WHAT A PRICELESS SEASON Epiphany-tide is! It flags up for us that life – all year round – is full to bursting of “sudden and startling revelations that stop us in our tracks and ask us to think again”. Here are some audio-links to just a fraction of the reflecting we’ve been doing, of the epiphanies that have come to us, in Bramhall this morning …
“We’re the organ pipes that make the organ’s music” - Fr Simon here
“Les Miserables and the opening of my heart“ – Yvonne Hope here
TIME AND AGAIN this week I’ve wound up in conversation with people who were deeply touched by Rachael Elizabeth’s Epiphany Moments sermon (audio, readings and homily here) last Sunday. Members of our pastoral team have headed back to base at St Michael’s with accounts of conversations all around the parish about “a stillness and a directness that ‘stopped me in my tracks’”. And I’ve been enthralled by the number of people of “advanced years” who show themselves ready to learn from a young teacher.
This is wonderful, exciting and hopeful. Our parish is blessed with four people at various stages of the discernment process on the road to possible ordination, one of whom, Paul Deakin, currently revelling in life at the College of the Resurrection in Mirfield, will join our ministry team as a Deacon (assistant curate) in July this year; Tracy Ward is the imaginative leader of our pastoral team and is presently engaged with a pastoral placement in neighbouring Norbury, whilst also preparing to co-lead a retreat with me in May, and enjoying the Diocesan Exploring Faith Matters (EFM) course; Yvonne Hope, one of our Young Church co-ordinators and a founding member of our Puppet Ministry, will preach for us about her work with homeless people at Barnabus on Sunday 20th January at 10am; Rachael Elizabeth spent time over the Christmas holidays preparing for major pieces of work on Christian states, and on Unitarianism – as well as assisting in eucharistic and baptismal services and preaching on the Feast of the Epiphany.
Further, we’ve thirty+ excellent lay people working to maintain good pastoral care in a parish of some fifteen and a half thousand people; together with an energetic retired priest whose pastoral vision is generous and inclusive, a licensed Reader, two licensed pastoral workers, a large team of children and youth workers, excellent churchwardens, church council, administrator, finance team, links with the Diocese of Newala in Tanzania (the Rev Anita Matthews will be our preacher on Newala Sunday 27th January), together with the usual host of parish-based organisations and friendship groups whose influence for good reaches out into the wider community seven days a week.
This is wonderful, exciting and hopeful because, in the words of one gentleman’s reflections upon Rachael Elizabeth’s homily – “I’m challenged, even in these, my advanced years, to take stock, to think again about what has been revealed to me and what I’m asked to do about that. How profoundly grateful I am to have encountered a young teacher and the “sudden and striking” message her life and hope presents us with.”
Epiphany: A moment that stopped you in your tracks and made you think, made you re-evaluate life. Maybe it was when someone looked you right in the eye and told you that you were beautiful, maybe it was the time you could look in the mirror and say the same to yourself, believing it. Maybe it was the time you played the piano for the first time or sang with a choir or painted or had your first day in a new job and found a passion for it. Maybe it was the time your partner smiled at you, maybe it was the time you found a new home like I found this home, and you knew it was going to be ok. Maybe it was the time you held a child in your arms, a beautiful new-born baby, completely dependent, harmless, vulnerable, perfect. Like the baby Jesus.
None of these moments can happen without a degree of personal vulnerability and openness. Jesus came into the world a child not a king in a palace. Today our day of Epiphany in the Church remembers the wise men that thought they knew so much, but were completely changed by the humility and vulnerability of an experience that healed their souls. – from Epiphany Moments
I thank God for such epiphanies: for
the sudden and striking realisation, a revelation, a stunning manifestation of some truth.
These moments, these babies, these people are changing the world and working for the building of a wholly new kind of “kingdom” every waking moment of our lives. And I pray that epiphany-tide may ebb and flow in all of us, always. What more hopeful a subject for contemplation could there be in the contemporary life of the English Church and Nation – indeed in the life of the Worldwide Church, and the panoply of faith-traditions amongst all the Nations – than the possibility before us of further “sudden and striking realisation”?
I’M OFF TO A DAY CONFERENCE on “Catholic Evangelism” tomorrow. I’m not wholly sure whether it’s going to be about Catholic Evangelism (capital C, capital E) or catholic evangelism (small c, small e), and I’m rather hoping for the latter … hoping, that is to say, for a catholic evangelism that really is about good news (evangelism) universally applied (catholic), ie, for everybody – no matter their “faith tradition” or lack thereof – everywhere.
I’ve spent a very great deal of my life passionately pondering what exactly constitutes good news, and in particular why having some sort of acknowledged relationship to / with the Source of our lives might matter – to individuals, to communities, to nations, to our world, to the whole created order – some of these whole and healthy, some desperately broken, hurting, and in need of that Divine touch that brings healing. And I’m consistently finding that old definitions of what it means to be Catholic, or Protestant, or Christian, or shades in between all of these, don’t fit all sizes any more, if they ever did.
Christ everywhere …
What constitutes Good News in a ‘catholic’, pluralistic world? Where is an / our anointed Christ to be found? (as I’m sure such a Christ is indeed to be found, anywhere in the world, and across the world’s faith traditions). And the questions are so important to me because as a Christian priest, seeking always to live and learn – to be a disciple – after the pattern of Jesus of Nazareth, I have observed that some kinds of Catholic, some kinds of Protestant, and some kinds of “Christian” plainly do not represent very good news for many people at all. So catholic evangelism must be something quite different, something much more open, something prepared always to be held to account as to the reach of what it purports to be good news. Catholic evangelism will not, I think, be too prescriptive.
Feast of life for all
Catholic evangelism will offer the “feast of life” to people in the “highways and byways” won’t it? Catholic evangelists, personal and corporate, will have dismantled their drawbridges. Catholic evangelism will be less concerned (although not wholly unconcerned) with the Faith of our Fathers and hugely more concerned with Faith Being Received Today. When I’ve asked adults over the past thirty years whether they’d like to come to confirmation classes, so that they can be presented to the bishop, confirmed, and thereafter receive Holy Communion many have politely declined. When I’ve offered the Sacrament of Holy Communion “no questions asked” it has been the case, more frequently than I can count, that the recipient has ended up doing the asking, seeking to confirm a present and acknowledged reality – satisfied hunger – in their lives.
Let’s explore!
And I remember that Jesus was ever ready to go the extra mile for children, too. “Do not try to stop them for the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these”. Catholic evangelists will work hard at becoming more, well … catholic – so that they’re more plainly seen to be, well … “Christian” or “Anointed”. Catholic evangelists will be interested in marginalised multi-tasking-capable women, tax collectors, prodigal sons, unimaginative but very opinionated men, quieter and more imaginative men, too, and in lost sheep. Catholic evangelism won’t chastise the lost sheep for having left the fold in order to “explore”, still less tell the poor creature that God forbids it. Instead truly catholic evangelists (like Jesus of Nazareth) will make the fold larger so that there’s the space for MORE sheep to engage in the business of exploration, to engage, that is to say, in their God-given Life!
The Sound of Silence
One of the biggest growth areas in our parish (liberal Catholic with blurry edges – a bit like my paintings!) – has been a call to shared and silent meditation in the parish church – arriving and departing in companionable silence. No coffee or handing out electoral roll forms afterwards. And numbers in excess of many a church’s entire Sunday congregation have responded to a call – we believe a Divine call – to dwell for a space, together in the “house for the Church”, to wait upon the Word that touches life in silence. (The Word – not words. There’s not “even” a Bible reading). It’s life-changing, say many participants. It’s the only occasion in my month when I’m really and deeply aware of the heartbeat of God, the pulse of life, say others. This silence, this “that’s not very Catholic” but absolutely catholic encounter is breathing into our common life new elements of what it means to bear good news in our lives today, what it means, first and foremost to BE the Body of Christ now on earth, what it means to be religious in the original sense of the word (religare) – reconnected, re-membered. Restored to what we’ve forgotten.
Old assumptions yield
So whether tomorrow proves to be slanted more to Catholic Evangelism, or to catholic evangelism, I hope we’ll be asking the same question – What is Good News? – at least sometimes. Because, remembering Louis MacNeice’s Mutations again:
… old assumptions yield to new sensations.
The Stranger in the Wings is waiting for his cue.
The fuse is always laid to some annunciation …
Tracy – photo/emmaward
REALLY GREAT first sermon from Tracy Ward here today. We’ve had some inspirational first sermons here in the last year or two and I’m thrilled to bits that we’ve currently 3 aspiring priests at Bramhall Parish Church, and we’re also sponsoring the theological training of an ordinand for the Diocese of Newala, Tanzania.
God’s Spirit calls hearts and souls and minds and bodies today, as ever. Tracy voiced the Word of God’s Spirit with an encouragement to Live Your Life – being exemplars of the kind of in-love-with-life-and-Love-service that can truly be described as a more excellent way. Great sermon. Great eucharistic worship. Great Spirit of God right here in the midst of us. We hear the commission. We’ll act upon the call: the uniting, embracing Body of Christ.
THOMAS AND TOBIAS were baptised this morning – when, on the first Sunday of Lent, we recalled Jesus’ own baptism by John: (I absolutely love the little snippet above, beautifully narrated here, from the film The Miracle Maker, and used on this blog before)
In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’ And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. – Mark 1.9-15
What was John up to? What were we doing with Tobias and Thomas this morning? And does the doing matter?
Well, I think the first thing to say about this morning’s baptism is that it certainly appeared to matter, very much indeed, to the supporting families and friends. It’s true that the novelty value appears to have worn off for many a contemporary weekly churchgoing Anglican. Some of ours discreetly hive off back home if they get wind of the idea that “their” service will face the challenge of newcomers. On such occasions, with all due respect to John the Baptist, I thank God that I’m their parish priest rather than he. I understand a bit, I think, where they’re coming from, in that I am myself very fond of a bit of liturgical p and q. But I think they’d be given pretty short shrift from J the B, don’t you?
Back to the opening question. What was John up to? Why would baptism be important for Thomas and Tobias, or for me and you?
The keyword, for me, is “repent”. John called his hearers to repent – a process described in Greek as metanoia – a turning around. Not a sandwich-boarded doom-laden “you’re on the road to hell” sort of a “repent” but nevertheless a turn-around-sort of a repent. A stopping-in-our-tracks sort of a repent. And that’s what I was up to this morning, too: inviting people to take a moment to “turn around”, to have a bit of a rethink. Repentance: a few moments practice in our daily lives – (as wholesome and as necessary a daily-renewed baptism as the practice of having lunch or dinner) – when we turn around to look inside ourselves instead of outside.
And I think that that’s what Jesus’ Lent, his “days in the wilderness”, tempted as we are, were and are all about. Lent’s not just about Jesus in “wilderness” (in the tempting, perplexing, question-provoking aspects of life) but about you and me needing to grapple with those places and those temptations, perplexities and questions, in our time, too.
Who am I? Whose am I? What’s my life for? Am I on the side of right or of wrong? And do my life and actions – does my practice – reflect my answer? And do I feel the same today as I did yesterday? And how am I hoping to feel tomorrow? (Heavens! This is a process that’s gonna take some time. Probably a lifetime. I’d better set some time aside every day – and it would be as well for me to “train up” children to start this practice in their own child-like sure-footed and imaginative way). There’s going to be need to hive off up a mountain on my own from time to time, or take a boat away from the crowds and out into the bay, if I’m really going to find my Way.
Am I at peace with what, having repented, I observe within myself? Do I have the inner resources not only to survive but also to thrive when the Spirit of Life “drives” me into the wilderness spaces and places of my own ordinary day to day life and experience? Does my engagement with this liturgical act, this Baptism, this honouring, and raising and welcoming of two little British boys have anything at all to say to what I feel about the “heaving little tummy” of the 2 year old Syrian boy whose tragic death was witnessed by Marie Colvin, shortly before her own untimely death, the other day?
Baptism? What was John doing? What was Jesus doing? Why did the “Good News” writers notice? Why was I engaged in baptising Tobias and Thomas today?
Stop, look, listen. That’s the content of John’s preaching. Consider. Look left, look right, look left again before you cross, are the themes picked up and developed and run with by Jesus, then and now. Jesus takes preaching a step further. Jesus turns preaching and teaching into living. So let me repeat: Stop, look, listen. Look around you. What’s to be seen in the wilderness of this life – your life? Stop, look, listen. Look inside you. What’s to be seen in the wild places of your own heart? And how, if at all, does the one affect the other?
Baptism isn’t about filling the Church’s pews (so in that sense it shouldn’t matter too much if “we never see them again”). Baptism is more of an invitation to oasis in wilderness, a daily-repeated invitation to a place where we may be assured of welcome, our morning shower and refreshment, the place of preparation before receiving the bread and wine of life itself; Christian Baptism matters because it is sacramental sign and symbol of an invitation to a place, and to a challenge, where we may grow into the discipline and practice of asking questions – and grappling with them until we come upon some answers. Though there may be more questions about questions before ever we arrive at answers.
I heard it suggested recently that the “Good Shepherd”, seeking to keep his whole flock safe, discourages single sheep from going out to explore. They’ll automatically trip up, automatically fall down a hole. He’ll then have the (very worthy but inconvenient) task of setting out to rescue the naughty explorer. But I believe exactly the opposite. I believe that we’re set down in the wilderness of life precisely to ask questions, to employ our inner resources to make sense of what we know exists beyond the walls of our own little (maybe ecclesiastical) sheep pen, and to explore. Co-creators with the Source of our own lives, we won’t necessarily live in perpetual clover, but we’ll be alive! Fully alive – building a home in the heart of humankind for “the reign of God”. And trusted by the Divine parent who’ll wait patiently forever on the lookout for our safe (and better informed) returning.
Baptism matters because it washes the dust of desert from our souls, refreshing and awakening and dawning and calling. Baptism matters – even infant baptism – because the questions it raises and the confidence it inspires are addressed and gifted to the whole community. Baptism matters because it has an eye to everything that’s going on around us, to the future security and mutual society of Thomas and Tobias, and because it calls us, every day of our lives, to be quiet enough, for long enough, to hear the Word that God speaks into every fibre, cell and atom of all creation. “YOU – all of you – are my Beloved …” You, all of you are, as the great hymn of the incarnation puts it: Of the Father’s Love begotten.
Yes: Becoming the Beloved – or, more accurately, recognizing that we are the Beloved of God. That’s what we’re up to, or should be up to, in Homs and in Bramhall equally. All of us.
I KNOW I SUGGESTED only yesterday that I’m more than just a bit grateful for those who shoulder the responsibilities of General Synod membership, doubting my own ability and / or willingness so to do. (PCC’s about my synodical limit). And I know I smiled when I read Bishop Nick Baines’ Catch up the other day:
if it wasn’t clear before, it should be obvious now that some circles simply cannot be squared. I am not aware of anyone – of any persuasion – who is looking forward with unalloyed joy to this week’s debates.
But nonetheless I wish I’d been in London this morning to hear the ABC at the Synod Eucharist. And to thank God for him. No matter how despondent I sometimes feel about the quality of the life of the Church of England generally today I am never, never despondent about Archbishop Rowan. I feel that at heart he speaks for me from the praying heart of a priest; that he speaks to and for the hearts of countless “witterers” and that, in his own heart and experience, he really does understand something of the “churning around inside” that goes on in wittering lesser mortals like me. Doesn’t he hit the nail on the head here? …
… we ought to remember that of course this is God’s future we’re talking about. And God’s future is by no means the same as the future we try to create for ourselves, and imagine for ourselves. That’s the challenge of discernment in the Holy Spirit. We’re asking not for a foretaste of the future we would like, we are planning, we are working for; we ask for a foretaste of God’s future. And once we put it like that, we realise of course that sinful and stupid as we are, we haven’t got a clue about God’s future. And so we come in prayer to the Holy Spirit, very much with empty hands and longing hearts and relatively blank minds. We come in exactly that state of wittering, inarticulate confusion that St Paul so wonderfully describes as the state of Christian prayer. We do not know how to pray as we ought to. Our prayer is a bundle of distractions and longings, hopes and anxieties, churning around inside, and somehow, upheld, shot through, by the power of the Holy Spirit in us. Somehow the Holy Spirit is constantly winnowing out the nonsense from our longing and hopes, and pushing us towards that future, God’s future, of which we can have so little a picture.
And yet, having said we haven’t got a clue what God’s future looks like, as a matter of fact that’s not the case. What does God’s future look like? Well, one thing we can say is that it looks like Jesus. And that’s why what we wait for, what we long for – God’s future – is our redemption. We ourselves have had the first fruits of the spirit grow inwardly while we wait for adoption. The redemption of our bodies for in hope we were saved.
full homily text and video here © Rowan Williams 2012
The future looks like Jesus … so, the future will probably be heavily weighted towards affording women absolutely proper, necessary and equal status; would respect the dignity and untold worth of all shapes, sizes, colours, creeds and the many other temporal orientations of a wide-world’s-worth of human persons; would teach and preach with relevant simplicity and humility; wouldn’t be afraid of affection, children, emotion, failure, laughter, illness, intimacy, politicians, questioning, religious authorities, or sexuality; would have a ready empathy with – and a natural incination towards – friendship / colleagueship with outcasts and ordinary folks, little life celebrations, wholeness and holiness, and a gracious and compassionate leading out of “things now hidden in darkness” into God’s eternally new and creative light.
Thank God for Archbishop Rowan. I thank God that a future that looks like Jesus will be, notwithstanding the best efforts of contemporary religious nattering, inevitably and eternally bright. Transfigured. A lifting and a glorious revelation of the Divine beauty in all things – witterers and “others” included – beyond the present limits of our sight.
Thanks be to God that “God is”, as God’s Archbishop of Canterbury has it, “God’s future.”
TO SAN FRANCISCO? I wish. But no. No immediate plans. Bramhall’s my patch for the present. But some day. Some way. Because somehow St Gregory of Nyssa’s Church in San Francisco lives and listens and speaks with and about the kind of words I’m constantly wanting to say. And do. And Grace Cathedral too. Church Times’ front page photo of a celebration of the Eucharist at St Gregory’s represents for me the glorious hotch-potch of loved and redeemed humanity that is my own life’s prayer and perpetual dream. And there’s a big chunk of an extract of Sara Miles, author of Jesus Freak: Feeding, healing, raising the dead.
Worship and service were part of a whole; the Friday food pantry and the Sunday eucharist were just different expressions of the same thing. Well meaning Christian visitors liked to describe the pantry as a “feeding ministry”, but that just seemed like a nervous euphemism to me. What I saw was church: hundreds of people gathering each week around an altar to share food and to thank God. And then, on Sundays, in the very same space, communion. The priest and whoever else was serving that day – a woman with cancer, a fussy older guy, a serene, angelic seven year old boy in shorts – would lift the plates of fresh bread and cups of wine, and turn, showing the food to the people standing pressed close around the big, round table in the middle of the sanctuary …
These words, and this photo, and these films speak to me of the God of Life whose own freedom has granted humankind its own. Freedom to explore. Freedom to become whole and holy in and amongst the hotch-potch of communities filled with people of every shade and hue and opinion and creed under the sun and stars. Freedom in which hospitality and generosity are extended to all. Am I going to San Francisco? Well, whether on earth, or the San Francisco in heaven, some day, I pray. And in the morning here in Bramhall? There will be alimentos gratis – the free food of Divine Love – in Eucharist at 8, 9 and 10.45am – and during the course of these celebrations, by the Grace of God, six children will be baptised …
PAUL DEAKIN (vested, left) preached an encouraging and challenging sermon this morning, attired for a few brief moments in a too short preaching scarf – because it’s more ordinarily employed at Stockport County FC! It’s great having Paul home on leave from his studies at Mirfield. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” – Nathaniel asked of Philip. Well, of course, someone could and did! And Paul Deakin’s one of the many good things to “come out of” Bramhall.
DAVID TAYLOR (robed, right) served the dual offices of assistant verger and altar server, at short notice, in the midst of one of those whirlwind sort of mornings that Sundays at St Michael’s often look like. With consecutive celebrations of the Eucharist at 8, 9 and 10.45am there’s a lot to be done behind the scenes to make sure there’s a smooth flow. With David and other willing souls like him we’re able to sing: “we get by with a little help from our friends …”
AND ANDY BROWN put imagination into gear and was quick to snap the moments when some of my wonderful young friends here got stuck into “the priesthood of all believers” liturgically. Literally “active angels”, we encouraged each other to pray according to the style and practice of ancient tradition, standing, and with arms raised in a posture of praise, thanksgiving and receptivity. And we all shared in times of silence and stillness too. It all made for a holy communion. Eucharistic. Something accomplished. Religio - a binding together. And I recall that the great son of man who came out of Nazareth once said: I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends – John 15.15-17
IMAGINING. I think that’s one of our chief works as humans. It’s how we co-create with the Source of all life. And imagining is what I’ve been doing all day. First in a fairly routine sort of early morning meeting, later in a scintillating encounter between an artist, Stephen Raw, an architect, John Prichard, two churchwardens, Ralph Luxon and Sue Taylor, and a photographing priest who thought he was in photographic heaven, moi …
I took many dozens of photos. Mindful of my manners though I will check with the artist before sharing too many more than the one above. This is a little trio of beautiful articles in a Stephen shaped cave. Not the work of the artist, but absolutely the work of the artist, if you know what I mean? Stephen’s studio feels like a coloured X-ray of his heart and soul and mind and body; a statement of faith and an act of imagination and creation. We came away energised at some profound level. We’d been standing on holy ground. I shall hope to stand there again. And there was good coffee! And cookies.
~
Later in the day I imagined a lovely local man being now in the nearer presence of God. I was deeply moved by his wife Sheila’s beautiful reading of Psalm 121 during a memorial service at nearby All Saints’ where Harry had been the organist until his sudden and unexpected death. The music, sung, played and listened to, together with Fr David’s quite simply superb shepherding of the service, and a fine address, made for one of the very finest funeral thanksgivings I’ve ever experienced. I’m deeply grateful for that and know that Harry’s family must surely be yet more thankful. Harry was an artist in his own distinctive and giving way. Perhaps all of us, in early morning meetings, artist’s studio, thanksgiving service in Church, or wheresoever we may be, are, each and every one of us, artists in our own distinctive ways.
How did God bring about such an extraordinary work, I wonder? And I only come near being able to approach an answer when I make time in my life to imagine ….
Update: with Stephen Raw’s kind permission: my photos are here
SUNDAY AFTERNOON will be a special time in Bramhall Parish Church when some of our brightest and best, well prepared and excited, make their first holy communions. They’re an imaginative and special bunch of youngsters whose thinking, conversation and learning about the stuff of faith has taken them and me “Somewhere Deep” and they’re all a great joy to have around the place. They, together with their catechists and parish priest, warmly invite you to celebrate with them at 3.30pm on Sunday 20th November 2011 – with High Tea in the Hall after the Eucharist. Do come and encourage them. And be encouraged!
