Peace be still - how to go on sabbatical

Passage for reflection: Mark 4.35-end

I used a poem by the poet Brian Bilston for devotions at some of my Church Councils this week. He writes about the reality of January: 

Thirty days has September,

April, June and November.

Unless a leap year is its fate,

February has twenty-eight.

All the rest have three days more,

excepting January, 

which has six thousand,

one hundred and eighty-four.

It feels like with a lot of bereavements this month - eight funerals have been arranged in this area since 1 January -  and some quite serious illness and worry, the cost of living rising, threats of war in Eastern Europe and anger about boozy parties and birthdays and Prime Ministers pictured “near bottles” and then Covid still being about with a major scare happening in one of my churches this week, that life is like being in a storm at the moment. 

The last storm we were in was Arwen on Holy Island. We lost power and had to hanker down in our cottage with just a few nightlights and candles but luckily also a log burner, not that it was easy venturing outside to get the logs as you couldn’t stand upright. All night the wind howled and it caused great damage. To be out in it would have been dangerous even life threatening. 

To be engulfed by madness, can mean that madness is all consuming, physically but also mentally. All you can think about is the thing that is making you uncertain. So when we are bereaved, we hurt and we lose purpose for a bit. When we are unwell, we can’t cope with doing very much. When the world presents us with challenges, we wonder how we are going to cope. Energy prices rising will be a huge challenge to many people. And when so called leaders don’t give us any confidence because we don’t trust them anymore… well, I’ll not comment about that. I’ve spent ages since a Covid scare at church sorting things and trying to keep people safe yet again has been draining and time consuming and other things I need to do have had to wait. The storm is all there is.

Or is it really all there is? In our reading we are in a severe storm on the Sea of Galilee. How strong can we surmise this storm was? The disciples were fishermen who were accustomed to storms on the Sea of Galilee and this one must have been fierce for them to fear for their lives. They are horrified as the storm worsens that Jesus falls asleep! “Don’t you care we are all going to die?” This reading is set in the lectionary for this Saturday. Saturday, Sunday and Monday will see me rushing about (unless I test positive for Covid!) as there’s so much to sort before I can go on sabbatical on Tuesday. The last month has been especially tough. I’ve not done anything very well as stuff has battered me from all directions. So there’s three words from Jesus I need to hear for myself which come as he awakes, see the disciples petrified and sees the wind and the waves out of control. 

“Peace, be still.” 

Isn’t that what we need at the end of a difficult January? Jesus won’t take the pain of bereavement away, or stop us getting ill or stop people behaving as they do (though he will forgive them) and nor will he write all my membership tickets or update my pastoral lists or tidy my desk or write a service for May 1, but he will give peace to our situation if we just recognise he is there. Haven’t we lost the sense he is just there in the storm? An old hymn said I think “with Christ in the vessel I smile at the storm.” 

I sat in a meeting the other night trying to get us to think a bit bigger about plans. Instead we didn’t want to think about other than what we know. Why? Because we are fearful. So we can only just cling on. We haven’t the answers to how we might grow and we haven’t enough energy to take on more. But if we spent more time giving our concerns to him, surely our storms would calm, wouldn’t they? 

“Peace, be still.” 

Two other things strike me from this reading:

After their brush with death, Jesus doesn't comfort, but rather scolds His disciples.
Why is He so hard on them?
Is there evidence in the passage that Jesus meant to enter this storm as a test of the disciples' faith? Jesus suggested the boat trip himself, and promptly went to sleep. The application to our lives is that even when Jesus leads us "through the valley of the shadow of death", we should fear no evil, for he is with us. We too can rest in faith during the storm. Our boat isn't going down, because Jesus is on board.

And note this too: the disciples at the end are scared of the storm, but Jesus! Someone in a commentary writes “ This fear was not produced by the storm, but by the calm. The sudden storm and sudden stillness caused brain overload.” How would it be if we let God be God and just were just awestruck by what he does again? 

The Breton fishermen’s prayer reminds us of this constant need to reach out:

“Dear God, be good to me; the sea is so wide and my boat is so small.”  

So what’s my message this week? I guess I pray for stillness and peace. I will miss my eight communities but I will use every moment of the next three months to find God, hear Jesus’ story, and find some balm for my battered soul. All will be well. And when it doesn’t feel well, it’s then I need to up my prayers, listen and look harder, for the divine calm and solace and reassurance that this will pass will be there. 

“Peace, be still.”

A weird Sunday

I’ve just finished my penultimate Sunday before my sabbatical begins. I’m looking forward to a change of focus and pace, but this wretched pandemic has again intervened in my life. Being away from my people at this point feels like in many ways an unwelcome interruption as things are only just beginning to get going in the eight churches I serve, little sparks of hope and possibility. I’ve been here a year and five months but it hasn’t been the usual start to an appointment! Normally I’d have met everyone by now, been seen at events inside and outside the church, and been in and out of people’s homes to visit them over a cuppa. Someone said to me this morning, “we don’t really know you.” She was right. 

It is fascinating to note people’s reactions to a sabbatical. Some people have asked what I am doing on my holiday! I can’t explain why I felt sad after leaving my folk at Dallowgill this afternoon after their service and a 15 minute Church Council (my world record!!!) I am not worried about letting things go. I guess it’s because it’s only now I am feeling my encouragement of these churches I was sent to at the height of pandemic

is bearing fruit and so it’s hard to think of three months away. My pictures in this blog post are all from the journey back across the moor towards home. Lots of sheep!

I’ve a busy week with more funerals, Church Councils, other meetings, worship next Sunday  and pastoral stuff but I’m also using this week to begin to focus on what the next three months might bring us. I’m looking forward to focussing on encountering sacred space in historic Christian  sites and receiving worship in other than Methodist churches on Sundays, using our cathedral and Fountains Abbey a lot, enjoying doing Holy Week and Easter liturgy on Holy Island, and getting my book on honest journeying with God finally finished. I only started it in 2016!! 

I am trying to be open to where God leads, and having time to do stuff at home I have neglected and spending quality time with Lis without rushing out the door all the time. 

When I had my first sabbatical from March to May 2009, I stayed on Holy Island for the first time. In the lounge of the retreat house was a poem which included the words “you did not come here to get away, you came here in order to go back.” What will I come back to? I wonder! I wished my congregation at Bishop Monkton this morning a happy Easter! I’ll return in the Easter season. Let’s hope I am refreshed and in the meantime all our communities keep looking and enjoying the stirrings of the divine which are quietly happening all about us. Perhaps we’ve spent too long just not looking…

So sadness today, yes, but a confidence that maybe if Covid starts to go away from the summer we might really begin to flourish here. The light of hope is there. And over these next three months I just pray I might see what might be possible as we’ve time to stand and stare a bit…

And I pray there might be surprises! I returned to Holy Island as part of sabbatical in 2016. On a Monday afternoon the retreat house door swung open. Um! Look what happened seven months later! 

Listening to a radical preacher

Have you ever been sure you know a person then realise you don’t? I was visiting someone poorly in Sawley. Her address was Church Farm. I found Church Farm and knocked the door. A lady answered. She was the lady I wanted to see … at least I thought so. We chatted for twenty minutes. Then I spotted some post on her dining room table. The name on the post was not her. I knew this wasn’t Christine! She looked just like her. I said not wanting this dear soul to think I hadn’t intended visiting her “where does Christine live?” “Next door” she said. Next door was also Church Farm. It turned out Christine was out. I said goodbye to the lady and left after a nice if unscheduled visit. I then bumped into Janet from the chapel. She told me when I told her my wrong door story I’d just visited Christine’s sister who looks just like her! I’d got the wrong person. You have to remember folks that mostly ever since I’ve arrived here I’ve seen my flock in face coverings! 

Do we know people as well as we think we do? 

This Sunday is the third Sunday after Epiphany. The Epiphany is in most people’s minds just the story of the coming of the magi to visit the Christ child. But it’s actually a season in the church year which lasts until Candlemas, 2 February. Epiphany literally means a manifestation, a showing, something made clear. The readings in these early weeks of the year give us lots of information about the nature of Jesus.

Imagine you are sitting in your local synagogue. It isn’t in Bishop Monkton or in Dallowgill but you live in Nazareth. Today’s preacher is the local lad you’ve seen grow up in the carpenter’s shop, the son of Joseph and Mary. It’s his first time in your pulpit, if the synagogue has one of those. You know him well. He’s now about thirty. It’s going to be a nice service. He had been among them growing up learning the faith with the rabbis so it was a big day that he was old enough to read to them. They knew those words from Isaiah, words of promise about the Messiah to come. How nicely he read them, they were so proud of him. Well done, Jesus, well read.

But wait a minute, what did he mean “Today, in your very hearing, this text has come true?” If you read on, there was a stirring in the pews, muttering amongst the elderly, huffing and puffing – and he talked about how they would be saying “Doctor, cure thyself,” a Jewish proverb which would mean in our language, charity begins at home – and he spoke about Capernaum and all the exciting things that had happened there, and that a prophet is not accepted in his home town, and how Elijah the prophet had to go off to Sidon, and Elisha too went off to Naaman, the Syrian leper. 

The normally reverent place of worship became very uneasy, especially at the mention of these other places and what he was implying. But Jesus wasn’t going to be put off by people’s presuppositions and he wasn’t there to court popularity. In fact, he seemed to asking for trouble by sticking to his own agenda. There was no doubt the situation was getting nasty. 

They kicked him out of the service, he didn’t last long in their world. He had upset their religious life, their cosy Sabbath routine where they met with their God. They wanted him out of town too, and tried to drive him over the edge of a cliff. But he turned round and looked at them and they faltered, and then he simply walked through them, and no one dared touch him and he was gone… 

Maybe we can imagine what might have been said in the town and around the synagogue for days afterwards. Who did he think he was, talking to us like that! We thought we knew him but we don’t at all. He isn’t claiming to BE the Messiah, is he? 

This is the first public sermon of Jesus. Some people do funny things when the sermon begins. I had a church in Bishop Auckland, where when they came into church, would line up on the ledge of the pew in front of them, a row of sticky sweets. When the sermon began, the first sentence, there was a commotion of rustling paper as the sweets were opened and put in the mouth.

Why does a sticky sweet get you through the sermon? Why does the proclamation of God’s word have to be something to be got through? The congregation in the synagogue were waiting for Jesus’ words with expectation – what did he say to them and to us today? The message was urgent. The good news of God was being fulfilled today. Now was the hour of grace. Now was the moment of opportunity. Will we accept it, or will we drive it out so we can get on with being the church? We need to be open to the moving of God’s Spirit. As I said atthe beginning, this is the season of Epiphany. Epiphany is like one of those detective series we watch working out where the clues are, like Vera or Line of Duty or Father Brown. Eventually the penny drops and the mystery of the killer or wrongdoer is solved. 

Epiphany bible readings are a series of clues, we behold the glory of God in Jesus, we see him affirmed in baptism, we see him give us a sign of his abundant generosity at a wedding in Cana, we today see him set out quite clearly to his home synagogue, to people he knew well, the heart of his message and programme, good news to the poor, freedom for the oppressed, liberty for captives, sight to the blind, and the herald of a new age of God’s reign. Believe me, it isn’t easy to preach to the church you grew up in. Igrew up in a small village church where everyone was related to me. So preaching there, and I went on note as a local preacher aged 18, was horrific. My late mother who was my biggest critic used to hide under the pew and then when we got home she’d say “why did you pick that hymn?” and “what did you say that for?” and “you went on a bit long!” I wasn’t exactly hurled over a cliff but it wasn’t a very happy experience. Much easier to be honest and challengingto people you don’t know.

God is working his purpose out – there will be good news for the poor, sight for the blind, release for captives, freedom for the oppressed, the breaking in of God’s time, whether we are part of it, or not. 

The danger is we have no time to see God’s Spirit moving or we are too exhausted to see it! That Nazareth assembly didn’t like it and they kicked Jesus out. 

What about us? Do you want Jesus manifesto at your heart or will you boot him over a cliff. I don’t know where the nearest cliffs to here are, but we could go there.  

I like what Tim Baker has made of this passage in the Vine at Home material for today: Jesus says he will stand for: - Good news to the poor - proclaim release to the captives - recovery of sight to the blind - the oppressed go free - proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. That last one, perhaps the most poetic, has been translated a whole range of different ways, including ‘this is God’s year or this is God’s time’, but there is also a hint of the Old Testament idea of the ‘jubilee’ here: the idea that there is a time when all debts and injustices are wiped away. A time of equity and equality. In which case, all five of these ‘manifesto statements’, these ‘strategic goals’, are about social justice. Jesus is committing to a transforming of the social order – a transforming that begins with the prophets of the Old Testament, and which he comes to continue, to update and to renew. A reminder that his ministry – indeed all God’s ministry – needs to include good news to the poor, the possibility of people’s potential being fulfilled, a hope for and a working towards a better time. 

But, crucially, Jesus doesn’t stop there. He says his five points, about social justice, but he is actually reading from the scroll of Isaiah. Many of his original audience would have already known all these words. Perhaps they were mouthing along with him. Perhaps a few groaned, muttering to themselves, ‘not another one on this passage, surely’. Perhaps a few lent forward, thinking, ‘I wonder what this young rabbi makes of this passage, it’s one of myfavourites…’ And this is when Jesus says a sixth thing. ‘Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.’ It’s a bold and a brave statement. But it is also the most important, most exciting moment in this gospel passage – and for us, the most relevant. It might even be the single most important thing Jesus says in the whole of his ministry. Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. And in that moment, what was word, becomes flesh, what was old becomes new, what was law becomes relationship, what was dead has come to life. Jesus hasn’t just reminded people of the principles Isaiah was writing about thousands of years before, he’s embodied them, brought them to life, moved them out of an ancient scroll and into the world of people who are living, moving and breathing. Can he do the same for us today?

I think this quote from the Lutheran pastor John Stendahl brings all I have tried to share with you from this challenging episode to a close:

“As we visit Jesus in Nazareth, as Jesus visits us here, ought we perhaps to understand his impatience and perhaps even feel it ourselves, this irritation with old suppositions and preoccupations? We live in a strange culture in self absorption is dominant, a culture in which our churches participate and cater to please. It may need a voice of anger to lead us into action. We shall perish if we cannot see a larger world and understand what we are doing to this world and to people beyond the compass of our lives. Do we feel the restlessness of God’s stirring, or can we at least hear it from him with getting too scared or taking offence?”

Today, like worshippers in Nazareth of old, we have come to meet God together. We have heard God’s word. How we respond to it from here is up to us…     

When we think we know who Jesus is, my friends, he will challenge us and surprise us. When we think we have him sorted, he will unsettle us and remind us of the nature of God. In our church, when people are searching, may we show by our life and our words, “today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

17 January Light

Passage for reflection: Psalm 139: 7 - 12

They say next Monday, 17 January, is the most depressing day of the year. It’s known as Blue Monday. It’s the day when the financial pressure of the Christmas just past hangs over us most, the weather is at its worst, and the extra pounds we’ve acquired over the holiday season are proving harder to shift than we anticipated. The daily grind just gets us down. 

I’ve spent the last few days with people who are facing really hard stuff at the moment: uncertainty, illness, challenges ahead, and bereavement. I’ve five funerals to take in the next fortnight. The world seems a hard place to be at the moment. The numbers down with Covid, even if it is milder than before, are rising. There’s real anger about parties being held at 10 Downing Street in May 2020 when we weren’t allowed to mix and people couldn’t see dying loved ones or visit those in need. There are people with real financial worries and there are others who are fearful about the future. There’s a lot of darkness about. Blue Monday? More like Blue January. 

After visiting a family to prepare for a funeral the other night I went back to the car and noticed the lights of the cathedral shining down the street above it. The light of Christ is always above, ahead, and around us. When we think the darkness and the state of our lives is all we have, God comes. Remember the old hymn: “Sometimes a light surprises the Christian while they sing. It is the Lord who rises with healing in his wings.”

Psalm 139 is one of the most beautiful of the Psalms. It reminds us very powerfully of the nature of God. The theologian Paul Tillich once said it is the reality of our human condition to run from God, to be on our own, to live in the world as if God were not here. He argued it is not God whom we reject and forget, but rather some distorted picture of God. The God who is really God is inescapable. There is, he said, “no place to which we can run or flee from God, which is outside of God.”

To me, this is a huge comfort on grey and difficult days like perhaps Monday will be. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness shall not ever put it out. A city on a hill cannot be hidden. Even the darkness isn’t a thing that we need fear because God is in it. There’s a lot of “how do we get through Monday” articles in the papers and on line this weekend. Maybe we need to remember the eternal light which shines into difficulty, into uncertainty and into bereavement. We don’t need to wait for Sue Gray to tell us this after an enquiry, it is a truth for every day we can know now.

And maybe to get through hard days we need to be the light for others. I’ve sat and heard five stories of people who’ve clearly made a difference to others through the way they lived their lives. So as we celebrate in the next two weeks, Vanessa and Dorothy and Bob and Barbara and Sheila, we also celebrate God.

The funeral I’m doing on Monday will include this poem by Longfellow. There was a tiny pink post it note in the funeral plan which has “to be read” on it. I think Longfellow is saying we need to live life to be full and in doing so we make a difference to others. Read it and see what you think. I don’t know what you are doing on Monday. Let’s hope for light to surprise us to enable us not just to get through it but to remember every day it never goes out. 

What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
   "Life is but an empty dream!"
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
   And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
   And the grave is not its goal;
"Dust thou art, to dust returnest,"
   Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
   Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
   Finds us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
   And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
   Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
   In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
   Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
   Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,--act in the living Present!
   Heart within, and God o'erhead!

Lives of great men all remind us
   We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
   Footprints on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
   Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
   Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
   With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing
   Learn to labour and to wait.

Epiphany: are we stuck in the palace?

We have reached the end of our Christmas story: the feast of Epiphany. The Christmas season now has a second part - the story of Jesus now opens itself to all the world. The magi travelling from the East is a reminder the gift of love given to us can be found by everyone. It may take some journeying to find him but the Epiphany story makes it clear it’s worth it. The wise men bowed down and worshipped and then gave the new king the best they could. And so must we.

I read a blog the other day which asked this question: “are we stuck in the palace?”

I wonder whether that is a really good question for us spiritually as we trudge through 2022. Are we open to divine surprise or are we rooted firm to our tradition and what we are comfortable with? Or even worse, do we find this radical new way God works in the world threatening so we lash out in a negative way because we just don’t want our life rocked. It’s easier to be stuck in the palace than to look for stars in the sky showing us a new journey we must take. 

Nadia Bolz Weber, whose writings inspire me and lift me, has a powerful take on the choice we have this Epiphany day. I read her book “Cranky Beautiful Faith” on a national express coach from London to Blackpool on my last sabbatical and it changed my life. Read it and see how contemporary this story is. For God is ahead of us and we can choose to see him or we can try to get rid of him from life… we can even try to do that in our church planning. How frightening is that? 

My picture above is of a very inquisitive Alice cat who just loves the wonder of discovering new places to explore in my untidy study. Can we be like her? Can we journey hopefully, with vision, with patience, with expectation, and let our hearts leap with joy when we catch up with where God is, or will be so obsessed keeping safe and secure in our palace, even though we are unhappy there? Thank you for journeying with  me through this little series of reflections. I hope together we have found God born among us anew… 

Enjoy Nadia below…

An Epiphany Story of 2 Masculinities 

A story of 2 men - 

Herod, who is a ruler on a throne of power, and Joseph who is a peasant in an unconventional marriage. One man is powerful and one man is not. And yet the text only describes one of these men as being afraid. 

And it wasn’t the peasant.

Matthew’s Gospel tells us that King Herod made the Magi tell him where this baby was because he was frightened. 

Frightened of a baby. 

Threatened by a horoscope and a newborn. 

And this fear that his position in life is so tenuous that it must be fortified by sacrificing whoever it takes is not a theoretical by the way - this Herod guy literally killed two of his own sons because he felt threatened by them. 

His own sons. 

Fear that what he had could be taken away, or fear of not getting what he wanted turned him into a monster. So much so that when he can’t quite locate the right baby, the one that is so threatening to him, he just sends for all the children two and under in and around Bethlehem to be killed. 

Take that in. 

This is what fear does.  

This is what fear does. Fear disguises itself in so many ways: as greed, hate, isolation, addiction…the list is endless. But in the end fear is at the root of all of it. And while you and I might not be murderous tyrants, none of us are free from the effects of fear in our lives. It keeps us isolated and small and it steals away joy and possibility.

But in Joseph we see a different kind of man than Herod. Joseph was not afraid.

An angel came from God and spoke love, was love, embodied love, sought to protect love – like a divine can of compressed air, and this cast out Joseph’s fear so that he could function the way he was intended to.  And here’s one clue – one way that we can know that Joseph was not afraid: he didn't bat an eye when the angel said that his baby and wife weren’t safe so he should take his family to Egypt.

Egypt.

The place his ancestors were enslaved. The place that God rescued his people from slavery.

With fear cast out, Joseph was able to believe it possible that God’s redemptive work can happen anywhere - even Egypt. With fear cast out, Joseph no longer had to see everything through the lens of what it was in the past. With fear cast out, he was able to beat a king, protect his wife and child, and preserve that which is good in the face of tyranny. (Just as an aside, we really need to start having better conversations about men. I don’t think that maligning traits that have historically seen as “masculine” is helpful. I want to start lifting up examples of beneficent masculinity, but I digress...)

Herod’s fear caused death and Joseph’s fearlessness protected life. Of course the irony is that Herod feared this baby for all the wrong reasons. The Christ child did not knock Herod off his pathetic little throne. History took care of that.  

No. Jesus of Nazareth did not overthrow Rome, he laughed at Rome. He saw Rome for what it was: temporary. Fleeting. Harsh and demanding and tyrannical, yes, but temporary. 

And this child, protected by the songs of angels and the heart of his mother and the fearlessness of his father, came to free the people.  Free us from the shackles of sin and fear. Gospel people are free people and free people are dangerous people.  Free people aren’t ruled by fear. Free people see Rome for what it is. 

And you know what?

There are angels hovering round us, good people of God.  There are messengers of love all around.  And again, and forever, they say: do not be afraid.  Do not be afraid. For in the heart of God there is enough love to cast out fear. Herods of the world, take note.

Happy Epiphany.