Tag Archives: church

HOW SHALL THEY HEAR?

Posted on by
2

Salisbury Cathedral – photo credit: Wikipedia

CHURCHWARDENS, parish administrator and priest have been enjoying a series of summer jollies – touring church sound systems! I wonder how, or if, the clergy in the cavernous spaces of our mediaeval cathedrals were expected to make themselves heard by those at the back?

I’ve lost count of the number of clerical reports I’ve read about the frustrations of church sound systems! We’re hoping that our tour of other churches will guide us towards a first rate new system come the autumn. We’ve seen some encouraging signs, and enjoyed each other’s company and the churches and people we’ve visited. And I, for my part, have been reflecting a bit upon the business of “speaking” and “hearing” in churches, whether with the aid of a good sound system or a bad one.

A good sound system is capable of amplifying a terrible sermon just as a bad sound system can deprive people of a good one. But speaking and hearing in churches, as in life generally, cannot be just about sermons or public acts of worship. What we seek both to communicate and to receive is “fullness of life” – and much as I love the Church, fullness of life is about so much more than what takes place in churches.

God saw that it was good

Terrible sermons lose sight of life’s fullness being celebrated out there in the big wide world, in millions and millions of people, places and traditions, sacred and secular. How many really want to hear the exclusive, limiting assertions of the “all knowing” and the self-satisfied? Not as many, I think, as those I come across daily who want, with God, to celebrate life. “And God saw that it was good”.

Good sermons remind us of the kind of world view that Jesus (and other great spiritual teachers) celebrated; that there is good to be found everywhere if we’ll only open our eyes and unstop our ears; that seeing and listening involve some kind of effort on our part (insist on sitting “at the back” – of anything, anywhere – and you can hardly expect to feel involved in what’s going on “up front”); that we’re sometimes persuaded that someone is dead when really they’re just sleeping; that praying on street corners so that others can have sight of how splendid we (think we) are is a meaningless idiocy that causes most thinking people to shut their eyes tight and flatly refuse to hear anything we have to say.

The worth-ship of life

What message do we want our sound systems to carry? What kind of life do we want to be mouthpieces for? Do we recognise that our acts of worship and our spiritual teaching and learning are about focusing on, training a magnifying glass upon, the glorious gift of life that every human person has been given? Does Baptism take place only in churches? I don’t think so. I think it’s happening everywhere, every day, in all of us. Is Holy Communion celebrated only in churches? Again, I don’t think so. What happens in churches magnifies and celebrates what’s happening everywhere, every day, whenever people “take bread and drink the cup” – there the God of Life is to be found and enjoyed. So “holy communion” isn’t exclusively Christian any more than the charisms of love can be confined to only one kind of human person (amongst the billions of kinds of persons in earth and heaven). Is the Word of God being spoken only in our pulpits? I don’t think so. I think the Word of God is being spoken by the supermarket cashier who takes the time to “hope you have a great day”.

What, given the best church sound system in the world, do we really want to say and pray, and be and do, bearing in mind that “whatever you did unto the least of these my brethren you did also unto me” ?

PS – I’ve just read Fr Richard Rohr’s meditation for today. Recommended, here

LIFE INFLUENCES …

Posted on by
1

a youthful me: 3rd crucifer on the right, 1974

A LOVELY EVENING AND SUPPER tonight with parishioners who are the parents of a soon-to-be-married bridegroom. Thank you to my kind hosts :) As so often beside the significant milestones in family lives we got to chatting about the influences having been “raised” in the worshipping life of the Church – all 3 of us in different parts of the country, from young childhood upwards – had had upon our lives … art, community, confidence, faith, “family”, literature, love, music, poetry, prayer, relationships, spirituality, stability … the list, like ticker tape, is still clicking away in my mind and I’m grateful for the recollections thereby engendered. And wondering how my own life might have turned out without lifelong relationship with the Source of that life, and with the Church of England …

THE CHAORDIC AGE

Posted on by
Reply

VICAR & WARDENS meeting this afternoon, reviewing last year and looking ahead to this year’s Growth Action Planning exercises. I’m blessed with marvellous (ordained and lay) colleagues here. We’re working together on what twenty-first century leadership in the Church is about, acknowledging a need for leadership whilst taking collaborative ministry seriously. There couldn’t be any other kind of ministry in this parish of ever-widening circles. Vicar-on-his-tod would have to be Vicar-with-no-time-for-God. So I’m not juggling precarious finances on my own (though they are precarious, even in this “larger” parish), and mine are not the only pair of ears trying to get attuned to the Divine word for our times.

My friend David Herbert shares my enthusiasm for a similar collaboration between mission minded people on the web, too. I check out his blog, and a dozen or so more, most days to see what friends and colleagues are up to. And I was rewarded over at David’s today by his Blackbirds and Hock from which I’ve nicked the following Dee Hock snippet. I’ll be taking this along to our next Growth Action Planning meeting. Cracking New Year questions as we begin to map out our aspirations for the next year or two. Thanks David. I’ve ordered the book … and we’ll doubtless swap notes …

What is this chasm between how institutions profess to function and how they actually do; between what they claim to do for people and what they actually do to them? What makes people behave in the name of institutions in ways they would never behave in their own name? Church, school, government, business – all the same…. Nothing in nature feels like church or school. There’s no ‘principal’ blackbird pecking away at the rest of the flock. There’s no Super frog telling the others how to croak. There’s no teacher tree lining up the saplings and telling them how to grow….

Nothing in the early years prepared me for the shock of institutions. With school and church came crushing confinement and unrelenting boredom … It was as though everyone began to shed wholeness and humanity at the door, along with coats and overshoes, and, one by one, to cut the threads of connection to the inner spirit, the world of nature and the humanity of others.

Dee Hock – Birth of the Chaordic Age via The Jog.

BBC – THE NATIVITY i

Posted on by
14

PETER STANFORD writes of a Road to Damascus experience for EastEnders scriptwriter Tony Jordan in today’s Telegraph. BBC Wales were planning a follow up to The Passion broadcast in 2008. ”I’d probably had a couple too many rums, but they asked me what I would do,” recalls Jordan. And one thing led to another. However …

Writing The Nativity may have converted him to the virgin birth, even to Jesus’s blueprint, but it won’t inspire Jordan to take his seat in the ancient church a few doors down from his house on Dec 25.

“I have a distaste for people who say to me if you come through these doors, walk down this aisle, sit on that wooden bench, and sing these hymns in this order, I have got God in a little bottle under my pulpit and I’ll let you have a look,” he says. “I don’t think that was God’s intention.”

The Nativity runs on BBC One for four consecutive nights from Monday Dec 20

I share Jordan’s distaste, even whilst I hate to admit that the kind of people he describes actually exist. They do, of course. WE do, of course.  And we all hate to admit it. So I’m glad of the jolt from Tony Jordan. Glad of a chance to ask myself the question: “is that how the Church really comes across to some people?”. Let me not be too quick to jump to the defensive. And let me thank God for a really big “offering” from the BBC. “It’s about Joseph finding faith”, Jordan says. And I’d add that it’s about faith being a gift made available “to you and all mankind” – God-in-Baby. Not God in bottle. Anybody’s bottle.

PRIVATE FEEDBACK: What did you think of The Nativity?






 

THROUGH THE ROOF!

Posted on by
Reply

I WENT DOWN THROUGH THE ROOF … (until I came face to face with him) … here, probably, will have begun the recollections of a man (or Everyman?) deeply involved in a humankind story intended to be heard and seen by as wide an audience as possible – hence the big entrance! Involved in a story that came to be described as GOSPEL, as GOOD NEWS, the story of a Man (or Everyman?) who was (is) PARALYSED: (much like some parts of the Church particularly, and much of humankind generally, appear, perennially, to be today).

Some men appeared, bringing on a bed a paralysed man whom they were trying to bring in and lay down in front of him. But as they could find no way of getting the man through the crowd, they went up onto the top of the house and lowered him and his stretcher down through the tiles into the middle of the gathering, in front of Jesus. Seeing their faith he said, ‘My friend, your sins are forgiven you.’

The scribes and the Pharisees began to think this over. ‘Who is this man, talking blasphemy? Who but God alone can forgive sins?’ But Jesus, aware of their thoughts, made them this reply, ‘What are these thoughts you have in your hearts? Which of these is easier: to say, “Your sins are forgiven you,” or to say, “Get up and walk”? But to prove to you that the Son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins,’ – he said to the paralysed man – ‘I order you: get up, and pick up your stretcher and go home.’ And immediately before their very eyes he got up, picked up what he had been lying on and went home praising God. They were all astounded and praised God and were filled with awe, saying, ‘We have seen strange things today.’ Luke 5 17-26 JB

Friends bring a paralysed Man (or Everyman?) to the One they believe can administer healing. Oddly a debate flares up because forgiveness is offered instead.Forgiveness instead of healing! Damn! That’s not what we came for. And – at any rate – this forgiveness stuff is bordering on the blasphemous. An odd little, mean little end to the story?

Except that it wasn’t the end. And the story wasn’t little. Turned out that the forgiveness CONTAINED the healing. Turned out that the paralysed Man (or Everyman?) picked up his mattress and walked.

Yet the debates still flare up. Some folks are still saying that this forgiveness stuff is bordering on blasphemy. Everyday reveals another paralysed Man (or Everyman?) – and the proclamation of the Healer is still a proclamation of forgiveness. It’s beginning to dawn on paralysed humankind that we can’t “get up and walk” whilst we remain convinced that white people, or coloured people, or doubting people, or gay people, or straight people, or male people, or female people, or different people or (dang it) just plain other people are beyond the pale. It’s beginning to dawn (pretty reluctantly, still) that, where the balm of forgiveness (the wholesome medicine of the Gospel) is applied, EVERYONE can “pick up their mattress” and “walk”.

Shouldn’t we all strip off the protective cover? Shouldn’t we all “go down through the roof”, recognising that we ourselves are paralysed and restricted? Shouldn’t we pull  out the plugs from our inner ears so that we can hear the ‘still small voice of calm’ within? “My friend, your sins are forgiven you.” Ha ha! That’s why I’ve been making thanksgiving this morning. That’s why I’ve been making Eucharist. For “they shall come to Zion shouting for joy, everlasting joy on their faces; joy and gladness will go with them and sorrow and lament will be ended.” (Isaiah 35.10). “They”, someday, shall say “I went down through the roof!”

May it be that, after supper, we can say: “We have seen strange things today”.

SAINTS AND FATHEADS

Posted on by
Reply
IMG_1507-1

Ann Hyde prepares to be ordained Deacon

I DROVE MY NEW COLLEAGUE over to Bishop’s House this morning, and drove home with a full heart, praying a bit, and hoping a lot, for Ann and for all who are preparing to be ordained this weekend. I pray they’ll have a good retreat, one and all. Whatever they hear there will live on in their hearts for the rest of their lives; along with Sunday’s episcopal bidding, already well rehearsed:

In the name of our Lord, we bid you remember the greatness of the trust in which you are now to share: the ministry of Christ himself, who for our sake took the form of a servant. Remember always with thanksgiving that the people among whom you will minister are made in God’s image and likeness. In serving them you are serving Christ himself, before whom you will be called to account. You cannot bear the weight of this calling in your own strength, but only by the grace and power of God. Pray therefore that your heart may daily be enlarged and your understanding of the Scriptures enlightened. Pray earnestly for the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Elation, I remember,  at my Deacon’s Retreat in 1982, alongside a gnawing terror that came upon me suddenly. Neither the years of training, nor the cathedral rehearsal, prepare you for the day: “we bid you remember the greatness of the trust”. Glory be! This is serious, serious stuff. About as serious as serious gets. And seriousness has remained. But so too elation.

Amongst the joys and the sorrows, trials and tribulations, great faith and lost faith, hectic round and R S Thomas’ absence of clamour, a theological twinkle has remained a constant companion:  Geoffrey Paul, on the occasion of his Enthronement as  sixth Bishop of Bradford, in 1981, said

I don’t find faith any easier than any of you, and must echo the words of the epileptic boy’s father in a modern translation: ‘Lord, I believe but not enough.’ I shall want to do everything I can to help you to believe in practice what you say you believe, and I shall rely greatly on your faith and love and prayers to help me in my unbelief, so that by enlarging the area of believing, we may give God room to demonstrate his strange Christalmightiness in our midst.

And then, being a Christian is a matter of belonging to Christ with those who are his, and of course there is no way of belonging to Christ except by belonging, gladly and irrevocably, to all that marvellous and extraordinary ragbag of saints and fatheads who make up the One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church.

The Enthronement Sermon, in The Pattern of Faith, an exposition of Christian doctrine by Geoffrey Paul, Churchman Publishing, 1986, page 135

And all who heard him knew that he was a holy bishop, and serious, and humane, and Christ-like and absolutely-hit-the-nail-on-the-head-dead-right. Encouragement there for retreatants tonight. Elated and serious, “remember the greatness” … gladly and irrevocably you’re to be marvellous and extraordinary, in company with all God’s people, both a saint and a fathead. Thank God,  and sing alleluia!