can be so busy being ‘right’, that we forget to be Christ-like.

Facebook and Twitter played a huge part in uniting the people of Egypt in a common purpose that brought revolutionary change. The Bishop’s 3-fold charge of Living God’s Love points us towards the common purpose which St Paul identifies as the Church’s life-blood, the Church's sign of maturity, and the Church's very reason for being: Go Deeper into God, Transform our Communities, and Make New Disciples…..

“For we are God’s servants, working together; you are God’s field, God’s building."

Amen

DOGGED FAITH & CONSTANT HOPE

2011-01-29T17:36:00.002Z

The Feast of Candlemas - St Anne's, Soho

Do you remember those ‘Magic Eye’ pictures: a mass of bright jagged flecks of colour with a vague pattern which in theory, if you stared at for long enough and in the right way, you’d see an amazing picture – for some reason it was usually of dolphins! For me it was always a classic case of ‘Can’t see for looking’. After hours spent starting at these wretched puzzles, all I would end up with was a thumping headache. I progressed a little, but only once or twice did I actually see the pictures I was supposed to. But to be honest, I got fed up with trying. Whether it’s because the novelty wore off, or maybe now I’m just too old…..?

Take a moment to consider those things which you find frustrating, things you just can’t seem to work out. And are there things which you consider yourself to have outgrown – or those things which for one reason or another you’ve given up trying with. They may not be major, life shattering things, but I bet all of us, however old or young, can identify something.…..things you just can’t seem to work out, and things which for one reason or another you’ve given up trying to make sense of?

Candlemas – or the Feast of the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, or the feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary – is one of my favourite festivals. This evening a small but hardy group of fools will process by candlelight from the Methodist Church at the bottom of the hill up to St Mary’s for a Sung Eucharist. This year our preacher is the Dean of St Albans, Jeffrey John (so if you can get to the top end of the Piccadilly Line later today, you’re very welcome to join us!).

I think I love Candlemas so much because of the raw drama of this part of the gospel story, but also because it has a very specific and significant place in the church’s year. Today is the last time we’ll see the crib figures until next Christmas Eve (that’s only 334 days away though!). It’s the last opportunity we have to peer into the manger and see the Christ-child. We know how ‘children grow up so fast these days’ – well that’s also true of our Lord. Candlemas pulls us away from the cosy comforts of Christmas and Epiphany, and pushes us towards the stark reality of Lent and Holy Week.

At the end of our service we will gather at the font and we bring to an end our celebration of the Saviour’s birth, and turn towards his passion and prepare to enter into the Easter mystery. The child becomes a man, the soft straw becomes sharp thorns, and the wood that cradled his small frame stretches him in agony on the cross.

It strikes me that the scene in the Temple in the Candlemas gospel covers all ages. The child Jesus, his young parents Mary and Joseph, and a couple of very elderly people, Simeon and Anna. In fact many years ago I preached at a diocesan youth event and said that Simeon and Anna were so wrinkled that they probably looked like walnuts on legs!

But this all-age factor in the story of the Presentation only serves to heighten the drama. For the child Jesus, this is an important moment of recognition – not for him maybe, but certainly for others; for his parents, the awful realisation that their boy’s destiny would have a tumultuous effect on his life, and theirs; and for Simeon and Anna, the fulfilment of a lifetime of waiting and hoping. But go back to where we started – those things which you find frustrating, things you just can’t seem to work out, and things which for one reason or another you’ve given up on. Maybe even things you assume now you are just too old for. Then sharpen the focus in your mind's eye, on those two aged characters in the Temple.

Simeon and Anna could see the thing that was hidden to everyone else – maybe they could comprehend even more than Mary and Joseph had understood at that point. Instead of seeing just another new born male brought to the temple in accordance with Jewish law, they recognised God’s Messiah, his chosen. What was hidden was revealed.

The words of the Nunc Dimittis are so familiar now – and so poignant when read at funeral services. ‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word; for mine eyes have seen thy salvation…’. At the end of a long life, God’s promise to Simeon is fulfilled. After all his waiting, he sees. And yet it’s much more than that – it isn’t just that after all his waiting he finds fulfilment, but because of his waiting. It’s a bit ironic really, and no doubt a much needed antidote to our fast-track society and more fundamentally our restless human spirit, but having played ‘the waiting game’ through Advent, Candlemas reminds us yet again of the need to wait, to look forward with anticipation.

Of course there’s the sense here at St Anne’s especially, in this vacancy, of waiting. Waiting and trusting in the faithful, unperturbed guidance of the Holy Spirit, as God moves us on step by step towards the dawn of new life and resurrection.

So what were those things which you find frustrating, things you just can’t seem to work out, and things which for one reason or another you’ve given up on? And what might we learn from the dogged faith and constant hope of Simeon and Anna?

THE STILL POINT OF THE TURNING WORLD

2011-01-09T15:38:00.002Z

Eucharist for the Feast of the Baptism of Christ and the Renewal of the Covenant, 9th January 2011 (Photograph: St Thomas', New York Sept 2010)

Some words from T S Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton – the first section of his Four Quartets which some of you will have heard me quote before:

At the still point of the turning world.

Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards;

at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement.

And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered.

Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline.

Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance,

and there is only the dance.

I can only say, there we have been:

but I cannot say where.

And I cannot say, how long,

for that is to place it in time.

Eliot’s poetry is crammed full of mystical paradoxes. Things set in tension, pulling in opposite directions and leaving space in the gaps for glimmers of discernment and apprehension. For me it’s a good example of how words can demand that you love them without fully comprehending them - and of course that’s exactly why some people can’t stand T S Eliot’s poetry! But in that short passage he explores the tension between movement and stillness. Between being fixed and moving on. And that tells us something about God. And it should also tell us a lot about us, God’s people.

Today we gather together as two congregations but one Church. We gather with a two-fold purpose: to mark the Baptism of Christ (one of the three gospel events which have made up the Church’s celebration of the Feast of the Epiphany since earliest times) and to Renew the Covenant - a devotion established by John Wesley in 1755 which has become a foundational event in Methodist worship, and for the last 20 or so years has been incorporated into Anglican worship and adapted by other denominations. Like T S Eliot’s paradoxical verse, they both speak of something which is a fixed point, a ‘given’, but aslo have a sense of direction and movement. The closing verse of the reading from Isaiah sums it up well:

“See, the former things have come to pass,

And new things I now declare;

Before they spring forth, I tell you of them”

For Jesus, his baptism was clearly a major milestone as he returned from the desert and began his public ministry – and of course for the earliest Christian communities that was where the story of Jesus began. No stories of the shepherds and the angels, the stable and the manger. The story began with the proclamation of the Kingdom, and the baptism of Jesus by John. As he is baptised, the heavens open and the dove descends, and a voice is heard saying “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased”. It is no coincidence that later, when Jesus’ ministry reaches a pivotal point as he prepares to go to Jerusalem, when he takes Peter, James and John to the mountain top – and as he is transfigured, again the voice from heaven echoes the affirmation at his baptism and says “This is my son, listen to him”. If you keep those two events in mind – baptism and transfiguration, and the affirmation of who Jesus is and God's closeness to him – how much more devastating is the desolation of Calvary when the skies are dark and silent, and the only voice heard belongs to the Crucified asking why God has abandoned him?

The challenge for us this morning is to understand our baptism into Christ, our incorporation into the People of God, as something which is not a static event of the past – but instead something which is active now, living and growing and changing and drawing us ever onwards. But at the same time we mustn’t be naïve and ignore where it might lead us. As individuals and as a community of faith, the more we become Christ-like, the more our discipleship will become cross-shaped.

John Wesley, of course, recognised that instinctively. Although the precise form of Covenant Prayer we use this morning doesn’t go back as far as 1755 it is rooted in the spirituality which through Methodism brought renewal to the Church. It is not an easy prayer – at least not if it is prayed with honesty and conviction. In a few moments you will be invited to say:

Put me to what you will,

rank me with whom you will;

put me to doing, put me to suffering;

let me be employed for you or laid aside for you,

exalted for you or brought low for you;

let me be full, let me be empty,

let me have all things, let me have nothing….

I find it acutely embarrassing when Christians in this country claim to be persecuted or under attack. It’s particularly embarrassing when comments are made by retired senior Anglican clergy – although its not just them. If we are talking about whether or not an individual can wear a cross around their neck or a lapel badge at work, for me that is facile in comparison with what our brothers and sisters in (for example) Iran and Egypt face day by day – as recent news bulletins have reminded us. As we renew the Covenant this morning, we invite God to put us to doing, put us to suffering. None of us would sensibly invite suffering or persecution, but what the prayer asks of us is to simply acknowledge that surrendering to God’s will may in deed and in reality, bring that upon us. Things are OK today – but that cannot be taken for granted without belittling the experience of the wider Church of which we are a part, and the seriousness of God’s call to follow Christ in all things.

At the still point of the turning world.

Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards;

at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement.

And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered.

Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline.

Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance,

and there is only the dance.

Celebrating the Baptism of Christ (and by doing so celebrating our own baptism) and Renewing the Covenant are both deliberate ways of anchoring ourselves when all else is changing – when the Church is changing, as well as the world around us. But its not an act of rigid defiance, the liturgical equivalent of holding up a placard and singing ‘We shall not be moved'. we hold on to the fundamentals of our relationship with God through baptism into Christ so that everything else CAN change – and, by God’s grace, us with it. Buildings may rise and fall, clergy may come and go, projects may begin and end, styles of worship may wax and wane (and thank God some of the music wont last five minutes!) – God calls us to hang on to none of these. We are called instead to be rooted and grounded in God’s covenant love, which we can neither earn or ever deserve. And with that as our fixed point, our ‘given’, may we be renewed in moving forward as the people of God – the God who declares: See, the former things have come to pass, and new things I now declare.

Amen

JOSEPH'S YES

2010-12-20T09:03:00.001Z

ADVENT 4
So here we are again on the fourth Sunday of Advent – once more poised, as we prepare to be hurled into the Christmas festivities yet again. This is the Sunday which is traditionally focused on Mary, so its perhaps surprising that the reading is all about Joseph. Added to that, today’s gospel passage seems to pre-empt the whole festival in a rather perfunctory manner. The whole thing is wound up in just 6 verses – and then following on from the passage we heard this morning comes the story of the Magi visiting, the story which only Matthew seems to know about, and which Mark, Luke and John omit to mention. (Of course Mark and John – the earliest and the latest of the gospels – don’t see any need to report the birth of Jesus at all... If we are to be ‘biblical Christians’, especially at this time of year, then we need to pay very careful attention to what is, and what isn’t written there, and we have to perceive what exactly it is that Matthew is wanting his readers to understand.

The first part of Chapter 1 is often skipped over, because on the face of it, its a relatively boring list of who begat whom in the ancestry of Joseph, and therefore ultimately of course, of Jesus. Impressively, Matthew records the genealogy of Jesus in a pattern of three groups of fourteen generations: from Abraham to David, from David to the exile in Babylon, and from the exile to the birth of the Messiah. As I said, very impressive, but wildly out of kilter compared with what we know from other sources – like the Old Testament! But of course Matthew is not attempting to write history. The genesis of Jesus is to be read like the genesis of creation – not so much about how it happened, but who was responsible and why it happened. Just as the book of Genesis majors on God’s activity in creation, so Matthew majors on God’s activity in the birth of Christ. Most significantly Matthew ‘doctors’ the genealogy of Jesus to include a group of women: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba (Uriah’s wife, who King David too a fancy to and so sent his best Captain to die on the front line). Matthew lists these women before coming to Mary because for each of these Old Testament women, there was something “irregular” about their union with their husbands. Deliberately and apologetically, Matthew is pointing out the precedents for the irregular marital situation that Mary and Joseph find themselves in.

That might seem to be unnecessary detail, but it is crucial background information as we approach the gospel passage we heard read this morning. Because the question behind Matthew’s writing is simple and essential: WHO IS JESUS? Well in his gospel, Matthew’s answer is two-fold. Jesus is Son of David, and Son of God. John’s Gospel never once refers to Jesus as ‘the Son of David’; Mark and Luke use the title only four times – but in Matthew it is used 10 times. That's because Matthew writes for a predominantly Jewish audience, and so for him it is vitally important to demonstrate Jesus’ descent from King David through Joseph.

I really hope that you can spot the difficulty here - but you may well not, because we are so used to hearing the passage and taking on board wholesale what we think it is saying to us. Jesus was Son of David, and according to Matthew, the Davidic Messiah by descent through Joseph…..but therein lies the problem. Jesus wasn’t Joseph’s son, was he?

This is where we really do need to pay attention to how Matthew writes his gospel, as much as what he writes. Bear in mind that Matthew writes for a predominantly Jewish audience. Throughout his gospel, Matthew follows a stylistic pattern. He tells a chunk of gospel story and then in conclusion, throws in a quote from the Old Testament to validate, interpret and justify all that has been written before it. But here, at the very start of his story, that’s not the case. He seems deliberately to make an exception. There is a validating quotation from the Old Testament: “Look the virgin shall conceive and bear as son, and they shall name him Emmanuel” But the passage continues after, and ends instead with the words “When Joseph awoke out of sleep, he did as the angel of the Lord commanded him: he took her as his wife, but had no marital relations with her until she had borne a son: and he named him Jesus.”

There are no accidents in the Gospels. Matthew wanted to end the first part of his gospel with these words: Joseph named him Jesus. Jesus was not Joseph’s son – but in rabbinic law, to name the child was to take full legal responsibility for him – to grant him the legal status of a biological son. Irrespective of his conception, to be named by Joseph made him the son of Joseph, and thereby the son of David. Luke’s gospel places the emphasis on Mary – her obedience to God’s will. Matthew places similar emphasis but on Joseph. Arguably, Joseph’s ‘yes’ to God is as important as Mary’s.

Matthew writes the beginning of his gospel to answer the question: WHO IS JESUS? He is Son of God, by the involvement of the Holy Spirit in his conception, the Spirit that overshadowed Mary. But he is equally the Son of David – through Joseph’s willingness to accept in obedience the will and purpose of God.

I have to admit that this is all stuff I find fascinating and inspiring – my apologies if you don’t! But I guess the message this morning is a simple one. As once again you hear the Christmas story, don’t take it for granted. Listen to what the gospel writers are wanting you to hear (because it may not entirely match the picture on your Christmas cards. Or indeed, it may be a far cry from what you recall from Sunday School. In different ways, each of the gospels addressed the question WHO IS JESUS? Mark, the earliest record, demonstrates who Jesus is by what he does. John, the last version, portrays Jesus as existing before the beginning of time, and Luke and Matthew include the stories of his birth and childhood to determine who he is.

So this Christmas, what are you going to do with that question? The same question the gospel writers grappled with and devoted themselves to? WHO IS JESUS? Because how you answer that question will determine what is important to you in the next few days – and for the rest of your lives……

RADIX or RADOX?

2010-12-12T09:19:00.005Z

ADVENT 3
Yesterday Colin and I spent the morning at Barnet Synagogue in Eversleigh Road. In the past few months while I’ve been off climbing the CN Tower in Toronto and the Rockefeller Building in New York, Colin has been working hard to build bridges with the local Jewish community, building on his time as Mayor’s Chaplain last year. We received an extremely warm welcome from Rabbi Lerer, and the whole shul – and then spent most of the afternoon at Shabbat lunch in the family home of Phil Rosenberg (Interfaith Officer for the Board of Deputies of British Jews, who many of you will have met at the Partnership Harvest Service back in September). We hope very much to be able to work more closely together in the New Year. We’ve talked briefly about a tour of the synagogue and the possibility of sharing in worship. Neither Colin or I have much fluency in Hebrew (did I say much? I think I mean none!) but there were two things especially that stood out for me yesterday.

Firstly, in terms of worship, there are similarities with liturgical action that link directly with the way we worship here at St Mary’s. For example the scrolls of the Torah are kept in the Torah Ark positioned so that the congregation face towards Jerusalem – which is of course, facing east as catholic Christian churches are traditionally oriented. When the Torah is read the scrolls are carried through the congregation and read from the bimah in the midst of the people – just as the Gospel book is carried into the midst of the people at the Eucharist. Of course none of that should be a surprise, as Christian liturgy grew from the worship of the synagogue – but the Church is so often guilty of ignorance and forgetfulness (and even denial) when it comes to our Jewish roots. The second thing that struck me was a clear sense of community and identity as the People of God. That’s really been my hobby horse since coming back from Canada – our need to renew our sense of identity as the People of God. A community which is shaped and guided by the stories of the Hebrew scriptures, and by the writings of the early church. And of course, that is a story we share with our Jewish brothers and sisters. Together we are the people of God. So watch this space – there will be more to come in the New Year I have no doubt. But for now it is a timely reminder of where we are coming from, as Advent leads us forward to celebrate the birth of Jesus. Because of course Jesus – and John who announces his arrival – are Jews. The disciples and founding fathers of the Church are Jewish. But more than that, like John the Baptist (who pursues us through Advent like the hound of heaven), they are radical Jews. Remembering that now is so important, because very soon we will find ourselves swamped with the sentimentality of the child in the manger, and 'gentle Jesus, meek and mild'. And that it all quite simply a load of old tosh. Jesus wasn't gentle, meek or mild. He was radical in every sense.

How do you feel about the word ‘radical’? Who would you apply it to – and would that be the kind of person you’d be comfortable with? Would you join a radical group? A subversive organisation of some description? Have you ever been described as a radical? Or thought of yourself as such?

Last week we heard that John was dressed in camel skin, with a belt around his waist, feeding on locusts and wild honey, a voice crying in the wilderness, calling people to repentance, calling people into a deeper and more honest relationship with God. John's methods were unsubtle to say the least –an ‘in your face’ sort of bloke, who left you in no doubt of what he was asking of you. The imagery of the passage last week was of a tree that was about to come crashing down: ‘the axe is laid to the root of the tree…..’ No half measures, but all or nothing. Drastic and decisive action. John was, unmistakably, a radical. John is still with us in the gospel, and the picture is no less radical, but the subject is Jesus himself. He is the radical who is turning the world upside down. John’s disciples are sent back to him with the message that the blind are receiving their sight, the lame are walking, and the dead are being raised. Radical stuff. The words of the prophet Isaiah give another dramatic and radical image – one of total transformation. ‘The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom…’ ‘For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert. A more radical change could not be imagined.

If you look up the word ‘radical’ in the Oxford Dictionary, you discover that it is ‘to go to the root or origin; to touch or act upon that which is essential….” Its very similar to those words from last weeks gospel – the axe is laid to the root of the tree…..and without a doubt, the John we read about in the New Testament and the Jesus we worship were both radicals – spirituality, socially, politically and theologically. They deliberately challenged, by their words and actions, the way men and women thought about God, the way they thought about themselves, and the way they thought about how they understood and engaged with the society in which they lived.

Both John and Jesus preached the kingdom of God – the rule or reign of God which arrived with the ministry of Jesus and continues in the world by the power of his Spirit - and as his followers we are called to radical discipleship. So how do you feel about the word ‘radical’? Who would you apply it to – and would that be the kind of person you’d be comfortable with? Would you join a radical group? A subversive organisation of some description? Have you ever been described as a radical? Or thought of yourself as such?

The labels Christians use so often exasperates me. It prefer not to put too rigid a label on myself – and that it itself makes me by some peoples reckoning, to be a ‘post-evangelical’ because post evangelicals don’t like labels! But most annoying of all for me are the terms ‘born-again Christian’ or ‘spirit-filled Christian’ or ‘charismatic Christian’. We usually apply them as a way of pointing out that others are different from us – and that we, of course, are the norm and they are the extreme. It annoys me, because it is nonsense. There is no such thing as a Christian who is not born-again. There is no such thing as a Christian who is not spirit-filled. There is no such thing as a Christian who is not charismatic. All three terms actually make reference to the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives, rather than indicating which particular ‘type’ of Christian we may or may not be. So you may not think of yourself as being much of a radical, but there is no such thing as a non-radical Christian. That doesn’t mean you have to be obnoxiously loud, or down-right rude to qualify, but even in its quietest gentlest ways, your faith is subversive. Following Christ is radical.

Advent is the time when we need to be shaken and stirred. We have to grasp once again how earth-shatteringly radical the gospel of the incarnation is – that is, the good news that in Jesus, God shared human life and hallowed it. The wonderful news that the desert will blossom and rejoice, and waters shall break forth in the wilderness. Isaiah, John the Baptist, and Jesus himself rattle our cage once again, because if we fail to appreciate today the radical nature of Christian discipleship, then in the next few weeks we will slide into the most appalling sentimentality, which masquerades as a religious festival but is at best innocuous and trite. The axe is laid to the root of the tree. To be radical means to go to the root or origin. The prophets were radicals, John the Baptist was a radical, Jesus was radical – and as Christians you and I are called to be radical …..because such is the kingdom of God. Such are the People of God.

The latin word for radical is radix. As I ran a bath in the early hours of this morning, and tipped into it some herbal bath salts, it occurred to me that if you change just one letter of radix, you get something very different. Radix becomes Radox – 'the secret of relaxation' (at least that’s what it said on the packet!) Advent is the time when we need to be shaken and stirred. We have to grasp once again how earth-shatteringly radical the gospel of the incarnation is – that is, the good news that in Jesus, God shared human life and hallowed it. The wonderful news that the desert will blossom and rejoice, and waters shall break forth in the wilderness

Radix, or radox – which do you prefer? And which, as a Church, as the People of God, are we geared up for?

HEAR AGAIN THE ADVENT CALL.....

2010-12-08T01:49:00.001Z

Company of Servers, St Albans Chapter
Advent Carol Service, St Stephen's, Bells Hill
Tuesday 7th December 2010

Traditionally the great themes of Advent are Heaven, Hell, Judgement and Death so I really hope you haven’t come to be cheered up this evening! And in that sense it is entirely appropriate that in a few minutes, were I to close my eyes, I would think I’d arrived at my own funeral. I first sang Charles Wood’s O Thou the Central Orb some 37 years ago, aged 8 – and its been an all time favourite ever since, and is on the shortlist for my send-off. (I will check the choir’s availability afterwards, but I can’t guarantee when it will be just yet!)

O thou the central orb of righteous love
Pure beam of the Most High
Eternal light of this our wintry world.
Thy radiance bright awakes new joy in faith
Hope soars above!

Come, quickly come, and let Thy glory shine
gilding our darksome heaven with rays divine.
Thy saints with holy lustre round Thee move

as stars about Thy throne set in the height
of God's ordaining counsel,
as Thy sight gives measur'd grace

to each Thy power to prove.
Let Thy bright beams disperse the gloom of sin
Our nature all shall feel eternal day
In fellowship with thee.
Transforming day to souls - erewhile unclean,
now pure within. Amen

For me, H R Bramely’s words and Charles Wood’s music conspire perfectly to create, and draw us into, the mystical vision of God’s transfiguring glory. A ball of eternal light. The orb of righteous love.

The Advent themes of Heaven, Hell, Judgement and Death are each in their own way pushing us on, to catch again a sense of this immense and immeasurable glory which is the goal and fulfilment of all creation, and the intimate and ultimate essence of Godself. In that sense, the season of Advent is a bit of a tease. Because no sooner have we caught that resplendent of glory in all its enormity, we are pushed towards the child in the manger – the epitome of human frailty and vulnerability.

Well if this sermon is followed by a choral snapshot of God’s ethereal glory, it was preceded by a far more earthy and in your face episode from the beginning of Mark’s gospel – in fact the very first words of the very first gospel:

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is written in the prophet Isaiah, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:“Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight”’ John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

There is something ‘rough and ready’ about John the Baptist. Something wild and dangerous. But his message is sharp and crystal clear. ‘Prepare yourself to meet your Lord’ ‘Get ready – now’.

The Church gets so many things wrong. And I suspect we get John wrong a lot of the time. Yes, Mark tells us he proclaimed a gospel of repentance, but are we perhaps a bit too quick to make that solely about morality and behavior? Before we know it we’ve created the scenario where John is saying ‘You better clean up your act to make yourself fit to receive the Lord’ or ‘Look out, incase you’re found out!’ ….and all of a sudden the overwhelming grace of God has been obscured by a condition of entry.

But that call to ‘repent’, the greek word metanoia which John begins and Jesus takes up in his ministry, and is often translated as ‘convert’ or ‘reform’ – fundamentally and literally means ‘change’, no more and no less than that. It’s a call to ‘change your mind’, in the sense of being open to grow and encounter the glory of God in Jesus Christ. John the Baptist does not bellow a moral accusation, but like the anthem which follows this sermon, (and indeed one could argue like all good music, all good art) offers an open invitation to encounter the glory of God. Prepare yourself, change your way of thinking, open your eyes, be ready to encounter your God.

Those of us who ‘work the sanctuary’ as it were, those of us who serve at the altar in any capacity as servers, thurifers, acolytles, MCs, deacons or priests– together we share in a particular way the ministry of John the Baptist. (and of course the list doesn’t end there, but includes choirs and musicians too)

The part we take in the public worship of the church should by its grace, its dignity and with a subtlety that points away from itself, help others respond to that same invitation to encounter Christ – to meet him in the sacraments and the liturgy of the church. So for us Advent provides a particular opportunity to reflect on the particular role, the particular ministry to which we have been called, and which we are privileged to exercise.

I’d like to leave the rest of this sermon to the choir, Charlie Wood, Mr Bramley …. and to you and the Holy Spirit. Hear again the Advent call to prepare, change, get ready to encounter the glory of God, and to receive your Lord:

Come, quickly come……
Let Thy bright beams disperse the gloom of sin
Our nature all shall feel eternal day
In fellowship with thee.
Transforming day to souls - erewhile unclean,
now pure within. Amen.

70's PUNK, OR WHERE WE'RE AT?

2010-12-05T21:50:00.003Z

ADVENT 2, Evensong

'Elijah and the Prophets of Baal’ is one of the great epic tales of the Old Testament, and also sounds remotely like a 70’s punk band! As a story it has the compelling ingredients of tribal rivalry, thrilling suspense, good comic timing, courage in the face of adversity, and the most amazing special effects imaginable – and for all those reasons it’s among my favourites! The Books of Kings were probably written at the time of the exile in Babylon, by the group of writers know as the ‘deuteronomists’ – so called because they are also believed to have been responsibly for compiling the book of Deuteronomy, a rewrite of the Jewish law. From their place of exile, the deuteronomists look back over the history of Israel to that point, and try to work out how they got into the mess they are experiencing in Babylon.

The two Books of Samuel and two Books of Kings (the divisions between each being completely artificial and more properly seen as one huge mammoth epic tale) are nothing like objective history, but rather a breast-beating confession of a whole nation’s short-comings. People like Elijah stand out against the crowd, simply because they did just that – they stood out from the crowd, and they stood up for God. And it’s in that context that we hear Elijah complain that he’s the only prophet left.

You may remember a couple of weeks back as we celebrated the Feast of Christ the King, the Old Testament reading reminded us that the Israelites demanded a king so that they might be like the other nations – and one of the warnings God gave his people was that kings were not only expensive to keep, but they also had a remarkable tendency for corruption, both material and spiritual. Years on, under the rule of King Ahab and his idolatrous wife Jezebel, the rot has really set in, and Elijah confronts it head on. [Having seen the Lord of the Rings trilogy its hard not to imagine Elijah played by Sir Ian McKellern with all the wild and wistful presence of Gandalf the White!]

Embroiled in religious and cultural collusion, worshipping YHWH on the one hand and playing safe by trying to keep Canaanite fertility gods happy as well, Elijah sees his moment, confronts Ahab and says “C’mon, outside – let’s settle this once and for all!” The stakes, at Elijah’s bidding, are high: all or nothing. Whoever wins, wins the people’s allegiance. And so the contest begins – two identical bulls on identical altars, waiting for the fire of heaven to fall. When the prophets of Baal have clearly failed, and Elijah has mocked them mercilessly (suggesting in the original Hebrew, amongst other taunts, that maybe their mighty god has nipped round the back for a wee….) Elijah rolls up his sleeves and calls the people to gather around his altar. But so that his message is clear, and in a gesture as much to do with bravado as faith, he has them drench the altar and the offering three times with water, making the spiritually unlikely, the physically impossible. But the fire falls, and the hearts of God’s people are turned.

We need to remember that this pyrotechnic display was for the purpose of converting not the heathen, but those who were already God’s people. A people who had lost their identity as 'the People of God'. In response they fall down and worship, and that is where the reading this evening somewhat coyly ended. The verse that follows immediately describes [briefly but succinctly] how Elijah then had all the prophets of Baal slaughtered. It’s worth noting that it doesn’t appear anywhere in the text that God had asked him to do that bit…..He seems to have taken things into his own hands, and taken them just a little bit too far.

In a moment or so we’re going to listen to part of Mendelsohhn’s Oratorio Elijah, first performed in Birmingham in 1846 just a year before the composer’s death. I can’t read the story in 1 Kings 18 without hearing the music of the oratorio in the background, and so needed no encouragement to share it with you this evening! Following the extract, which is roughly parallel to tonight’s reading, there will be a pause for reflection and a closing prayer.

I think there are three things to consider from this great epic:

The event is recalled in Samuel and Kings, as part of a serious 'spiritual audit' of God’s people, a critical self appraisal of a failing, exiled community, viewed in the light of God’s dealing with his people through history – it is part of the risky business of honest self examination. Ignatius of Loyola commends the use of the examen each night before sleep – the simple spiritual exercise of evaluating the day that has passed and our hearts in the light of God. In fact it was this examen that transformed Ignatius the wild soldier into Ignatius the barefoot pilgrim on the road to Jerusalem.

So firstly, just as we as individuals benefit from evaluating the day that has passed, so as a community of faith we need to look critically at our own faith history, and with an open vulnerability allow the Spirit to point out the things which have been done amiss, and the collusion and compromise we have been part of – and to a degree will always be part of. It would do St Mary’s good if we were to honestly, and critically ask, with some regularity: How did we get where we are now? For good or ill? And what needs to change now in order for us to move forward at the leading of the Spirit?

Secondly, we need to beware of overcompensating – whether it be Elijah’s bravado in dousing the altar with water, or his bloodlust in slaughtering the prophets of Baal. A consuming religious zeal can often be as obstructive to the work of the Spirit as spiritual lethargy. The path of Christian discipleship is indeed narrow, as tightrope-like we need to maintain the balance given by the Spirit – not doing too little, not doing too much, but just the right amount! (rather like Baby Bear’s porridge!)

And thirdly, whenever God acts among us – whether dramatically or gently, the purpose is always the same – that our hearts will again be turned. Not the hearts of ‘them over there’, or those to whom we’d like to make a particular point. But us, God’s People. Our conversion, like Israel’s, is always a necessity, and always the goal of God’s action towards us and among us.

So are we prepared as individuals and as a community to ask the difficult questions of how we got to this point in our spiritual growth (even if that shows us to be in a bit of a mess!?), how can we maintain the balance of our discipleship, and are we willing again and again for our hearts to be turned – converted by our Lord and God?

Lord God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel,

examine us, we pray, in the light of your Spirit,

that our hearts may be turned to you

and your love and mercy seen among us.

As we prepare to receive the Christ child,

convert our wills and enflame our souls

that the world may believe. Amen.

WORLD AIDS DAY LITURGY

2010-12-01T14:29:00.001Z

These liturgical scraps were written for the World AIDS Week Evensong held at St Albans Abbey 1998-2002 and for use within the Diocese of St Albans

COLLECT

Stigmatized God,

in Christ you tasted the bitterness of rejection
and bore the fear and prejudice of others.
Give strength to those who carry

that same weight today,

living hope to those in despair,

and the fullness of your love to the exhausted;
and give your people grace

that we may see in others

the marks of your Son,
Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

CONFESSION

You reveal the depth of compassion,

as we shelter in our own preoccupation:

Lord, have mercy:

Lord, have mercy.

You challenge the narrowness of our vision,
as we underestimate the bounds of grace:

Christ, have mercy:

Christ, have mercy.

You offer life in all its fullness,

as we build the walls of self security:

Lord, have mercy:

Lord, have mercy.

LITANY

From fear and ignorance;
Good Lord, deliver us.

From indifference and detachment;
Good Lord, deliver us.

From prejudice and pity;

Good Lord, deliver us.

From selfish and speedy judgements;
Good Lord, deliver us.

From shallow and simple answers;
Good Lord, deliver us.

Silence

With hope and wisdom;

Living God, inspire us.

With compassion and involvement;
Living God, inspire us.

With openness and love;

Living God, inspire us.

With full and prayerful generosity;
Living God, inspire us.

With courage to face

the reality and complexity of life;

Living God, inspire us.

Living God, so inspire us

with the depth of your love,
that we bear it on our lips
and in our lives;

for your name's sake.
Amen.

A THANKSGIVING

Based on 2 Corinthians 4

Creator God, we give you thanks and praise.
In your mercy you have given us

the light of the knowledge of your glory
in the face of Jesus Christ.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels,
so that it may be made clear

that power belongs to you alone:

Creator God:

we give you thanks and praise!

We are affiicted in every way, but not crushed;
perplexed, but not driven to despair;
persecuted, but not forsaken;

struck down, but not destroyed:

Creator God:

we give you thanks and praise!

We know that as you raised the Lord Jesus
you will raise us also with him,

and bring us into your eternal presence.
So we do not lose heart

As we are renewed day by day:

Creator God:

we give you thanks and praise!

We look not at what can be seen;
for what can be seen is temporary,
but what cannot be seen is eternal.
So we join with your people

in heaven and on earth

in the unending song of praise:

Holy, holy, holy Lord;
God of power and might!

Heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Hosanna in the highest!

SHARING PAIN & PEACE

We are the body of Christ.

In the one Spirit

We were all baptised into one body.

We are one body.

We affirm all that is good in each other;

Our God-given dignity and integrity,

Our companionship, and common pilgrimage.

We are one body.

We acknowledge the wounds we share:

In our society and in ourselves,

Our brokenness, and our dis-ease;

We are one body.

We are one body.

We are the body of Christ.

The peace of the Lord be always with you.

And also with you

INTERCESSION

The following prayer uses the refrain of the Iona Community's hymn 'Christ's is the world in which we move' (A Touching Place) as its sung response.

We open ourselves to the creator
and sustainer of the universe;

the One who enfolds the world with love,
and cradles us each with tenderness.

Cantor:

To the lost Christ shows his face;

All:

to the unloved he gives his embrace;

to those who cry in pain or disgrace;

Christ makes with his friends

A touching place.

We pray for the people of the world:

for those whose liberty is curtailed or abused;
those who are beaten

by the greed or prejudice of others;

and those in whom God's image is despoiled.
(Especially we pray for .... )

Cantor:

To the lost Christ shows his face....

We pray for people in need:
for those made vulnerable
by illness, trouble or loss:

those who shoulder heavy burdens,

and those who are willing to share them.
(Especially we pray for .... )

Cantor:

To the lost Christ shows his face....

We pray for ourselves:

when we rationalise or trivialise
the needs of others;

when through fear, pride or preoccupation

we fail to reach out in love to those around us;
and in so doing, leave Christ unnoticed.

Cantor:

To the lost Christ shows his face....

We pray for the whole of creation:

wound in the web of God's eternal purpose;
filled with the fire of the Spirit

renewed and repaired in the life, death

and boundless love of Jesus Christ:

our Friend, Lover, Lord and King.

In his name, and for his sake we pray:

Our Father ....

BEWARE THE RED HERRING

2010-11-29T15:36:00.001Z

ADVENT SUNDAY 28th November 2010 - Evensong & Launch of 1000+ Appeal

Once upon a time there was once a monastery. It had flourished, but now there were fewer monks – in fact only the old Abbot and four others – and all of them growing old. In the woods alongside the monastery there was a little hut, where a wise Rabbi from a nearby town came to pray. So, as the Abbot agonised over the decline of his order, he decided to visit the Rabbi to seek his advice.

The Rabbi welcomed the Abbot into his tiny hut, but when he told him his problem the wise Rabbi could only shake his head and commiserate with him. “I know how it is” he said “ almost no-one comes to my synagogue anymore”. So the Abbot and the Rabbi wept together.

The time came for the Abbot to leave, and they embraced each other. “It’s been wonderful to meet after all these years” said the Abbot “but I have failed in my purpose in coming here. Is there nothing you can tell me, no piece of advice you can give to help my dying order?” “ No, I am sorry” replied the Rabbi. “I have no advice to give. The only thing I can tell you is that the Messiah is one of you.”

The Abbot returned a little puzzled, and repeated the wise Rabbi’s words to his fellow monks. In the days that followed, the old monks wondered if there could be any significance in his cryptic words. Could he possibly mean that the Messiah might be one of the monks in the monastery? If he did, then which one? Surely he meant Father Abbot. He has been our leader for more than a generation. But he might have meant Brother Thomas – certainly he is a holy man. But he couldn’t have meant Brother Elred! He gets so crochety at times….but even though he’s a pain in the neck he does seem to be right a lot of the time…so perhaps he did mean Elred? But not Brother Philip – he’s too passive, a real nobody. But then again, he’s always there when you need him. Perhaps Philip is the Messiah? He couldn’t mean me, could he?

As they contemplated the matter, the old monks began to treat each other with an extraordinary respect – on the offchance that one of them might be the messiah. Quickly the word spread to the nearby village. Soon people began to visit the monastery to picnic, to play and to pray. Then it happened. Some of the younger men talked more and more with the old monks until one asked if he might join the order. Then another, and another, and then another…..

At the Eucharist this morning we had a few changes in the liturgy as we begin the season of Advent. One small but significant change was that at the end of the readings, the customary ‘This is the word of the Lord’ was replaced with a different response. ‘Hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church’ the reader said. ‘Thanks be to God’ the congregation replied.

For those of you who do such things, the sermon is now on my blog and I urge you to go back to it, because I believe it is fundamental to where we are at. I wont rehearse it all again this evening, but the crux of it was the question “Who do you think has the most influence on the way this church changes, develop and grows? If you weren’t here this morning, then please think how you’d answer that question. I didn’t ask people to say what they’d answered, but I did say I was fairly sure that most would have said ‘The Rector’ or ‘The Clergy’ or the PCC. And I asked, in all honesty, how many would have said God, or Jesus, or the Holy Spirit? We need a bit of a shake up, as we are in danger of losing sight of our identity as the People of God.

As I said this morning:

We are not a small business that is called to focus on its trading record, its strategies and business plans so that they become an end in themselves. We are the People of God.

We are not called to be a well-intentioned and respectable community club that maintains a lovely old building for the benefit of others. We are the People of God.

We are not a kind of spiritual Sainsburys, where individuals come week by week, one by one, to pick the things we need off the shelves, queue up then go home. We are the People of God.

And that means we are a People who need to listen to one another, stop listening to ourselves, and learn to actively listen to God, whose Spirit is leading and equipping us for all that lies ahead.

If this morning was about listening, then the second reading this evening from the Gospel of Matthew and the story I began with are about Looking.

“Then if anyone says to you ‘Look! Here is the Messiah!’ or ‘There he is!’ – do not believe it. Or false Messiahs and false prophets will appear and produce great signs and omens, to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.” (Matt 24.23,24)

Jesus urges his disciples to be watchful and not led astray. They need to be right-sighted and clear-sighted so they are not duped into taking their eyes off him and being sidetracked.

This evening we have launched our 1000+ Appeal. Our target of £250,000 together with the money we hope to make on the sale of the hall site will go towards finishing the reordering of this building and providing additional meeting space to the south. That is a huge task, and will demand a lot of hard work, and sacrificial giving of time and money. So thank you for being here this evening, thank you to those who have organised the launch, and those who have already donated. (in the week Dick and I met with a reporter from the Barnet Times to give some publicity to the Appeal, and when I got back to the Rectory there was a letter from Western Australia with a cheque for £1,000!)

But even more now we must be right-sighted, clear-sighted. We could get to point in however many years time (and I do hope you realise that this isn’t something that’s going to happen within a few months!) We could get to the point where we have a beautifully reordered and redecorated church, and a wonderful extension that is everything we hoped for……..we could do all that, and STILL have got it hopelessly wrong. As a church we have been thinking and talking and praying for over 25 YEARS to get us to this point. And we are moving forward because we believe it is the right thing to do – our response to God’s mission and ministry which has been entrusted to us. But right though that may be, it could still become the biggest red herring imaginable.

We need to listen. We need to look. Not for money. Not for good ideas and willing volunteers. We need them all of course – but first and foremost, and consistently and hopefully, we need to listen to God and look for God’s work among us. We can do it all. But if we do not regain a sense of what it means to be the people of God in this place, then we will be no further forward at all.

Think back to the story of the Rabbi and the Abbot. To save the monastery the Abbot needed more brothers. The Rabbi could have suggested to him a cunning plan, a great strategy for recruitment and with a 5 year business plan. But he was so much wiser than that. He helped them to grow closer together, to love and respect one another and listen – and in eager anticipation, to look for Christ moving among them day by day. We have a lot of hard work ahead that will be about money, bricks and mortar. And at the same time, at least as much hard work, if not more, will need to go into renewing our sense of being the People of God and expecting the Holy Spirit to be shaking us up and moving us on.

Listen to what the Spirit is saying to the Church.

Look for Jesus among us, and with us.

And pray that we may be renewed and revived as the People of God. Amen.

SMALL SEEDS, AND THE LANDSCAPE OF THE KINGDOM

2010-11-28T13:37:00.006Z

ADVENT SUNDAY, 28th November 2010

WHERE do I begin?! After three months sabbatical there is SO much I could tell you, and so many things that are flying around my head, there is a danger that this sermon lasts a little bit longer than you might want it to! In fact I know already it’s longer than my usual offering, but I hope bearable! Since I was last in this pulpit I have spent more time in the air than I have in the past ten years – flying to Toronto, then on to New York, back to Toronto, to Florence, back to Gatwick and then to Belfast and finally home. In fact I feel I ought to inform you that in the event of an emergency the exits are situated here, here and here. And all you need do to bring the liturgy to a complete stand still this morning is shout ‘Brace! Brace!’.

Please forgive me if, a little too often in the weeks and months ahead, I say “Well, when I was in Canada….” If however you do want to hear a bit more of what I did and saw, and my reflections on it, then there is a ‘for one night only’ performance on Weds 12^th January when I speak to the Wesley Guild at Brookside. That will also be the chance to see a small selection of the photographs I took – just under a 1,000 of which were posted on Facebook while I was away and in total number over 3,000. Don’t say you weren’t warned!

The bulk of my time was spent at the Church of the Redeemer in Toronto – and the impact of that experience of what it is like to be Anglican in another part of the world has an immediate effect this morning. You have in your hands a new liturgy book for Advent which has a number of significant changes. I won’t take you through them all but I will highlight one or two in a few moments. But first, I’d like you to answer a question. Who is it, in your understanding of life here at St Mary’s, who is it that determines the way we as a church change, develop and grow? I’m not going to ask you to put your hand up or talk to your neighbour, but it is a real question which I would like you to find a real answer for in your head now. Who is it that has the most influence – overtly or covertly? You may settle on one name, or a number of names…..but Who is it?

As well as notching up a good deal of theological reflection and reading, you wont be surprised to hear that I really did make the most of the opera houses, theatres, coffee shops and art galleries in the places I visited. I saw and absorbed so much culture that in the end it became hard to digest! (See previous blogs: No Confessional Knees up for the Convinced and One Big Cultural Whirl) But I want to share with you one piece of contemporary art I’ve seen on my recent travels.

The good news is that you don’t have to go all the way to the Guggenheim in New York to see it because it’s in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern on the South Bank until May next year. It’s by the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, and is called Sunflower Seeds. Into the vast space of the Turbine Hall has been poured no less than 100 million hand-made porcelain seeds, each crafted and painted so they look like the real thing – and it’s very hard to believe they not. And it’s also hard to know how to see the sculpture/installation. Because if you look at the individual seeds you see their uniqueness, their intricacy and their smallness. But if you raise your eyes just a little you see a vast landscape of seeds where they all seem to merge into one grey mass.

Now it’s not too difficult to see how that translates as an image of the church – countless unique individuals all jumbled up together to form one unit. So while that image is in your head, let me take you back to that question I asked you to answer a few moments ago. Who is it that determines the way we as a church change, develop and grow? Who is it that has the most influence?

Is it down to certain individuals, or is it about us all?

Last Summer, many of you took part in the Challenge Groups and made your contribution to our ‘stock-take’ of where we are at as a church community, and more importantly where together we are heading. The groups talked about our financial position and the need to match the growth in ministry with a growth in giving to fund it. And we discussed the PCC’s proposals for the development of this building – finishing the reordering and extending the building to provide additional facilities and much needed extra space. Of course when we started that process we didn’t know that the situation of the Church Hall would deteriorate so rapidly, and push us into some hard decisions. Thankfully in the Challenge process, and with those we have spoken too since, the response to the plans was overwhelmingly positive, and thanks to the work of our Building Team has progressed considerably in these few months while I’ve been away. And so we find ourselves this evening launching our 1000+ Appeal to raise the cash to get us going.

But the most important thing about those Challenge Groups was the simple, basic realities. People talked with each other. They listened to people they perhaps didn’t know very well. They met new people, learned their names and heard a little bit of where they were coming from – their story. Small but unique seeds that make up a vast landscape.

Advent is a time for shaking things up - and in that sense the best time for The Rector’s Return! (although I’m aware that sounds like a very poor film sequel….) In the words of the prophet Isaiah “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain” – words which John the Baptist used to define his ministry in preparing the way for Jesus.

And Advent needs to be a time for us to be shaken up – shaken and stirred even – and maybe that needs to happen as St Mary’s this year more than ever. That’s partly the rationale in the changes within the liturgy, nudging us with the unfamiliar and maybe even the uncomfortable. The traditional words of the Lord’s Prayer have been replaced (just for the four Sundays of Advent) with an alternative version from the New Zealand Anglican Prayer Book. At the end of the service there is no blessing; that’s partly to heighten our sense of waiting, of things ‘not being finished yet’ as we look forward to Christmas but also because there’s a simple logic that says “If you have encountered the risen Christ in the bread and wine of Communion, surely, isn’t that blessing enough?” What more do you need? But perhaps most importantly we will stand for the prayers of the people in just a moment (but it goes without saying that if you are not able to stand then do sit down as you might already do in the Eucharistic Prayer). Standing is actually the traditional Anglican posture for intercession, and it represents an attitude of attentiveness, of listening. The other small change I draw your attention to is in a similar vein and has already happened. The first two readings ended not with “This is the word of the Lord” but rather “Hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church”

We need to be shaken up. We need to be shaken up, because I believe we have lost something. Something which is vital to who we are – and that is our identity. Let me taken you back to that question: Who is it that determines the way we as a church change, develop and grow? Who is it that has the most influence? Some of you will have answered ‘The Rector’ – or given that things have gone on very well for the past three months without me you may have said ‘The Clergy’ or ‘The PCC’ or you may even have had the names of particular individuals in mind.

Who is it that has the most influence? I wonder, in all honesty, how many of us would answer ‘God’, or ‘Jesus’, or ‘the Holy Spirit’….. What I fear we have lost is our sense of identity as the people of God. Those individuals who God has called together in this place, and those people among whom the Holy Spirit is at work, and equipping to do the things we are called to do.

We are not a small business that is called to focus on its trading record, its strategies and business plans so that they become an end in themselves. We are the People of God.

We are not called to be a well-intentioned and respectable community club that maintains a lovely old building for the benefit of others. We are the People of God.

We are not a kind of spiritual Sainsburys, where we come week by week, one by one, to pick the things we need off the shelves, queue up then go home. We are the People of God.

Small and unique seeds – and together we make up the landscape of God’s kingdom.

As the People of God, we already have the gifts and resources to complete the tasks to which God calls us. How do I know that? Because that’s the story of the People of God, throughout the ages, time and time again. But it means that as well as listening to each other, we need to stop listening to ourselves and consciously listen to the story of the Scriptures and to God.

So starting today, this Advent - listen, that we may hear what the Spirit is saying to the Church. Amen.

ONE BIG CULTURAL WHIRL

2010-10-10T02:54:00.001+01:00

Outside the Metropolitan Opera, Lincoln Centre, New York: you can just see the Chagalls!

Well, the North American leg of my sabbatical adventure has certainly provided many cultural delights of a theatrical and musical variety, in addition to the long list of museums and art galleries which have left me reeling! George Bernard Shaw’s The Doctor’s Dilemma at the Shaw Festival Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic playing Mahler’s 6th Symphony at the Avery Fisher Hall, and last Wednesday the Canadian Opera Company’s new production of Verdi’s Aida at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto.

Founded in 1962, The Shaw Festival presents an annual summer/fall season in four purpose built venues with around 800 performances to something in the region of 300,000 people – so of course I had to be one of them! Having spent the morning at Niagara Falls (for pictures see here) Chris and I headed through the mist to in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. Each year the Niagara Rep Company offers a few Shavian delights, along with works by other playwrights of the same era, so it was a tough choice between Shaw and Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard or Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. But being The Shaw Festival, of course it had to be GBS; added to which, The Doctor’s Dilemma was one of the plays I referenced in my degree thesis on the relationship between the Church and the Theatre but as yet had never seen performed.

The Doctor's Dilemma

The set design was bold and abstract: huge x-ray images of limbs and rib-cage incorporating artistic representations of bacteria. It may sound bizarre, but The Toronto Star described it as ‘must-see stunning’. I didn’t expect the piece to be performed in crisp English accents but I guess that part of the ethos of the festival is to present Shaw as Shaw would have written. Evenso, ‘Englishness’ eluded the lips of at least one of the company after about five minutes, and I’d have been happy to hear the piece less purely performed while being more comfortable on the ear. Shaw examines the ethics of the medical profession (and is in fact asking ‘what ethics?’) and makes the contrast with the nature and value of art. The principal character, Colenso Ridgeon, is an eminent doctor who has just received his knighthood as reward for discovering a lifesaving cure. His professional integrity is immediately compromised as a beautiful young woman implores him to save her dying husband. He has medical resources to save just one more person: his dilemma is whether to save the frivolous and shallow artist or an impoverished colleague who faithfully serves the poor of his community – and how much his infatuation with the artist’s wife will ultimately cloud his decision. I thought the piece was well played, but overall it was a visual impression I was left with. The final exhibition scene where the (by then dead) artist’s work is displayed was brilliantly presented as a collection of giant caricatures of the same attendant doctors whose naive folly and quackery has been exposed.

Tales of Hoffmann

Hoffmann at the New York Met was also visually stunning. Having not seen the opera before (and not had enough time to chew on the synopsis sufficiently before the curtain went up) I found the staging slightly confused the relationship between Hoffmann’s muse and his rival Nemesis, almost implying that they worked together. But hey, it was the Met, so I was quite happy to be suitably over-awed with the spectacle, the acoustic, the ambience and the free ticket (and of course the back-stage tour the following evening – thanks David and Russell!) Equally impressive was the architecture of the Opera House. If the ‘Met Titles’ weren’t exciting enough, displaying the libretto on the back of the seat in front in a choice of English, Spanish, German (or OFF for the purists), the huge Chagall canvases and sputnik chandeliers in the foyer and the sweeping open staircases are breath-taking in themselves. This is an Opera House designed to do what opera houses were originally for: first to present opera, and (only just) second to enable members of the audience to be seen at the Opera.

The Lincoln Centre for the Performing Arts, of which the Opera House is the central feature, also includes The David H Koch Theatre (home to the New York Ballet & New York City Opera) and the Avery Fisher Concert Hall, where we heard the New York Philharmonic play Mahler’s 6th. To my disappointment earlier in the day, my iPod could offer me the 2nd, 3rd, 5th and 8th but not 6th – so it was again unchartered territory. The programme notes suggested that as a work it left the audience totally ‘without hope’, ending as it does with a disputed number of hammer blows, representing Fate. It’s believed that Mahler removed the third and final hammer-blow because he couldn’t bear the utter-finality it suggested (“Wouldn’t you simply die without Mahler?”) but this performance under Alan Gilbert gave us all three with a resounding thump. The first sent the snoozing man on my left into shock, and he’d jumped about three feet out of his seat! It was only on the third blow that I caught sight of the humongous hammer as it was raised above the orchestra and brought down onto what I assume was a hollow wooden box. Needless to say it’s now on my CD ‘to buy’ list. The iPod shall wane no more.

Aida

And so to the Canadian Opera Company’s new production of Aida, which truth be told is the inspiration and spur for this post in the first place. Again, the architecture of the Four Seasons Centre in itself is fantastic (I’ve not mentioned the various museums in particular, but as a building the Art Gallery of Ontario also got me very excited!), but of all the above, this production was the most moving, most impressive, and simply the best.

Aida was the first opera I ever saw, back in the early 1980s at the Coliseum, and most recently the 2007 ENO production designed by Zandra Rhodes, which was good but visually like a bad migrane set to music. Because it was my ‘first love’ of the repertoire, it is the opera I know best and have listened to over and over again. But somehow Tim Albery’s contemporary staging made me sit up and listen in a way I haven’t done before. Reckoned to be the grandest of grand operas, and notoriously extravagant and expensive to stage, this production may have been lower on budget but is without doubt high on impact. The opening scene of ‘a hall in the King’s Palace’ is transformed into a cabinet war room, and Ramfis and his fellow priests are convincingly portrayed as political leaders - not quite Mafioso but a force to be reckoned with none the less. Aida the enslaved Ethiopian princess is a cleaning girl who watches her lover Radames reach the zenith of his military career (which awkwardly demands the slaughter of her kith and kin and the wholesale destruction of her homeland – but as her love is an operatic love, that rather unfortunate fact seems to make little difference!)

For me the brilliance of the production is the complete dramatic inversion of the Triumphal March towards the end of Act 2. Rather than being the moment when the production team can ‘flash the cash’ and treat the audience to their anticipated show of exotic costumery, beasts and treasures, the whole sequence – march and ballet – is depicted as Aida’s nightmare. We were warned in the (free) pre-performance lecture that we were not going to see a traditional Triumphal March, but I didn’t reckon on its alternative being so powerful and moving. Of course the score remains triumphal, but the action played out displays the cruel brutality of war, which in turn gives heartfelt depth to Aida’s anguish. Rather than a parade of elephants and swirling dancers the audience watches as Aida is first taunted by the rich women of Thebes and assaulted by the men. As the trumpets begin their familiar melody the rear stage opens to reveal a war-ravaged landscape and a dying Ethiopian soldier. Aida watches in horror as prisoners are marched in and shot, before the women return to pick over the bodies for trinkets and the like, spitting on them in contempt. More soldiers enter wearing deathmasks, and the women seduce them on the corpse-strewn battlefield before Aida’s counterparts, the cleaning women, sweep the corpses off the stage in readiness for the jubilant arrival of Radames - who by the way had wandered in during the 'nightmare' and shot the dying soldier in the head.

From the director’s point of view, it is an incredibly brave step to deprive an audience of a much loved scene, and it is nothing short of sheer brilliance to pull it off so meaningfully and transform a classic moment of operatic camp into a fierce polemic against the brutality of war. This Aida suddenly felt a lot more Eastern European rather than Egyptian, and in consequence became more real and believable.

So it’s been quite a cultural whirl, what with all that plus the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern Art in New York along with the Art Gallery of Ontario here in Toronto.

Next stop the Royal Ontario Museum on Monday, and then Gounod's Faust at the dear ol’Coli on Thursday evening.....if, that is, I can stay awake :)

FORGET FRANCIS AND THE FURRY ANIMALS

2010-10-03T20:25:00.002+01:00

Photo: Statue of St Francis in the Children's Sculpture Garden at the Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York

St Chad's, Dufferin Street, Toronto

Sunday 3rd October 2010: Feast of St Francis

It’s great to be here. I’ve been in Toronto since 9^th September and this last week I’ve spent in New York – so the last week has been a bit of a blur doing the relentless round of Museums and Art Galleries as well as some very fine eateries. So it’s good to be back in Toronto for a rest! But it’s particularly good to be able to share with you in worship this morning here at St Chad’s – and especially as we celebrate the feast of St Francis, which actually falls tomorrow.

For the past 10 years I’ve been a member of the Third Oder of the Society of St Francis. Most religious communities have a system of oblates or friends – but what makes the Franciscan third order distinctive is that whereas other orders (like the Benedictines) have included people outside the ‘walls’ of the community as a later development, Francis founded all three orders himself from the very beginning. He established the first order for men living in community as friars, the second for women in community (often known as the ‘Poor Clares’ after Francis’ close companion and co-founder), and the third order was founded when he started to get complaints from married folk, or those who were for other reasons unable to give up their responsibilities to join him as disciples.

I’m often asked why I became a Franciscan – and there isn’t really a short answer to that question! It’s for many reasons, but often people have assumed it’s because I’m a particular fan of animals! I hadn’t appreciated how big the service of animal blessing at this time of year is, both here in Canada and clearly as I observed this past week, in the States too. And of course that’s the thing St Francis is best known for – his particularly close relationship to all kinds of creatures (whether he was preaching to the birds or reprimanding a savage wolf that had a habit of eating villagers!) But there is a real danger that if we get too fixed on to the animals, furry and adorable they may be, we miss the point of St Francis’ deep and profound spirituality which goes to the heart of the Christian Gospel.

The readings for this morning have I guess been chosen to reflect aspects of St Francis’ character and spirituality. The first from Genesis points us to his delight in creation, which flowed from God’s delight in creation. That in itself is a vital corrective for our thinking about the world around us. We can have too keen a sense of the world’s brokenness and our own failings that we forget that God looked at what he made and thought it was good – and God still does, and so must we.

The second reading from Galatians points us to his devotion to the cross of Christ. I regularly go on retreat to a Franciscan monastery in the UK near Worcester. After Night Prayer the brothers all kneel in the chapel facing a huge sculpted crucifix as one of them says: Having in mind Saint Francis’ devotion to the passion of Christ, and looking upon the figure of the Crucified, with arms outstretched, let us pray to the Lord.

And there we kneel for a time in silence, looking at the crucified, and with our bodies making the shape of the cross – a gesture which literally embodies St Paul’s words in Galatians: I never boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.

Such was his identification with the passion of Jesus, at the end of his life Francis is believed to have received the wounds of Jesus in his own body – and indeed some would suggest from St Paul’s own words at the end of the passage we heard read, that the apostle had experienced the same thing as well: I carry the marks of Jesus branded on my body.

Our third reading, the gospel passage, beginning as it does with Jesus saying: ‘I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants...’ points us in the direction of simplicity and humility, expressed by Francis and those who followed his example, in a life of poverty. But think back a few moments to my warning that if we get stuck on ‘Francis and the furry animals’ and the focus on creation, we are in danger of missing the heart of his spirituality altogether – and if we pay close attention, the words of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel will keep us on the right track. Jesus goes on to say: All things have been handed over to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

Perceiving that close bond of Jesus with the Father, and our close bond through him, is the thing central to Franciscan spirituality.

As well as being asked why I’m a Franciscan, in the last few weeks in particular I’ve often been asked what my impressions of Toronto or New York have been and how it compares with London – and again there’s no short answer! But friendliness is certainly high on the list in a way that is very different from London. I remember the first time I went to visit my wife’s parents in the midlands back in the UK. We were walking along and the man coming towards us smiled broadly and said ‘Hello, how are you?’ as he walked past. ‘Who’s that?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know’ said Linda. ‘But he spoke to us....’ I replied, bemused and still not getting it. Because in London that doesn’t happen! Generally speaking, you don’t talk to people you don’t know.

More and more our humanity is being privatized – whether we are living in gated communities or just not speaking to the people who live around us. And it’s not just London. I’m sure you can think of examples where you live. We have become consumers of the world and each other, and if we are not careful, as a consequence our children are growing up in a world where we don’t know how to deal with difference. Where we make everyone else the ‘stranger’ to fear or at least treat with a suspicious indifference.

This time last month, before I left the UK, I took part in a two day conference of members of the Third Order in London led by an American Franciscan by the name of Richard Rohr. It was a great couple of days, and I’ve heard him speak on a few occasions. But he identified Francis as one of the few human beings in the history of the Church thus far who ‘got it’, who understood what it was all about. (and as a general rule the Church needs to be reminded constantly that much of the time we’ve not got it right rather than assuming we have!) Francis naturally transcended the barriers which we put up between ourselves and God, ourselves and the world, and ourselves and each other. To be honest, I think if Francis were here today we’d probably think he was mad. But because he was so focused on Christ and his close relationship with God he was able to perceive that all things are being drawn back to that close relationship with Jesus and the Father – and so there are no real barriers, because we along with the whole of creation have a shared relationship within Godself.

The way Francis expressed that was to name everything ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ – the sure antidote to slipping into a way of living that treats others as ‘things’ to be consumed or used, rather than cherished and respected. Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wolf, Sister Death. Nothing was an ‘it’, or an object. Everything in creation was in relationship. Since Francis, probably the best way that has been articulated since is in the words attributed to Chief Seattle in the 1850’s writing to the American government about their taking of land:

“This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. One thing we know: our God is also your God. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator. One thing we know - there is only one God. No man, be he Red man or White man, can be apart. We ARE all brothers after all."

The life of St Francis, which we celebrate today, reminds us of the deep truth that we are all connected – because of our common relationship to God our creator, and so when we withdraw from others in fear, or when we turn in on ourselves in selfishness; when we abuse and misuse the riches of God’s creation or simply take it for granted, we do damage not just to others but to ourselves, and we dishonour not just others but our Creator.

So what would it mean for you this week to discover how many ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ you have? You could even name them. And what difference will it make remembering that in Christ, you and I and all things are connected, loved and held. For ever. Amen.

TREE DEDICATION

2010-09-26T04:41:00.027+01:00

Saturday 25th September

This afternoon I had the privilege of conducting a tree dedication for the Sisterhood of St John the Divine. I'm here in North York for the weekend, leading the retreat for the Toronto Integrity group.

Specifically the dedication was for Sister Thelma-Anne (now aged 82), who has served the church for many years as a well-known musician and composer of sacred music, as well as a sought-after retreat leader. She has served on several committees of the Anglican Church in Canada, and was part of the task-force that produced Common Praise, the national Anglican hymn book.

She was born in 1928, and excelled in music from an early age. As a post grad student in 1950 she experienced 'the unmistakable, self-validating presence of the Divine', and was baptised and confirmed in the Anglican Church. It was several years before she recognised her calling to the religious life, and was admitted as a postulant to the Sisterhood of St John the Divine on 31st August 1957 in Toronto (founded in 1884).

Thelma-Anne was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease on 11th October 2001. In her book In Age Reborn, By Grace Sustained (Path Books, 2007) she describes her illness as "a stranger whom I had housed unwittingly for possibly a decade."

Its presence would make significant changes in my life, both in terms of having to adapt myself to limitations, and in the potential it offered for the healing of dysfunctional habits and attitudes that, unknown to me, had worked against my happiness and peace of mind and prevented me from giving myself generously to others.

Best of all, the "stranger" would bring me to a greater awareness of God's love, as I struggled not only with the heritage of my past, but also with the turmoil of the present and, given the progression of my illness, the uncertainty of the future.

When she made her life profession at the community's former house in Willowdale in May 1964, Thelma-Anne's family planted a horse-chestnut tree in the grounds. It became so well established that when the community moved to a newly built convent and retreat centre in 2005 there was no way it was going to move as well (see picture below!). As a sign of gratitude for Sr Thelma-Anne's ministry and support over the years, members of Integrity planted another horse-chestnut as a tribute to her. It was a double-privilege that she was well enough to join us - despite the wind and rain!

We gather in the presence of God,
In the midst of creation and one another,
And in the timeless company of saints and angels.

The Lord be with you
And also with you.

Psalm 1

Happy are they who have not walked
in the counsel of the wicked,
nor lingered in the way of sinners,
nor sat in the seats of the scornful!
Their delight is in the law of the Lord,
and they meditate on his law day and night.
They are like trees planted by streams of water,
bearing fruit in due season,
with leaves that do not wither;
everything they do shall prosper.
It is not so with the wicked;
they are like chaff which the wind blows away.
Therefore the wicked shall not
stand upright when judgement comes,
nor the sinner in the council of the righteous.
For the Lord knows the way of the righteous,
but the way of the wicked is doomed.

Silence

COLLECT

Giver of life,

save us from the desert of faithlessness

and nourishus with the living water of your word,

that we may bring forth fruit that will last,

in the name of Jesus Christ our Saviour.

Amen

READING: Ephesians 3.16-21

I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge — that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.

Listen for the word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God

Silence

PRAYERS

In the power of the creative and wistful Spirit

We make our petitions and thanksgivings

Out loud, or in the silence of our hearts:

Prayers may follow

All gather around the tree

DEDICATION

Divine Creator,

you have blessed this tree with life:

nourished by sun, by rain

and by the richness of the soil.

In your goodness,

may it be a living sign

of your faithfulness in the past,

your enduring presence in years to come,

a life nurtured in community

and rooted in the depths

of your unfathomable love.

+ in the name of God,

Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer.

Amen

May we each be held

in the palm of God’s hand

now and always.

Thanks be to God.

NO CONFESSIONAL KNEES-UP FOR THE CONVINCED

2010-09-25T06:12:00.001+01:00

I'm not sure if Starbucks in the UK are using the same strap-lines and branding as they are here in North America - if they are I hadn't noticed until a fortnight ago. But every door of every branch (to be found on every block) is blazoned with the legend Take Comfort in Rituals. Now if there was ever a slogan that the Church ought to have grabbed first, this surely is it. And I don't mean that negatively at all. Rituals are fundamental to out basic human behaviours - and those who fancy they can enable worship devoid of any ritual are quite frankly kidding themselves as well as being rather dull and unobservant.

In the same way that walking through the glass door into your local Starbucks and nestling down with a coffee and a magazine is a way of creating some safe space for yourself (or so the marketeers would have you think), so the Church ought to function in a similar way with its public worship - as I think at one time the CofE did. But we've seen the safe-space, offered by a broad Church with a responsibility to the nation, be eroded by a demand for truth. I don't mean truth in a spiritual sense, but truth in a literal sense - and the two are not necessarily the same at all. The more faith becomes focused on literal truth, the more the Church's public worship begins to demand something from those who are present, whether they are dyed-in-the-wool-regulars or drifters-in. As more demands are made (both practical and creedal) so the public worship of the Church becomes less safe. Less comfortable.

This isn't about dumbing down, but rather it's about getting real. Neither is it about trying to woo people by being cuddly, but simply about being accessible. Not a single moment too soon, we are discovering that every fibre of our being as the people of God ought to be missional. It was never really meant to be any other way, but somehow the Church quickly got the idea that the best (or should that be 'most convenient') way to operate was to set up shop in a back street and hope for dear life that people would stumble across its many blessings when the time was right (a kind of Diagon Alley approach to mission and ministry....). Consequently public worship should be right there at the forefront of our missional activity. It must not be a holy mystery for the initiated, or a confessional knees-up for the convinced. That may well have been the practice of the early Church but it is not a model that will serve us well now. In out current cultural climate, we need to provide a safe space in which people can be welcomed and allowed to encounter the risen Christ.

For those who saw that superlative episode of Rev., I'm not suggesting that we should wheel in white sofas and a smoothie bar. The Church already has what it needs to create and maintain that safe space, and as Starbucks remind us, that is ritual. It doesn't need to be flamboyant (in fact it shouldn't be) and neither should it be fiddly and complicated. But it should be clear and allowed to speak for itself, rather than be numbingly didactic. At the end of the previous paragraph I initially typed 'a safe space in which people can be welcomed, engaged and encouraged to meet the risen Christ' but deleted it because even that sounds too busy, too deliberate, too 'sales-pitch'.

Printed on the paper bag in which I was handed my ginger & molasses cookie was the following epithet:

Flavours my senses,

sweetens my disposition,

stirs my imagination,

nourishes my dreams.

To make that claim for a cup of (generally overpriced) coffee is nothing short of absurd. But for the worship offered by God's people.....?

OTHER = SOMETHING ELSE

2010-09-17T22:32:00.001+01:00

Just a snippet of the sabbatical reading (and coffee-drinking) thus far....

TRINITY AS GROWTH & MATURITY WITHIN GOD

"As we make [this] journey towards maturity, with all the twists and potholes in the road which that entails, it may be useful to consider that this is a journey that God has also made. The idea that God - the same yesterday, today and forever - has changed over history is a contentious one......It is in this light that we now see why the incarnation was so important: it was actually necessary for God to give birth to a son for God to complete Godself. This violent, moody, changeable God needed to grow up and become a Father before he could be counted as mature. As Zizek has argued, 'Christ had to emerge to reveal God not only to humanity, but to God himself.'

God could not be all that God could be without becoming a parent. The doctrine of the Trinity is not simply about community with God; it is about maturity and growth within God too. The boyish, adolescent, tempestuous God of the Old Testament, of plagues and floods and animal blood, grows into adulthood and parenthood and, in one of those strange twists that Trinitarian thinking forces, allows the knives and anger of his youth to be turned on himself - not to affirm them, but to critique them and end them." Brewin, 106

JESUS AS DIVINE STRANGER

"The fact of Jesus' status as fully human and fully divine has traditionally been interpreted as a bridge between divinity and humanity: Jesus' divine side holds onto God, and human side holds on to us. But the idea of Jesus as the divine stranger suggests that the empathetic relationship may be equally powerful the other way round. The important thing for God was that Jesus was fully human - and thus gave God a strange mirror in which God could be revealed to Godself; the important thing for us was that Jesus was fully divine - for in this stranger, trying to adapt to the ways of our world, we see a truer picture of what we have become." Brewin, 107

There's something of this sense of Godward benefit to the incarnation in

DELIGHT, DESIRE & MAKING SPACE FOR THE OTHER

CHURCH AS STRANGE PLACE

"Our journey into Christianity, into the way of Christ, has to be a journey into the way of identifying with the stranger. It is not a journey into refuge from the world, a journey into comfort. It is a tightrope walk between separation and binding.

Too often our churches are created as places of protection, exoskeletal shells where we can take refuge from the traumas of the world and sing nice songs with like-minded, gentle people. This is not the church of Christ. Between ourselves and 'others', church should be a strange third place, a place where the other and the self can meet and exchange gifts. It is the role of the priest, of the leader, to facilitate, not dictate, these transformative spaces. It is our duty to learn to inhabit them for the simple reason that we are trying to follow a God who, through the incarnation, did the very same thing." Brewin, 110

Other: Loving Self, God and Neighbour in a World of Fractures Kester Brewin, Hodder & Stoughton 2010

AS WITH THE SON, SO WITH THE MOTHER

2010-08-16T00:25:00.000+01:00

Feast of the Assumption, 15th August 2010: All Saints' Margaret St

Solemn Evensong & Benediction

Song of Songs 2.4

“He brought me to the banqueting house, and his intention towards me was love”

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

It is I think a fact of ministry that one day is never like the next, and each day is often a bizarre cocktail of very different happenings. Last Wednesday was a case in point. After an hour and a half at my desk, I celebrated the Eucharist at 10 o’clock in honour of St Clare of Assisi. I then had an unscheduled visit from a young man troubled by the voices of demons in his head, and troubled further by the well meant advice of other Christians. I finally got to my next appointment – visiting a member of the congregation for good coffee and exceptionally good homemade biscuits - and from that conversation came some unexpected inspiration. After lunch (for reasons too complex to explain here and now) I spent 3 hours bombing up and down the River Thames on a reinforced inflatable rescue boat – bouncing above the wash of the Clippers and tourist boats at great speed, and on more than one occasion almost being thrown overboard. Then around 6pm I was dropped off at Hammersmith Bridge, peeled off my lifejacket and dry suit, and made my way to the Hammersmith Apollo to hear the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist Master Thich Nhat Hanh speak about ‘Global Ethics for Our Future’.

Not a typical day by any means (even for East Barnet!). But in all the activity and variety of last Wednesday, one thing stands out in my memory. After the exuberance of the afternoon on the river, I sat with around three and a half thousand others listening to the quiet, at times barely audible voice of an 84 year old man sitting cross-legged on the podium. And of all the things he said I remember this: “A piece of bread is an ambassador of the cosmos”.

He was explaining the Buddhist understanding of mindfulness, the discipline of living in the present moment, which of course has many connections with the Christian contemplative tradition. He was articulating the sense that in a piece of bread there is the essence of the wheat from which the flour is made, but also the sun; the soil but also the rain; the toil of the one who sowed the seed and the effort of the one who harvests. And all of them are drawn together, embodied, in the end result.

“A piece of bread is an ambassador of the cosmos” Try to find a ‘post-it note’ in your brain and just make a note of that there for the time being.

Today we celebrate the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Revised Common Lectionary is too coy to give the feast its full title but none the less, from as early on as the third and fourth centuries the Christian church has taught that the mother of our Lord did not suffer corruption, but at the end of her life – having held a central place in the apostolic community as this evening’s reading from The Acts of the Apostles reminds us – at the end of her life she was assumed bodily into heaven. Now clearly it isn’t a biblical event - and because of that some Christians find the Assumption problematic. But equally clearly, it is a biblical logic. The Old Testament teaches us that Enoch and Elijah were so close to God in their human lives that they were caught up in the divine glory: in 2 Kings chapter 2, Elijah gets whisked off in his chariot of fire, and in Genesis 5 Enoch walks so closely with God that, we are told, ‘ he was no more, God took him’.

Surely as mother of Jesus, God-bearer and co-worker with God the Father in the incarnation, Mary’s closeness to God is unparalleled and without rival? Writing in the 8^th century, St John of Damascus describes the Blessed Virgin as ‘the Earthly Heaven’. By giving birth to God incarnate she unites earth and heaven, making heaven earthly, and earth heavenly.

First and foremost the Assumption is a mystery to be celebrated in the worship of the Church rather than requiring us to work out the mechanics of what might have happened and how. The earliest tradition in the Eastern Church was that Mary died a natural death – one she embraced with joy as she was reunited with Christ – and that after three days she too was resurrected and assumed into heaven. Again in the words of St John of Damascus, ‘as with the Son, so with the Mother’. The early church taught that Mary’s life became a mirror, following the exact pattern of Christ’s. Bearing that in mind, if we look closely, Luke moves effortlessly from the end of his gospel where the apostles are gathered around the risen Jesus – to the beginning of Acts where the apostles are gathered with his mother Mary. For us to celebrate the Assumption is to celebrate the very dynamics of the incarnation – the intimate and loving relationship between the Blessed Mother and her Son, Jesus Christ.

Song of Songs 2.4 “He brought me to the banqueting house, and his intention towards me was love”

As Hebrew love poetry, The Song of Songs captivated the imagination of the Church, and provided the language and imagery to describe the relationship between us and God; a relationship with the potential to be as close and intense as that of the Lover and the Beloved, as that of the Mother and the Son. Above all commentators on The Song of Songs, it was Bernard of Clairvaux who grasped the importance of this sense of relationship. Central to his understanding of God was the sense that the one who is Love created us out of love to share Love itself. Mary’s life of loving obedience is crowned and completed with the Divine Love.

Scrabble around in your brain, if you would, for the post-it note you left there a few moments ago. The Zen wisdom that “A piece of bread is an ambassador of the cosmos”

Just as the whole of creation may be seen in a tiny part of it, so the entirety of God’s relationship with humanity - and the depth of humanity’s response to God – is drawn together, embodied, held in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She whose life became a mirror of Christ’s life, becomes the model for Christ’s Church. Obedience that is born of, sustained by and ultimately crowned with Love. Just as ‘a piece of bread is an ambassador of the cosmos’, so Mary is for us the ambassador of our relationship with God. To celebrate the Assumption is then not just to celebrate the intimacy of her relationship with God in Christ, but to celebrate ours as well, as together we ‘look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come’.

“He brought me to the banqueting house, and his intention towards me was love”

In the Eucharist, and in the sacrament of the Altar at Benediction, we encounter the risen Christ in a piece of bread. So, in the company of Our Mother Mary, consider your relationship with God. And remember that primarily is it not about what you do or even how you live - but primarily it is about how God loves you. Intimately. In this present moment. Now.

In the sacramental intimacy of Benediction, consider the invitation, the promise and the potential depths of your relationship with Christ. Because this bread is no mere ambassador of the cosmos, but the one through whom the cosmos came to be. The one who sustains and enlivens and crowns all that you are, and all that you can and will be, with Love. Amen

DON'T BE AFRAID, LITTLE FLOCK

2010-08-08T16:18:00.000+01:00

Trinity 10: Luke 12.32-40

It is a universal truth and nugget of everyday wisdom that ‘You need to have the right tools for the job’. There is no point trying to bang a nail in the wall with the handle of a screwdriver (I know, because I’ve tried!). And there is little use in attempting to drive in a screw with the end of a knife (yes, I’ve tried that as well!) But there is another piece of wisdom that accompanies this truth, and that is that if you have the right tools for the job, then you need to keep them where you can find them. I have a very good tool box, which is in the shed, but fairly empty. However as I sit typing a sermon and look to my left, on the bookshelf above the printer I can see a hammer, two screwdrivers (one flat head, one Philips), and there is another hammer and a pile of ¾ inch screws on the shelf behind me – and I know that at any given time there will be at least 5 tape measurers secreted in various places in the study. But when I need them, I can guarantee they will be invisible to the human eye!

You need to have the right tools for the job, and those tools need to be in the place where they can be most effectively used. Admittedly there is no mention of toolboxes in this morning’s gospel – but there is a similar theme of being suitably equipped and well prepared for the job in hand.

We take the gospels so much for granted that we miss the beauty and intricacy of the text and the many different layers of understanding. Luke tells how Jesus urges his ‘little flock’ to be ready: to sell their possessions, give alms, be dressed for action with lamps lit, waiting an ready to welcome the master when he returns from the banquet. There is an urgency in his tone – and that urgency has a hidden depth of theological meaning in itself. We need to dig to find it, but Luke’s original readers would probably have spotted it straight away. “Be dressed ready for action and have your lamps lit”….

Journeys are very important in both Luke’s gospel and in his sequel, The Acts of the Apostles. Don’t get me started on the Road to Emmaus (!) but there is much also to be said about the Road to Damascus when Saul is convertyed, and the Road to Gaza where Philip baptises the Ethiopian eunuch. But in his gospel in particular, as Jesus travels on the Road to Jerusalem, Luke drops hints and back-references to the beginning of the journey that runs through the Old Testament – the Exodus. In Exodus 12, Moses gives instructions on how the people of Israel ought to eat the Passover meal in readiness, saying: “This is how you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. And you shall eat it hurriedly.” (12.11) The same urgency. The same need to be ready, to waste no time. To have the right tools in the right place at the right time – because it is always time to move on as God’s people, and we mustn’t get caught out by not being ready when Christ calls.

As always, we can (and should) apply the message of Jesus not only to ourselves as individuals, but also to our collective self, as his body the Church. So what are the things that, if we knew Jesus would be with us tomorrow, we would be hurriedly trying to sort out, patch up, put right, or sweep under the carpet before he got here? How would our focus be sharpened? What would we need to do quickly to make us ‘fit for purpose’ as his disciples. The answer to those sticky questions will be different for each of us – but all of us, without doubt and without exception, would have a lot of cramming to do in order to be ready! And as the church we must always be ready to respond to Christ’s presence, to Christ’s call. Always ready to move on. Its far too easy to caricature, but the Master is likely to return and find the Church of England not ‘ready with candles lit’, but debating whether the candles ought to be 100% beeswax or not, and what kind of candleholder would be most appropriate given the breadth of options available and current health and safety legislation!

In the past few months there has been much thinking and effort and deliberation on the part of your Parochical Church Council to determine what we ought to be doing in order to be ‘fit for purpose’ as the part of the church in East Barnet. You will probably have heard at least a bit of the situation. After years of thinking, planning and preparation we have grasped the nettle and decided to close the Church Hall – prompted by the death of the boiler and the prohibitive cost of bringing the building in line with current disability access legislation and fire regulations. At some point in the New Year the site will be put on the market and sold for housing suitable to this locality. It is envisaged that the proceeds of that sale will go a long way to fund the further development of this site – making this building ‘fit for purpose’ and ready for action for the next generation.

Those of you who have been part of our Challenge Groups in recent months will have already heard what that involves – picking up where the millennium project left off prematurely; removing the pews, levelling the floors and installing underfloor heating, relocating the font and corona to the back of the south aisle and redecorating the interior. And in addition, extending the building to the south: providing meeting rooms, larger vestries, a kitchen and office with proper toilets and disabled facilities with a new entrance.

Even with the sale of the Hall site that’s going to involve us in a fundraising appeal to the tune of £300,000 and it will pretty much dominate our church life for the next few years. So it is a little fortuitous that this morning’s gospel reminds us WHY we are embarking on such an ambitious and potentially controversial scheme. It is because Christ calls us to be ready and 'dressed for action with our lamps lit'. It is because Christ calls us to be fit for purpose as his church, and be ready for mission and ministry now and in the years ahead. And it is because, like all God’s people from the beginning of time, we are called to journey on, to move forward, to have the right tools for the job, and have them not scattered all over, but here in the right place where we need them, and where they can be best used.

It’s a daunting prospect. But as Jesus said to his disciples: ‘Do not be afraid, little flock’. ‘Be dressed for action, and have your lamps lit’ Amen.

TRAVELLING LIGHT, TRUSTING HEAVILY

2010-07-04T16:27:00.001+01:00

“See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals…..” (Luke 10.3-4)

Remembering that St Luke is also responsible for the Acts of the Apostles, its perhaps not too surprising to note that he seem to be rather keen on mission. This morning’s gospel reading from Luke 10 records how Jesus sent out 70 disciples (there’s a slight discrepancy in different manuscripts-some say 72, but its hardly of any significance!) In one sense they continue the theme which is the starting point for his gospel account. In chapter 1, Zechariah and Elizabeth are told they will have a child, John, who go before Jesus to prepare the way. He’s remembered as John the Baptiser but ought really to be John the Forerunner. And now, in the same was that God sends John, these 70 disciples are sent out by Jesus as forerunners. They are dispatched to those towns and villages in which Jesus intends to minister. Of the four gospels, only Luke records this episode, and we ought to immediately note that it gives perhaps a different picture of Jesus’ ministry than we might otherwise assume.

Firstly there is clearly a much larger community around Jesus that just the twelve disciples. Not just a benign crowd – like extras on a filmset – but 70 men and women (well why not?) who are sufficiently engaged and committed to Christ’s ministry to go on the road as his envoys and ambassadors. And secondly of course, this is quite deliberate. A strategic mobilising of disciples in outreach ministry, unprecedented in the gospels before Easter.

Now because of that, some New Testament scholars would suggest that Luke is actually recalling the early church rather than recounting the actual events of Jesus’ ministry. Whether that’s the case or not, Luke includes the Sending out of the Seventy disciples to demonstrate that the missionary zeal of Peter, Paul and the apostles in Acts was nothing new but had always been a crucial element of faith in Christ, of Christian discipleship. Mission is in the church’s DNA.

Mission is in the Church’s DNA. And part and parcel of that is a sense of risk. It demands faith and trust in Christ, but also the ability to step out in faith, into the unknown. To step out and see what happens, and go where-ever you are carried. Sending lambs into the midst of wolves is never a comfortable business – especially not for the lambs!

I’m already starting to worry about the final arrangements for my sabbatical in the autumn, which starts with 6 weeks in Canada. I’ve never been away for 6 weeks before – how big does my suitcase need to be? And more crucially, how on earth am I going to carry all the books I will want to read in that time…..? Looking again at the gospel, I wonder how many of us would be prepared to embark on a journey with such poor provisions? ‘Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals’. It’s a bout travelling light, yes. But more importantly it’s about trusting heavily.

How do we compare with Luke’s model of a mission-focused church that is willing to risk the unknown and the new, in order to prepare the way for Jesus today? What are the things we need to hold on to, and what are the things we have to let go of and risk losing in order to do what Jesus asks of us? What are those things for you as an individual disciple? And what are those things for you together as a congregation, and for us as a Deanery and Diocese?

Luke reminds us that discipleship and mission (and if we are to be faithful to Christ and our Christian tradition, then we can avoid neither) are costly, risky, and make us vulnerable. But Luke also reminds us very subtly of the context of that costly risk….

Chapter 10 begins with the words “After this, the Lord appointed seventy others and sent them on ahead of him in pairs to every town and place where he himself intended to go….” AFTER THIS….. after what, exactly?

We need to remember that the chapter and verse numbers are entirely artificial to the Bible, added much later as ‘navigational tools’ by scribes and copyists – so where the flow is broken for us, it would have been far more apparent to the earliest readers. The end of chapter 9, from verse 51 says “When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And he sent messengers ahead of him…..” Those two words, After this…., link the sending out of the 70 disciples to the momentous journey that Jesus begins on his way to the cross.

Our journey is Christ’s journey. Our mission is Christ’s mission. His great work, risk and vulnerability is the model for ours as a Church.

“See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves. Carry no purse, no bag, no sandals…..”

God give us the courage and grace to take the risk of Christ-like mission and ministry, travel light and trust heavily – in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

FRACTIOUS APOSTLES

2010-06-29T23:46:00.040+01:00

Tuesday 29th June: Feast of SS Peter & Paul

Deanery Eucharist at St Peter's, Arkley

As today we celebrate the Feast of St Peter and St Paul, our readings focus not just on their faith – Matthew’s account of Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Christ of course being one of the pivotal points in the whole gospel narrative – but focusing also on their lives as they come to an end.

They are both marked men. The leaders of the early Christian community were being picked off, and the communities they pastored were facing harsh persection. Herod had succeeded in taking out James, the brother of John and son of Zebedee in about 43 AD, and then swiftly pursues Peter and successfully imprisons him. The first reading from Acts recounts Peter’s narrow escape on this occasion thanks to angelic intervention – but within 20 years, James, the brother of Jesus and leader of the church in Jerusalem, Paul the apostle to the Gentiles, and Peter ‘the rock’ would all be dead. Martyrs for their faith in Christ. And of course, that’s how today we rightly honour them. Models of Christian discipleship, fearless faith and commitment to our Lord.....BUT...what is clear from Luke’s accounts in the Acts of the Apostles, is that had they been in the same room for any length of time they would have almost certainly been at each other’s throats and it would have kicked off, big-time.

One of my favourite poetic witticisms by Steve Turner from the 1980’s says simply this:

History repeats itself.

It has to.

No one listens.

History repeats itself.

It has to.

No-one listens...

Well if that’s true of history in general it is certainly the case with Church History – and across the board of traditions and denominations it usually the aspect of our faith of which we are less informed. So forgive me as I offer a brief resume and reminder of what we know about Peter and Paul from the Acts of the Apostles and the letter to the Galatians in particular. Paul had been a leading member of the Church in Antioch in Syria for a number of years and had pioneered the conversion of Gentiles, non-jews. And in the course of their discipleship, the question had arisen as to how much of the Jewish Law these non-Jewish converts needed to comply with.

Perhaps surprisingly, Paul’s line is relatively liberal - he exonerates them from keeping the ceremonial laws. Now that immediately got Paul into trouble with the wider Christian community. At the beginning of Galatians 2 he writes that ‘false brethren’ had been ‘secretly brought in’ who ‘slipped in to spy out our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage’. (Gal 2.1-4) Those ‘false brethren’ were in fact other Christians who had travelled 350 miles from Jerusalem, and from Paul’s tone it seems they hadn’t been exactly up-front as to their motivation. As soon as they had evidence of what they perceived to be unacceptable behaviour on the part of the non-jewish Christians, they lodged a complaint with the Apostles in Jerusalem. Paul was belligerent and refused to budge, and in the end took Barnabas and Titus with him to confront James and Peter in Jerusalem.

In the end the meeting went of peaceably enough, but Paul refers to James and Peter with a slight sneer as: ‘those who were supposed to be acknowledged leaders (what they actually were makes no difference to me; God shows no partiality)—those leaders contributed nothing to me’ and then in Galatians 2.11 he reminds his readers that “....when [Peter] came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned”. There’s no love lost there is there?

History repeats itself.

It has to.

No one listens.

It good to be gathered here as a Deanery this evening, as we help mark this Church’s Patronal Festival; and of course we could have focused on Peter alone. But I think there is more wisdom, more reality, and ultimately more hope to be celebrated when we remember Peter and Paul together. They weren’t enemies of course – not like Moriarty and Holmes, or Thatcher and Scargill. But clearly they weren’t like Cameron and Clegg either! Possibly Blair and Brown reflect the relationship Peter and Paul seem to have had!

Two men, two Apostles, two Christians whose genuine passion and zeal for the gospel pulled them in different directions, and in the earliest days of the Church they loved and gave their lives for, brought them into direct conflict.

History repeats itself.

It has to.

No one listens.

As a Deanery, we are called not only to note and respect our differences, but celebrate them as God’s gift to us, and part of our strength rather than a weakness or failing. [And as we approach the second half of 2010 we are very aware that we will be growing in size – welcoming the Elstree & Borehamwood Team into our deanery family.] When you think about it, we have got practically every kind of Anglican in our midst pretty much - and that's something to thank God for rather than see it as something we have to work around.

So like Peter and Paul, our churches, our congregations and our church leaders may well at times seem to be pulling in different directions – concerned with different and maybe even conflicting priorities. And of course it doesn’t take much for us to see that replicated not just in our Deanery but nationally and throughout the Anglican Communion. I suspect that in similar circumstances, Peter may well have told Paul to carry his mitre rather than wear it!

As we celebrate these fractious apostles, we thank God for their differences – and we thank God for ours. And although it may at times seem to be a truth which is as yet beyond us all, we give thanks that like them, we are co-workers and companions in the gospel – by the grace of God and to the glory of his name. Amen.

WHERE HEAVEN & EARTH ARE HELD IN LITTLE SPACE

2010-06-28T19:11:00.002+01:00

‘Deeply moved’. That seemed to be the consensus of opinion at the close of our second Ecumenical Pilgrimage to The Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, ‘England’s Nazareth’. Twelve of us – Anglicans and Methodists together - spent this last weekend in the depths of the Norfolk countryside, where the O2 signal is non-existent and where, to quote the anonymous carol of the 15^th century, heaven and earth are ‘held in little space’.

Some of us had been before, but for others it was their first visit. For some of us it was just a month since we had been there for the National Pilgrimage, but even so Walsingham’s impact as a place of prayer and ministry was not diminished. Familiarity does not always breed contempt. Sometimes it releases a potential and creates space in which God can get to work. For one of our group, that’s what ‘deeply moved’ translated into. ‘God was speaking to me’. Whatever the tradition or churchmanship, that has to be the acid test, surely. Of course, Walsingham and it’s unashamed anglo-catholic heritage, may not be everyone’s cup of tea (or even something a little stronger). But it’s dynamic as a catalyst in opening people’s ears to hear God speaking to them, and drawing individuals into the whirlpool of the Holy Spirit’s work cannot be underestimated or denied. I wonder what might happen if the ultra-protestant mob that harangue the procession at the National every year were to sit quietly in the Shrine Church for just 10 minutes and ask God to speak to them?

Once again we based ourselves in the Methodist Chapel. Built in 1791 in the precincts of the Franciscan Friary, it is tucked away on the edge of the village and is the oldest Methodist Chapel still in use in East Anglia. It is significant that the hospitality and grace of this tiny congregation (and Tommy & Sylvia in particular) is one of the things which we always come away impressed by – and without doubt is part and parcel of the ministry of God in that place as we have experienced it. You can read more of its history here.

We followed pretty much the same drill as our Pilgrimage last April – you can read a more detailed account of that here, with a link to photo albums. This time round there seemed to be more of a sense of being pilgrims together; not just from our two congregations, but in company with the other parishes represented over the weekend. We were listed on the board outside The Bull as ‘S.Barnet’ which may have caused some confusion and an unfruitful search in Butler’s Lives of the Saints! In a very real sense, the togetherness in pilgrimage which is symbolised by the processions around the Shrine Gardens is in fact actualised and made more real by the hospitality of The Bull, which as well as offering a steady flow of beer and the like, the landlord is also very generous with his gift of time! Co-beneficiaries of such hospitality were folk from St Luke, Grimethorpe, and our appreciation of the different-ness of our context and experience of mission and ministry was another grace received – as was the initial shock I had in being identified at the bar thanks to this blog!

Since last year there have been a few changes to the regular programme of worship and ministry on offer – all of them for the better and giving a greater focus of what Walsingham is about – a place of encounter with God in Christ. As Shrine Administrator, + Lindsay Urwin continues to mould the work of the Shrine, and lead its growing ministry team to make Walsingham a place that is about the here and now of God’s loving presence.

Perhaps surprisingly I came back with no new statues or vestments this time (but then again I am going back in a few weeks so the opportunity is not lost!). But we did come back with the determination to put a few things into action – most notable being the foundation of an Ecumenical Cell of Our Lady of Walsingham, and use our shared Thursday evening Eucharist as the focus for prayer and devotion. Next year we don’t anticipate organising a ‘come and experience Walsingham’ weekend but instead have booked it as the venue for our Parish Retreat in Lent which hopefully will draw others to the spiritual riches and opportunities of this holy place! Watch this space!

NOT THEN, BUT NOW

2010-06-22T00:13:00.003+01:00

Albantide: Sunday 20th June 2010

Today we celebrate the life and death of Alban – Britain’s first martyr; he who, along with Edward the Confessor, would probably be a better bet at being our national patron saint, rather than St George. We celebrate him today for a number of reasons: his actual feast day is not till Tuesday (22^nd June), but yesterday there were thousands gathered in St Albans (both inside the Cathedral and outside in the Abbey orchard) to honour the Roman citizen after whom our cathedral city and diocese are named.

For those who don’t know the story, it’s a simple one. Alban was a Roman citizen. He’s often portrayed as a soldier but there’s actually nothing to suggest that he was – but he was certainly a roman, living in Verulamium (the remains of which are alongside the lake in St Albans). During a time of persecution, he gave shelter to a Christian priest, and when the soldiers came knocking at the door, Alban swapped clothes and was arrested in his place. In the short time the priest was with him, Alban had seen and heard enough to make his own choice to follow Christ – and so found himself before the Governor. He refused to deny his new-found faith in Christ, and so was executed on the hill-top where the Cathedral now stands.

So we celebrate Alban as the first recorded Christian martyr of Britain. But we celebrate him also because of our historic connection with the Abbey that grew up at the place of his martyrdom. As our opening hymn reminded us (in slightly shorter form than usual!) it was the monks of St Albans who founded this church over 900 years ago,. So too, we remember Alban because of a very specific link we have, through history, with our mother Church and Cathedral.

But there’s a third and more fundamental reason why we celebrate Alban today. And it’s quite simply about family. As many of you will know already, today happens to be my birthday. I begin my 45^th year with the slow realisation that I am, in fact, an adult! So we’re having a family lunch, and then we hope that as many of you as possible will join us for Evensong (for Albantide) and for drinks afterwards (which are for Albantide and birthday-tide!). Having been here in East Barnet longer than I’ve been in any other parish, it is the most natural thing in the world to mark my birthday with my family, and with my extended family as well. And Alban is also part of that family – as much as you and I are.

We say week by week (in the Apostle's Creed) that we believe in the Communion of Saints. But I wonder when you last stopped to think about what you mean by that – if in fact you’ve ever asked yourself that question. So have a think now….There’s something about the word ‘communion’ which other than being holy, is simply about being ‘in common’.

On Friday evening, I sat and watched the England/Algeria game on the big screen at the British Legion in the village. It has to be said that it wasn’t the biggest gathering of football fans - but the beer was cheap and that’s all that matters at the end of the day. But of course the 25 or 30 of us at the Legion were in good company with the thousands in the stadium in South Africa, and the millions watching the game on TV around the world. Last night Linda and I were at a dinner party with the Bishop of St Albans, the Dean of St Albans, the Archbishop of Loreto in Italy, and the Bishop of Guyana....and what did we talk about??? The football! But unusually I had something to say because I’d been there. Id watched the game – such as it was!

To believe in the Communion of the Saints, is to celebrate what we have in common with the saints through the ages: their faith in Jesus, their life experience as Christian disciples, their struggles, their joys. But it is something which is real and present NOW - just like we talk about the World Cup because it is happening NOW rather than just reminiscing about 1966! The Communion of the Saints is not about the past, not just the sense of ‘those who have gone before us’ - but those who are part of that ‘great cloud of witnesses’ as the writer to the Hebrews puts it. The Communion of the Saints is not about history, but it is about NOW. In Christ, Alban is as much a living part of the Church NOW as he was THEN. We live and worship and witness as a church in the company of the Blessed Virgin Mary and all the Saints – as much as we are in the company of the people sitting either side of us in the pew this morning.

To celebrate Alban – to celebrate the Communion of the Saints and Martyrs of every age - is to challenge the narrowness of our vision, and our small and self-centred understanding of what it means to be part of the Church, the body of Christ that spans across the world, yes, but also through time itself.

With Blessed Mary, with Alban and all the saints, we worship the true and living God. And may that same God open our eyes, and broaden our vision, and reveal the glory that surrounds our steps as we journey on. Amen.

WHAT CAN YOU SEE, CHARLIE BROWN?

2010-05-29T23:56:00.001+01:00

TRINITY SUNDAY, St Mary's Potters Bar

You may be surprised to know that there’s a connection between the Charlie Brown cartoons, and the mystical theology of St Bonaventure in the 13^th century! I’m thinking of one Charlie Brown cartoon in particular: Charlie Brown is lying on a hillside along with his friends Lucy and Linus (Lucy is the know it all loudmouth and Linus her quiet piano playing, comfort blanket hugging brother). The three friends lay there looking up at the sky watching the clouds pass by.

Charlie says: "If you use your imagination, you can see lots of things in the cloud formations…What do you think you see Linus?" Linus considers for a while and then says: "Well, those clouds up there look to me like the map of the British Honduras in the Caribbean….. That cloud up there looks a little like the profile of Thomas Eakins, the famous painter and sculptor….. And that group of clouds over there reminds me of the stoning of Stephen…..I can see the apostle Paul standing there to one side…..". "That’s very good", says Lucy. "What do you see in the clouds Charlie Brown?" "Well," says Charlie, "I was going to say I could see a ducky and a horsie, but I’ve changed my mind!"

The link with St Bonaventure (which you can probably already sense is a little tenuous!) is that he too looked and saw very clearly. When he looked up at the sly, or around at creation, or at the spiritual experience of human beings in their journey into God, he saw - not a duckie or a horsie (or anything more elaborate) – but he saw Threes. Trios. Trinities. Whatever he was trying to describe, it would be three-fold – a bit like the traditional preacher’s three point sermon. It is wasn’t just a convenient way of organising his information, or communicating his understanding. Bonaventure saw the world in threes, because in everything he saw the mark of God. God the Holy Trinity – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So if Bonaventure were lying on the hilltop with Lucy, Linus and Charlie Brown, he’d be pretty predictable in what he thought he could see!

Today is Trinity Sunday. Since the fourth century the church has placed a huge emphasis on the doctrine of the Trinity as the touchstone of orthodox Christian belief. Not surprisingly that was quickly reflected in the church’s liturgy – and came to a climax in the days following the feast of Pentecost. There’s a logic there, of course. We believe in the Trinity simply because that it how the Church has experienced God – the Creator who sent the Son and the Spirit: one God, experienced and known in three distinct ways. So to celebrate the Trinity having told the story of Holy Week, Easter and Pentecost is a way of putting all the pieces together.

For those of you who like liturgical detail, it really took off as a festival in its own right in the 12^th century. Thomas Becket was consecrated as Archbishop of Canterbury on 3^rd June 1162, the Sunday after Pentecost – and decreed that it should be kept as a celebration of the Trinity thereafter. Then in the 14^th century Pope John XXII fxed the celebration across Christendom. [So now you know….]

Of course, the biggest mistake one could make on Trinity Sunday (or in fact at any point in the Church year) is to try and explain the understanding of God as Three in One and One in Three. It is something that if we try to understand it in its entirety, we can only fail. We can explore, and contemplate the nature of God, but he will never be fully known – at least not in this life.

I caught a snippet of a programme on Radio 4 a while back (I think it was about Jean-Paul Sartre and his partner Simone de Beauvoir but I may be getting confused there!) but the point was made that in any relationship there ought to be part of the other person which remains unknown, which remains a mystery. Well if that it true for human beings, how much more true that is of God. If we know all there is to know - about husbands, wives, children, parents, friends - then there is no need to reach out, there is no longer any need to grow closer.

Back to Bonaventure - whose theological and spiritual outlook was based on the experience and spirituality of St Francis of Assisi. For Bonaventure, God is Trinity because God is love. And God is love, because God is trinity. To believe that God is revealed to us as Father Son and Spirit is to believe that God is about relationship. The very nature of God is relationship. An interdependence, a mutuality and equality in love. That’s what God ‘looks like’ when we are talking about the Trinity. And its because God IS relationship, that our relationships are so crucial. By being in right relationship with one another, with the environment, with God, within families, churches, religions and communities – by being in right relationship with one another, we reflect the nature and heart of God.

When you come forward for Communion this morning you’ll have a chance to look a bit more closely at the icon on/by the altar. It will be familiar to many of you, and is based on an original by Andrei Rublev. It’s called ‘The Hospitality of Abraham’, or the ‘Old Testament Trinity’. It represents God – Father, Son, and Spirit – sitting at table and inviting you to join them. An invitation to accept their hospitality, and to enter into their relationship of love. And as you come forward for Communion, or for a Blessing, that invitation is made to you once more. An invitation to intimacy.

In any relationship there ought to be part of the other person which remains unknown, which remains a mystery. You and I may more often feel more like Charlie Brown than St Bonaventure in terms of what we are able to perceive or understand about God – but in our relation with one another and with the world around us, may we be drawn into that intimate relationship that is at the heart of who God is. That intimate, loving relationship which holds together the whole of creation. Amen.

PATRONAL HYMN: AUGUSTINE OF CANTERBURY - 26th May

2010-05-20T14:06:00.003+01:00

Hymn for St Augustine of Canterbury, 26th May

Tune: Crüger Hail to the Lord's Anointed

Sing praise to Christ the Saviour

the Lord of heav’n and earth;

whose glory spans the ages,

and brings all life to birth.

In sending his apostles

he speaks the hopeful word,

that through his timeless offering

creation is restored.

In humble, quiet obedience

Augustine heard God’s call,

spurred by his Holy Father

his purpose to fulfil.

Though doubtful and uncertain,

beset by anxious fear,

sweet Wisdom’s inspiration

gave strength to persevere.

As bearer of the gospel

to England’s shores he came;

and ‘neath the spreading oak tree

preached boldly of the same

Lord Christ, who in compassion

redeemed a world of sin,

unlocking heaven’s kingdom

for all who trust in Him.

So moved by his oration

both excellent and true,

his new won royal patron

allowed their passage through;

into the royal city,

led by the holy cross

with joyful alleluias,

to seek and save the lost.

Now lift we then our voices

to sing Augustine’s praise,

that by his prayer and pattern

we may receive God’s grace;

and bearing the same gospel

apostles we may prove,

in every word and action

to celebrate Christ’s love.

QUEEN AND COUNTRY (National Portrait Gallery)

2010-05-15T01:05:00.005+01:00

I'd expected something bigger, to be honest. Something more elaborate perhaps. More 'significant'. But for all it's compact simplicity, Steve McQueen's Queen and Country is incredibly powerful. In 2003 McQueen was appointed by the Imperial War Museum as official war artist in Iraq. As a result of a six day visit when he witnessed first-hand the loyalty and dedication of the service forces, he returned with a bold proposal that the Royal Mail issue commemorative stamps featuring each of the servicemen and women killed in the conflict. Despite significant support from the public, the Royal Mail have yet to agree to this unique and poignant memorial.

I think my expectation of something bigger was influenced by Emily Prince's American Servicemen and Women Who Have Died in Iraq And Afghanistan (But Not Including the Wounded, nor the Iraqis nor the Afghans) which was arranged around the walls of Project Room of the Saatchi Gallery until earlier this month. Whereas her 5,213 drawings from photographs are arranged around the room, Queen and Country is contained within a wooden box with sliding panels. Each side of each panel represents a life lost. Anticipating the project being realised at some point in the future, McQueen presents the portrait of each soldier as a sheet of postage stamps, each stamp bearing the familiar silhouette of the monarch in whose name they fought and died.

It feels almost voyeuristic. The multiplication of each image gives the individual's portrait a greater intensity, and the viewer's physical action of drawing them out of the casing seems to heighten the sense of engagement and somehow makes a more personal connection.
But viewing the images is also random: people were picking different panels on either side of the box in no particular order or sequence, and for me that reflected the randomness of their deaths. The portrait above left is Private Craig Barber of the Royal Welsh. He died in Iraq on 6th August 2007 aged 20.

The installation contains 160 stamp-sheets commemorating 160 lives, each included with the permission and co-operation of their family. I came away not only reflecting on their experience and loss, but also curious as to why the Royal Mail is diffident about the project. Is it perhaps too personal? Too real? Or might it be thought by some to be too functional, too mundane? Whatever the reasoning and argument, Steve McQueen intends to go on updating the catalogue of young faces until the stamps are issued by the Royal Mail.

It is well worth a visit to the NPG. But in the meantime there is more information and a chance to add your name to the list of those who support McQueen's proposal at the ArtFund/Queen and Country website.

WAIT. LISTEN. LOVE.

2010-05-09T07:38:00.001+01:00

EASTER 6

“I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, with teach you everything….”

Of course, today’s newspapers are dominated by the ongoing talks between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Cameron and Clegg are due to meet later this morning, while the Prime Minister waits in No 10 no doubt tapping his fingers on the desk top waiting to pick up the pieces. Word is that David Cameron is prepared to give ground to the Lib Dems in key policy areas in order to clinch a deal sooner rather than later – including a rather more generous concession on electoral reform that has been offered thus far. But everything remains very fragile – not least since the leaking of a secret memo outlining the "hardline Eurosceptic stance” that will (allegedly) come into play once in government, and threatens to undermine the whole process.

For the past month or so we have been bombarded with promises from a whole range of political persuasions – the whole process crowned by three TV debates between the leaders of the three main parties. Those debates have been so dominant in the campaigns that a number of school children I’ve spoken with this week were convinced we were voting for a new Prime Minister, rather than a new government.

Its perhaps a little ironic that having spent weeks hearing and assessing the promises made to the electorate, we are now having to sit back and wait as they now make promises to one another in attempt to form a coalition. So many promises, and so much resting on whether or not, in time, those promises will be fulfilled or forgotten. Just as the nation has been caught up in a ‘season of promises’, so our worship and prayers at the moment are focused on promise. Specifically the promise Jesus made to the disciples, that once he had left them, the Father would send the Advocate, the Holy Spirit.

We don’t know how the disciples responded initially to that prospect. There will certainly have been confusion and maybe even a little scepticism and doubt – that would certainly be consistent with their response to Jesus on other occasions. And of course within a few verses, Jesus is telling them not to let their hearts be troubled, and not to be afraid. It was, for them, a time of significant uncertainty. It was a time when all they could do….was wait. As we approach the feasts of the Ascension and Pentecost, we wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit. Of course, we’re not waiting in the same way as the apostles did. Our worship here this morning, our Christian discipleship and witness as individuals and as a congregation, are a direct result of the outpouring of the Spirit at the first Pentecost some 2000 years ago. But we are still waiting on the fullness of Christ’s promise: ‘the Father will send [the Holy Spirit] in my name, [to] teach you everything….’ To lead us into all truth. Now we may or may not be right to take our politicians promises with a pinch of salt (after all its easy for any of us to say what we intend to do, only to discover too late that its not going to be possible after all!). But how do you respond to the promise of Christ to send the Spirit to lead us into all truth? And what on earth might that mean?

Potentially, we are at a milestone in our political history, with electoral reform becoming the bargaining tool of a hung parliament. And of course that ought to be something which as Christians we are deeply involved in and concerned for - praying for our members of parliament (and of course that means praying for the ones we didn’t vote for, as well as the ones we did!) But we are also at a milestone as a Church: the draft legislation has been published by Synod to enable women bishops within four years, and the Pope has cleared a path for anglo-catholic traditionalists to be re-grafted into the Roman Church.

We too are possibly in a place of scepticism and uncertainty, and maybe even doubt. And as we look towards Pentecost, today’s gospel challenges us and begs the question: Do you believe that God, through the Holy Spirit, is leading us into all truth? Of course, the very idea implies that there will be change and new developments. If the Spirit is leading us into all truth then we have to accept that our grasp of the truth (such as it is) today may well be incomplete, may well be limited and will most certainly be partial.

On Friday I went to the Jain Temple just outside of Potters Bar. The Jain community were welcoming the Archbishop of Canterbury, and we were invited to keep him company! I learned a lot more about Jainism than I’d known previously, but I was particularly struck by one of the principle teachings of this ancient eastern religion called ANEKANTAVADA, which translated means ‘the multiplicity of viewpoints’ In essence this philosophy is the humble understanding that no single perspective on an issue contains the whole truth, which engenders a non-dogmatic approach to faith and living.

Sitting behind the Archbishop, it wasn't too difficult to imagine the invisible weight of the world-wide Anglican Communion that sits on his shoulders, and I could easily imagine him thinking ‘Oh if only….!’ That’s not a digression, or just a shameless opportunity to name drop (although it is a pretty good one you have to admint), but because surely there is a similarity between ANEKANTAVADA and the belief in the promise of Jesus that the Spirit will lead us into all truth. Because unless we are prepared to stand up and say that the Holy Spirit’s work in us (or in our congregation or in our church or in our denomination) is complete, then we too must accept a multiplicity of viewpoints, even when that touches the things about which we care most passionately.

Such multiplicity of viewpoints is clearly going to be the hard-experience of our politicians in the weeks and months ahead. And it will most certainly continue to be the experience of the Church –

“I have said these things to you while I am still with you. But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, with teach you everything….”

By God’s grace, it is in the gaps created by our difference and disagreements that the Holy Spirit is able move and lead us….If only we will wait. If only we will listen. If only we will love.

Amen

VIMY RIDGE: A CLOSER LOOK

2010-05-01T15:34:00.033+01:00

This blog started here!
Despite the promises of good weather, as we approached Vimy Ridge off the A26 the clouds were gathering and as well as threatening rain there was a cold wind picking up across the ridge and the Douai plains. The first impression was that the twin towers of the memorial resembled something from Lord of the Rings (a prototype design for Isengard perhaps?) and set against the darkening sky seemed to be bathed in an eerie white glow.

The architect, Walter Seymour Allward, searched for 2 years to find a stone with the luminescence and colour he wanted which was eventually dug out of an ancient Roman quarry near Seget in Croatia and transported to the site between 1927 and 1931. Apart from it’s brightness (the memorial having been renovated and restored on 9 April 2007 to mark the 90^th anniversary of the battle), three things hit home as we made our approach.

Firstly, of course, it’s sheer size. The path brings you to the back of the memorial, but once you have climbed the stairs and found your way to the front you are presented with a wall just over 7 metres high, representing an impenetrable defence. The two towers rise 30 metres above the wall and seem to suggest (at one and the same time) something which has been knocked down, and something that is rising up. A ruin, and a reaching out. They are intended to symbolise France and Canada standing side by side, one bearing the maple leaf and the other the fleur-de-lis. Unity in sacrifice.

Secondly, for all it’s size, the memorial is actually incredibly simple - plain even. Most of the surface area is given over to the carved names of the fallen, but with no real ornamentation. Allward presents the 11,285 names as a seamless and continuous list around the base of the monument rather than the horizontal listings of the Menin Gate. The relative simplicity of the memorial reflects both the bareness of the landscape (beautiful though it is today) and also the singularity of its purpose as a structure: for all is artistic merit, architectural and structural ingenuity, and the incredible feat of organisational planning that brought it to be, it is first and foremost a simple record. Names. People. Lives.

Thirdly, of course, you cannot help being struck by the 20 carved figures – some more easily seen than others. My immediate sense was that the statues drew me in, and almost compelled me to look up, in fact to look up to the very limit of my vision, and beyond. But just as there is the sense of it is something ‘fallen down’ and ‘rising up’, there is a marked difference among them. Their eyes are either cast down, or raised up to the sky. Not one of them meets your gaze as you look at the memorial. It’s almost as if you are being invited to make a choice.

Looking down from the front wall, standing centrally and carved from a single 30 tonne block of Seget limestone is Mother Canada (or Canada Bereft). Clearly she is modelled on the mater dolorosa of Christian art, and represents the young nation mourning over its lost sons. Immediately below, on the battlefield itself, is a tomb bearing a Brodie helmet (itself now an icon synonymous with the First World War) and a sword draped in laurel branches. Mother Canada looks down on the fields of devastation, but more significantly she looks towards the east, and the rising of a new dawn.

On the western approach to the monument flanking the steps, are the figures of the Mourning Parents (reputedly modelled on Michaelangelo’s statues on the Medici tomb in Florence, Italy)

Vimy Ridge is a national memorial, but also a family one, depicting the grief of every mother and father.

Returning to the eastern wall, at each corner is a group of figures know collectively as The Defenders, embodying Canada’s role and intention in the conflict: The Breaking of the Swords is to the south, and Sympathy for the Helpless to the north. I was aware as we wandered around that there was little about the figures which suggested triumph. Exaltation perhaps, but not in any sense of victory.

Originally the southern figures were to be focused on a German helmet being crushed underfoot, but Allward rejected the concept as too militaristic. Instead, as two idealised figures look heavenward, a third crouches beside them and breaks his sword in two. As a war memorial, it is unusual: it is not the enemy that must be defeated, but war itself.

The figures to the north show one man looking heavenward in defence of the sick and hungry who shelter beneath him.

At the base of the two towers, and in effect uniting them, is The Spirit of Sacrifice. A young dying soldier falls back against the stone as if crucified. His torch has been taken up by another, his comrade. It is understood to be a reference to the poem In Flanders Fields by the Canadian military doctor, Major John McCrae. On 2 May, 1915 during the Second Battle of Ypres, his friend Lieutenant Alexis Helmer was killed by an exploding shell. The chaplain was on duty elsewhere and so McCrae conducted the burial. It is believed that later that evening he began the draft for his now famous poem.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The torch, held aloft draws the eye to the top of the towers to the Chorus – figures positioned at the limit of our sight and at the point where earth and heaven ‘meet’. To the east are the personifications of Hope, Charity, Honour and Faith; to the west Truth and Knowledge. Above then all stand Justice and Peace, modelled in a similar fashion to Allward’s Truth and Justice outside the Supreme Court in Ottowa. At the highest point of the monument, Peace holds the torch aloft. Just as the memorial shines on the top of the ridge, it is the light of peace to which we are drawn, and which stands as the highest, noblest point of the whole region.

CANADIAN NATIONAL MEMORIAL AT VIMY RIDGE

2010-05-01T12:02:00.008+01:00

In 2007 I went with a group of friends to the Champagne region of France, making sure we sampled the local produce both discerningly and enthusiastically! We’ve just been again with a bigger group of friends with added appetite and enthusiasm! On the first trip, once we got through the Euro tunnel, I put my foot down and we hurtled along the A26 because of the 3 cars travelling together, we had been pushed into a different traffic lane at Folkestone and had been made to wait for a later crossing! So we sped through France in pursuit of our fellows (and I’m slightly ashamed to say caught up very quickly – the angels were clinging for dear life to the wing mirrors I imagine!). As we zoomed through the countryside there wasn’t much time for sightseeing, and indeed there’s not much at all to see really. But as we flew through the Pas-de-Calais, the Canadian memorial at Vimy Ridge stood out on the skyline, atop Hill 145. Even at speed, it demanded attention, and was a sharp reminded that the fields of that same bleak countryside we know today were, and still are fields of horror and a landmark to human atrocity.

The Battle of Vimy Ridge was one of the opening battles in a larger British campaign known as the Battle of Arras during the First World War. It is also considered a major event in Canadian history for the key role the Canadian Corps of First Army played in the attack – hence the prominence of the Canadian Memorial. The German army had fortified Vimy Ridge with tunnels, three rows of trenches behind barbed wire, massive amounts of artillery and numerous machine gun nests. During the course of the First World War, the French and British had suffered thousands of casualties in previous attempts to take it. The French alone lost 150,000 men in 1915, including about half of the elite Moroccan Division and two-thirds of a full regiment of the French Foreign Legion (3,000 men).

On March 25, 1917, what was then the largest artillery barrage in history started. The German trenches were shelled for over two weeks, using over one million shells. The German artillery pieces were hidden behind the ridge, but by using observation balloons in the air and microphones on the ground to triangulate the sound and flashes from their firing, the Canadians were able to locate and destroy about 83% of the German guns. The Canadians also made many night trench raids during this week, a 7 day period known in German battle history as the "Week of Suffering". At dawn on Easter Monday, April 9, the assault divisions of the Canadian Corps attacked. The attack was so loud, the sound of guns could be heard plainly in southern England, about a hundred miles from the front. The first wave of about 15,000 Canadian troops attacked positions defended by roughly 5,000 Germans, followed by the second wave of 12,000 Canadians to meet 3,000 German reserves. Over 1,100 cannons of various descriptions, from British heavy naval guns mounted on railway cars miles behind the battlefield, to portable field artillery pieces dragged into place by horses, mules, or soldiers just behind the Canadian lines, fired continuously. Nearly 100,000 men in total were to take and hold the ridge.

By April 12, the Canadians controlled the entire ridge, at a cost of 3,598 men killed and 7,004 wounded. The German Sixth Army suffered approximately 20,000 casualties. In all the battles at Vimy Ridge in World War I, there was a staggering cost in dead and wounded on both sides. Across 16 kilometres of ridge, approximately 200,000 men perished: French, British, Canadian, and German. Considering that typically there were three wounded to every man killed, the total casualties at Vimy during the War can be estimated at 800,000.

….and I put my foot down, and sped past it, like so many thousands do on a weekly basis, along the A26 toll-road. I didn’t know then about the 200,000 who fell at the Ridge. And although it seems ironic, shameful even, to have sped past last Monday, almost without a second thought, that fleeting glimpse of the memorial on Hill 145 led me to look it up - and to learn. We said that we ought to go back to the Memorial sometime – and last Monday we did. Of course this trip was all the more poignant as I prepare to visit Canada as part of my sabbatical in the autumn and I guess gives a little bit of context and sows a few seeds for my planned reflection on how reconciliation and inclusion can emerge from conflict and crisis.

The complete photo album from last Monday’s visit to Vimy can be seen here:

As this is likely to be one of my longest blog entries to date, so I’ve broken it up into smaller posts. If you want to read more about the Memorial and what I made of it, then click and read on!