Reflections from Manchester - Work

I know I don't do a proper job but today I hsve been thinking about those who do. I came past this massive mill of the past at Kearsley this afternoon. It dominates the area - a symbol of the might of an industrial age that transformed this region I am visiting. Everyone went to work there, the conditions were grim, but there was no alternative. It was hard work. 

The world of work is perhaps no less stressful today. I watch, for example, teachers, stressed with targets and government standards; I watch people who commute every day from Sussex into London working all hours, hardly seeing family in the week.  I watch prospective MPs who say they are listening to the workers. Are they really? 

I worked in my first appointment in a Lancashire mill town. Life was simple, if hard. There was a certain amount of cotton to spin each day but no appraisals or targets or job insecurity. Some of my elderly ladies were very deaf from years of working by machinery, but in the main, they were content and they valued the cameradery of the mill life they shared. 

Tonight I have been out at Media City and have watched people unwind with colleagues after a long working week. The context is different but perhaps the pressure is as great.

What has the church to say to the world of work now its membership is largely retired? I have friends who are workplace chaplains but I should be able to relate to this world. Perhaps it needs more conversations with people in work about what they face. Perhaps the Church needs to be more in the middle of work then expecting people who work long hours to come to meetings at night! 

 Much to ponder! 

Reflections from Manchester : Togetherness

I am on quarter days leave in Manchester. Manchester for some reason feels like home to me. I trained here, served my first appointment here and a lot of my closest friends are in reach of here, so I am always glad to come back. I feel connected to the place. 

Today I have been reflecting on togetherness and the power of being together. It is easy to feel outside. I am staying at a hotel which belongs to Lancashire County Cricket Club. I was surrounded at breakfast by people talking about cricket. I know nothing about cricket. I was outside, excluded. Eating toast in what felt like a private club.

My first stop today was the excellent People's History Museum. A wonderful exhibition on General Elections trying to get people to see we have a collective responsibility to vote and make a difference and to challenge apathy. There are too many people who say "shan't bother voting, it won't make any difference." I looked at images of Peterloo and the suffragette movement and was deeply moved. The democratic process needs us to remember we together can make a change and it is a privilege when people have fought for it and some places still haven't got it. 

I then sat on the grass by Cheethams school. I watched people enjoying being together. The sun brought people out and it was lovely to see. 

At lunchtime I went for communion in the cathedral which was lovely. There were only four of us there plus the priest and verger but we shared the peace as strangers but somehow, for a few seconds, it brought us together powerfully. 

This afternoon I called en route to Ashton, on the Etihad Stadium complex, home of my team City. It is good to have a common cause to cheer (or lament over!) City supporters know pain. We don't want Mr Van Gaal and his chums to finish above us but it is looking likely. Sticking to a cause, supporting in adversity can bring you closer together.

My friend and I had a long discussion about Pellegrini and Yaya Toure in the pub tonight!

Returning to Ashton this afternoon was interesting. A Circuit that taught me lots about togetherness and working out community together. The town looked very rundown and in need of some tlc. I hope there are people working together how to improve things. It was good for me to meet with a close friend of some 18 years over dinner. We meet when I come up and it is Like we have never been apart. Relationships are a privilege and a reminder we are meant to be in community. This week I hsve been single for two years and I thank God for my friends - more of who I will connect with over the next two days. 

What about togetherness spiritually?  Jesus bond people together as a team and encouraged them to be together with a common purpose. The disciples post crucifixion huddled together  supporting each other. Eventually together they formed a church using their gifts in appropriate ways. The exhibition at the museum this morning challenged me that together we can make a  difference. We are made to be together. I recall a wonderful book by the American commentator Jim Wallis, in which he says to people moaning on their own about stuff to get on with it together  -  "maybe we are the ones we have been waiting for." We can make a difference together -  a friendship; a cause; a vote; a church.  I reflect as I write this Question Time is on the hotel bar television - an example of shouting the other down. Sometimes togetherness is so hard...

Despite that I thank God tonight for being part of friendships and community. Together we can make a difference if we can be bothered! After three hours  with my friend I feel better.  The same can be true as we face life.   

Reflection for Easter Sunday - From hurt through healing to hope

Do you remember that wonderful Vicar of Dibley scene where the Christmas Eve Communion is imminent and she is in the vicarage panicking, staring at a picture of Jesus and she says to Jesus, “biggest gig of the year, absolutely no ideas at all.” 

I needed to prepare some thoughts to share at a Circuit Service tonight. I have introduced a Circuit Service once a quarter and have challenged people to come out tonight. We shall see!

After lunch, I went out and bought three things – a radio times, and two Sunday newspapers – to get a balanced view of things. In one Nicola Sturgeon is going to get us a Labour and friends government. In the other she is going to get us a Conservative and friends government. Or something!

Reading the papers and looking at write ups in the television listings about soaps, we don’t know how things are going to end. Take your soaps – you know I love my soaps – Coronation Street, which I dip in and out of, teenage Faye giving birth, frightened. We don’t know how motherhood will affect her and those around her. Neighbours – Amber and Daniel, about to get married.  Daniel has fallen down a hole and to make it complicated he is down the hole with Imogen who is secretly in love with him and jealous of Amber (I missed the episode which told me how they fell down a hole so it’s a bit confusing!) We don’t know how it will all end. Wedding or no wedding?

Eastenders – Kat has taken an overdose as life has become too much. Alfie, her soul mate and husband, has come to her aid and the paramedics have been called. Will they get back together? They’ve been separated since he set fire to the house for an insurance scam not knowing she was in it. Emmerdale – I don’t do Emmerdale, but I know Laurel has a drink problem. Is that right?

Then there’s Mr Selfridge which ended last week, where nothing much happens apart from someone moving from accessories to haberdashery, but last week Miss Mardle and Mr Grove finally got it together and Mr Selfridge finally found out he’d been tricked out of all his money investing in what was never to be a real scheme of homes for returning soldiers from the war. What will happen next? We don’t know.

Easter begins with a not knowing what will happen next. We know the end, and we’ve celebrated the end this morning with Easter breakfasts and praise services and dressing crosses with spring colour. We know the end – Christ is risen, he is risen indeed. Alleluia. But despite Jesus telling them some time before all the events that they had been caught up and had fled from, that it would end on the third day with him rising, they had forgotten that, and the Easter story begins for the disciples in uncertainty and in confusion and fear.

I want to suggest tonight Easter is a process. Easter is a pastoral journey we all need to take. Easter can transform us as Christians, as churches, as a Circuit, if we relive the emotions of it, maybe as though we do not know how it will end. A journey out of darkness and uncertainty, towards joy and assurance, and then to a sharing of it with others.

I see a journey of three stages in John 20: 19 - 23

First, let’s say before we get to the end, it begins in utter devastation does Easter. Imagine you were one of Jesus friends gathered in that room described in John’s Gospel. How is it going to end? You’ve chosen to run, to hide so it didn’t end bloodily for him like it did for him. Jesus has been your hero, guide, mentor and lord but now he is dead. You are distraught as you try to come to terms with what has happened. The events surrounding Jesus’ arrest and death were so traumatic, that there is a good chance that the disciples were in shock.

There is no evidence from the gospels that they expected Jesus to come back to life and so that room must have been one of absolute despair.

There are days, and longer periods in life sometimes we feel like the disciples. Maybe we have had to walk away from a project that has failed; maybe we had to leave something or someone because it was bad for us but we have now no idea what will come next for us; maybe we have had a long period of illness, or have cared for someone not knowing what the future holds; maybe someone has left us and life feels very empty as we adapt to being alone, in shock and confusion. Maybe we have, and people we share in our churches week by week have, but never tell us, days of sorrow where hope feels far away.

And all we can do is hide away, retreat into a safe space to recover and to think.

Remember on Easter evening they did not know the end, they were in grief, trying to work out how life would be for them. The end of the project they had left everything for, was failure.

We have sung today hymns that tell us Jesus’ death opened the way for us to know God. God has won and death is defeated but from the disciples perspective it looked like God had lost. Sometimes, life feels like that as we look around us at the chaos in the world and wonder where God is and what he is doing. Sometimes when we are really going through tough times, we can also wonder where God is.

Easter healing and hope starts there. We begin to reflect on what God is doing with us and his world as he redeems in Christ the sadness, the darkness and the pain. The death, the tomb, the abandonment is real, but God comes into those things and conquers them. It is God’s greatest act, and God’s greatest surprise. Step one of the Easter process, moving out of devastation. It is into devastation the risen Jesus enters.

Secondly, Easter is about receiving peace. In the Bible there are two permanent outpourings of the Holy Spirit.

The more famous one is in Acts chapter 2, which is outside and very loud.

The one in the Gospel for tonight is inside, to a group in dire need of pastoral sensitivity and much quieter. I warmed to an article about this called “Pentecost for Introverts” as I am one of them myself and I don’t like noise or huge gatherings. 

Revisit the scene. How it is going to end?

The door is locked because they are scared that the same people who put their Lord to death will be after them also. The doors are bolted shut…the shutters are pulled over the windows. They are nervous at what the next knock on the door could mean.

Suddenly Jesus is in their midst. He says to them, “Peace be with you.” They are still not sure who this is standing before them.

But then Jesus shows them his hands, where he had been nailed to the cross. He shows them his side where the spear had pierced him. They recognize him and are glad, saying, “It is the Lord!”

Then Jesus says it again, “Peace be with you. As the Father sent me, now I send you.” In other words,

“What I have done in my life is now up to you to continue; it is up to you to carry forth the work I have started.” And then a strange thing happens—Jesus breathes on them. He breathes on them and quietly says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

There is no big, violent wind… no crackling tongues of fire… no babble of foreign languages. There is just Jesus breathing on his followers. “Peace be with you.”

Do you need that peace tonight? Do you need that quiet breath of reassurance and confidence that Jesus is here? Our churches cannot do anything unless we have that peace and that commissioning. We need on Easter Sunday to take in and let Jesus come and minister to us. We need to receive before we plan and we give. The beginning of how it will end is the receiving of the gifts of Jesus coming into our situations.

Perhaps each of our churches needs to have a more regular commitment to gathering together in expectation that Jesus will come into our room of uncertainty and he can help us. He gets what we are going through, he understands our problems, he comes and wants to get involved with us. We need to let him in far more, else we become merely a club which doffs its hat to him now and again but most of the time struggles on stubbornly on our way. How will it end? The end is more assured if we receive what he can offer.

And finally, Easter comes with a commission. Gerard Manley Hopkins in one of his works has this phrase “Let him Easter in us” – Easter is a verb, something to do. Perhaps this is the test of how well we receive Easter, can it be seen in our attitude and in our willingness to share it in the places we are called to be. The biggest thing people outside the church want to see is a church that makes a difference and actually practices what it says it believes.

Two things on Good Friday hit me really about this. An unfortunate lack of punctuation in the Rye News on line report about our walk of witness suggested that we were remembering Jesus death which was organised by Churches Together! Churches causing Jesus death. Then during Olivet to Calvary, one of our local friends, rather the worse for wear after a few cans, enjoying singing Just as I am rather loudly, but what really was good for the sermon illustration box was when Maunder’s piece has the choir sing powerfully about crucify him, crucify him, he shouted at these good Christian people in the choir, “whose side are you on?!” Confused that inside the church we seemed to be wanting to contribute to Jesus suffering.

 But you know the end of the story can be just that if we don’t receive him, we don’t believe him, we don’t share him. When Jesus says receive the Holy Spirit he is giving his friends the power and energy of which he is the source, a continuance in them of the life he brought to people in the same state as they began Easter, confused and bewildered. And remember that the commission might mean sorting some things out – read the end of the passage again.

In that house in Jerusalem, they received the Holy Spirit.

And that group became the church—yes, they became the church…worshipping God, studying scripture, praying, and seeking to do God’s will. They became the church, going out and serving other people — weeping with those who weep, rejoicing with those who rejoice, sharing one another’s burdens, emptying their pockets for other people’s children, sitting up all night with a distraught friend, providing shelter for the homeless, praying faithfully for the helpless. The church of which we are a part tonight. You know we are asking over the next few months each church to think seriously about what it is going as a response to Jesus. List what you are doing. What is your mission and your vision? Then we will think about what help you need to achieve it, and we will together become a supportive unit as a Circuit as we celebrate God’s work here as a partnership and as a team, supporting each other where some need support and celebrating with others who are doing some wonderful things. What is our Circuit about? It is about rejoicing together the new life of Christ, breathing peace into our communities, and celebrating a positive end to the story.

Only when the breath of God breathes into us can we be the church Jesus created us to be.

Let me end these thoughts about how it will end with some words from Tom Wright, who when Bishop of Durham visited in Holy Week one week, the parish of Easington Colliery, one of the most deprived parts of Britain following the closure of the pits. He preached a Holy Week series which was then put in a little book called “The Cross and the Colliery” – words about how we contribute to a good how it will end up. “Jesus began his work of new creation with one or two very puzzled women and a few frightened fishermen. God seems to take special pleasure in doing things despite the fact that the human resources seem slim, not to say grossly inadequate. What matters is, more prayer and more parties. More knocking on God’s door to see what he wants us to be doing, and more celebrations of God’s new creation, both here in church and wherever else you can. We plant seeds of hope, and the point about planting seeds is that you have no idea what they will do when they come up. What we do know is that Jesus Christ has risen from the dead, and that God’s new creation has begun.”  It begins in a room, and it still transforms today, even, right here, in us and through us.

Only when the breath of God breathes into us can we be the church Jesus created us to be.

The Easter process, from hurt, to healing, to hope and healthy churches.

Reflection for Holy Saturday - Waiting

I am sitting here waiting for my friends to arrive, who are coming for a day to "do Rye"! Two of my three services for tomorrow are written. The third will be written after "The Voice" final... YEAH! (Sorry, have loved Sir Tom this series!) 

The Rector in Rye said to me yesterday, exasperated at the number of services he still had to take, "at least you don't, like me, have something tomorrow." Methodists don't do Holy Saturday but perhaps we are missing something in not having something today. 

Today, spiritually, is about being confident in the waiting, of acknowledging waiting as a time of strengthening, even if it is a time of confusion and you haven't a clue what to do, paralysed by circumstances, that mean all you can do is wait. 

When I was very seriously ill in 2011 and off work for four months unable to breathe very easily and unable to talk very much or walk very far, I had a lot of waiting time. A major illness is frightening because you don't know where it is going to end. You wait for the thing to get better. In my waiting time, once I had got over the anger of being ill, and the frustration of not being able to do things, I learnt that in the waiting, there could come peace, it could be having time to read, it could be valuing little things. My cat had never sat on my lap until I was stuck on a sofa all day. Now sitting on my lap is part of her demands each day! You also learn in a waiting time what is important and what is not. Often people who fall ill due to rushing about, learn afterwards the things that they need to do and what things don't need so much energy. 

I am trying today to get my mind round how those disciples were feeling post crucifixion. They had fled to safety, but they were direction-less. They had given up everything for what was now in their minds a failed project. What were they waiting for? A sign maybe of what to do next. Often when we get bad news, we need someone to help us work out the next step. Rushing into a decision can be unhealthy. There is a numbness physically in the waiting, I know at the moment of people waiting for tests and test results, feeling sick until they know what is wrong with them, of people who have recently been bereaved, adjusting to life, thinking about whether to move or not, waiting for what is the right thing to do but lacking energy to make any decisions, of people who have been made redundant, having space to work out what comes next, of people in the church whose blood pressure is rising because waiting for action is too hard for them, they want results now. 

My experience of churches that have gone on to grow is that they waited. Sometimes it isn't the right time to do new things, or make decisions after a major event like a faithful member dying for example. Communities of faith that are healthy wait, wait on God's timing, spend time in the silence, not knowing, waiting for divine help, looking for hope in the uncertainty. 

Last week on retreat, I spent a lot of time waiting. Waiting in creation's beauty, waiting in silence, listening only to the sounds of nature around me, waiting without pressure of a phone or computer and even apart from times for dinner, any time constraints. How do we use waiting times more positively? It is hard for us who always want to rush on and get to a destination. 

Maybe Jesus waits to rise to allow us some breathing space, to recover from the shock of Good Friday. Maybe with some space and some reflective time, we will be more open to encounter him when he comes. As my picture says we are waiting for someone worth waiting for. 

Often when we have to wait for something, we value it more. So let's have, even if we don't do it in a church today, a day of positive waiting. 

"Waiting for God is an active, alert, yes, joyful waiting. As we wait we remember him for whom we are waiting, and as we remember him, we create a community ready to welcome him when he comes. " Henri Nouwen. 

Reflection for Good Friday: Reacting to the Cross

Good Friday has to provoke a reaction in us. Imagine you were there on that Friday, watching from a distance. Imagine coming home and writing a diary entry. What does seeing Jesus on the cross do to you? What will you do with Jesus called the Messiah? Will you like the crowd at Pilate’s question, shout “Crucify him!” Is he too much trouble for you, unsettling your life, your plans, your church even? Is he offering you a religion that is too radical, his claim to be God too much? 

What will you do with Jesus called the Messiah?

Will you run away like most of the disciples, too scared to hang around, a cross too bloody, too nasty to even look at. A lot of people stay away from church today.

They don’t want to think about murder, and blood and death. I got the children at St Helens last Sunday to shout the words of Holy Week. We shouted Hosanna first, then I wanted them to shout Crucify. Evelyn said “I don’t want to” and so she didn’t. She told me it was too sad. We want to walk away from the horror of crucifixion and not be involved. What will you do with Jesus called the Messiah? Abandon him. Alone, abandoned, forsaken, Jesus dies on the cross. Alone, because we walk away, turn our backs.

We want to make our cross look pretty and look nice, but a crucified man should shock us, barbarically got rid of in this way. We’d rather not be there.

What will you do with Jesus called the Messiah? Perhaps on this Good Friday you will stay with him, you will stand with him, you will let him love you, for here, on this cross is how far in love God is prepared to go to convince us we are worth something. Perhaps on this Good Friday you will see a Jesus who identifies with the world and its pain because he is in the world and suffers the pain with the world.       

He is crucified not once but today, many times. The Iona book of reflections I have been using in my own quiet times this week says in the reading for today: “Crucifixion – we shouldn’t be too surprised – we shouldn’t really be altogether shocked, either.

I mean it’s what we do, you know, to the pure in heart, to the folk naïve enough to think that their one brave act can change a system, bring down an unjust empire, and make a difference in the course of history. They are crucified, not just stopped, or silenced, or shut down, but crushed, humiliated, made an example of, power does not like to be challenged. This story is harrowing because it is so familiar.” What will you do with Jesus called the Messiah? Can you offer a God to a world that is crucifying others, a God who knows what it is to suffer, a God who suffers but who will have the last word.

What will you do with Jesus the Messiah? Will you stand at the cross this morning and worship him? Will you understand how much he gets what you are going through, and knows what people you meet are going through, bereavement, tragedy, sudden pain, uncertainty, questions, doubt, fear, abandonment. Will you in your church offer this Jesus to others, a God who walks with people. We call Jesus Emmanuel at Christmas, God is with us. We should call him that today – God is with us right where we are, where the pain is, and he transforms that pain having entered it. Today is not about some wishy washy nicey nice Christian sweetness that denies the reality of the world. Today reminds us that real Christianity costs. People need to know it can deal with hard complicated stuff.

I watched the Leaders Debate last night, and then got into a huge Facebook debate with my friends because I suggested that Nicola Sturgeon was the most down to earth, natural, credible, genuine of the bunch. I know her SNP views. I wasn’t commenting on her policies. I was commenting about someone maybe who lived real life rather than spouting at us from on high. Real leadership has to be messy and has to suffer to understand the messy suffering people around it. On Radio 4, at 3pm this afternoon, when they always do a powerful half hour programme, there are testimonies of staying in the suffering – someone in West Africa staying despite the Ebola virus and people in Eyam in Derbyshire during the plague. It is easier to be aloof or to scarper.

I pray on Good Friday we will be prepared to stand by Jesus. By his dying, we are brought into relationship with God. By his dying, we are cared for where we are. By his dying, the price of our mistakes has been paid. We go forward and we anticipate Easter but first we have to stop here and consider who Jesus is and what we will do with him as a church.

I always like to read Jurgen Moltmann in Holy Week. He talks about hope this week and why today is called Good.

“The ultimate reason for our hope is not to be found at all in what we want, wish for and wait for; the ultimate reason is that we are wanted and wished for and waited for. What is it that awaits us? Does anything await us at all, or are we alone?

Whenever we base our hope on trust in the divine mystery, we feel deep down in our hearts: there is someone who is waiting for you, who is hoping for you, who believes in you. We are waited for as the prodigal son in the parable is waited for by his father. We are accepted and received, as a mother takes her children into her arms and comforts them. God is our last hope because we are God's first love.”

Pilate said “what do you want me to do with Jesus called the Messiah?” On Good Friday, your answer to that question matters.

O Lord and Master Jesus Christ, Word of the Everlasting Father, you have borne our grief and carried the burden of our human frailty, by the power of your Holy Spirit renew in your church gifts of healing and send out your disciples again to preach the Gospel of your Kingdom, to heal the sick, and to relieve the sufferings of your children, to the praise and glory of your holy name.

By your passion protect us, by your wounds heal us, by your death, raise us up, and bring us to life eternal. Amen.

(David Adam) 

Maundy Thursday and a Leaders Debate

There is a General Election in five weeks’ time. You might have noticed. I am bombarded already with leaflets and e-mails. David Cameron has written to me personally, that was very kind of him. The BBC news channel offers me an “election tonight” programme, highlights of the squabbling of the day. We are asked to think about leadership and what sort of leadership we want to run our country. I have caught some of the Leaders Debate tonight. Is it wrong to ask if I can vote for Nicola Sturgeon?! She, for me, came across as the most genuine of the leaders. So much blame on the others or set answers from so many of them. 

“Five more years of him, we are heading for disaster.”

“Trust him with the economy, you will be sorry.”

“The NHS will be in threat if you trust what he says”

“He only has one policy!”

What sort of leader do we need?

A group of church stewards met. Their leader, their minister, banging her head against a wall with them, was told “we want leadership”! So, she went to their meeting to suggest what they might do to progress as a team and build their church. “But we don’t want a minister who tells us what to do!” they cried, wanting only to keep things as they are, unthreatened, unchallenged, a nice club for them.

What sort of leader do we need?

Remember at Passover, Jerusalem was full of expectation about leadership. The Messiah of God would come and lead the people, with power and strength and restore the fortunes of the chosen of God. We want a leader who will do what we want. Fulfil our expectations, and er, not challenge us too much.

Or, we want a leader we will agree with and support when they are appointed or voted for but then we will soon moan about everything they try and do, and hope the next one will be more to our liking.

What sort of leader do we need?

Jesus, on this holy night, invites us to reconsider what Christian leadership is all about, and we might not like what he says. This Holy Week is a week of challenge for us if we do it properly, we are invited to have an overhaul of our attitude. It isn’t about what we want or want we like, it isn’t about being comfortable and unchallenged, it is about a new way of being: servant leadership, literally kneeling upon the ground and actually getting dirty.

What sort of leader do we need? A dirty one? Really?

The greatest among you must be your servant.

What? To lead we must serve. Surely not?

Someone said to me the other day they like it when I bring ordinary stuff into sermons – people I meet, or things I watch on television or at the cinema. Well, here’s first my Downton Abbey illustration. The servants at Downton know their place, indeed, now some of them are discovering there is life beyond service, Mr Carson, the head servant doesn’t like it. Servanthood for him is a call. It is a privilege to serve in the big house. Several generations ago, our relatives might have been “in service” -  but maybe today we wouldn’t want to spend our whole life at the beck and call of others, dressing them, feeding them, being summoned by a bell to them.

I went to see the new Disney version of Cinderella at the cinema on Monday. It is really good. Cate Blanchett as the wicked stepmother is brilliant. She had to have a dialect coach so stepmother didn’t have an Australian accent I guess. You know the story – Cinderella is confined to the attic, dehumanised and made to serve. Not allowed to sit at her step family’s table. Not noticed even.

I don’t want to be a servant leader, Jesus, because it involves smelly feet – yuk!

Remember in the dust of Jerusalem hosts provided water for the feet of their travelling guests and sometimes even provided a slave to do the washing.  It was all the more important in an age when the guests at table reclined, displaying their dirty feet for all to see – and smell.

Imagine you were one of the disciples in the Upper Room when Jesus himself acts the part of the household slave doing the washing. 

What sort of leader can I be?

The gospels recount tales of the disciples’ squabbles for power and their arguments as to who was the greatest among them. On one occasion Jesus placed a child before these disciples and told them that the least among them was the greatest, and yet even then they still did not stop squabbling. James and John attempted to use their mother to reserve them places of honour at the right and left sides of Christ, and yet, when Christ eventually entered the city of Jerusalem for his coronation his crown was made of thorns and the places to his right and left went to two condemned men, the dregs of society. James did not attend the event, running away with most of the rest of the disciples. No wonder Jesus got exasperated with them so often!

Perhaps the heart of Christian ministry, Christian discipleship, if disciple means one who learns, therefore learning from Jesus, is this – we must if we are going to show Christianity to people today, take our towel, tie it round us, take a jug and a basin of water, pour water into the basin, and stoop down and wash feet. We are to be the servants of the servant king, who came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many. 

I will vote for a politician who washes feet.

I would be attracted to a church which put feet washing in community and in fellowship over comfortable unthreatening safety.

I want to follow a leader who knows what is it like to be dirty, messy, smelly, understands real life and pain and leads from the bottom up, not dominating from the top down. That’s the sort of leader we need. And his name is Jesus.

So great an impression did this sort of leadership make on the early Church remember – theologians trying to work out the significance of the person of Christ, the earliest writings suggest Jesus was someone very different from anything that had come before. Philippians 2, that beautiful hymn: Jesus as though by nature God, did not count equality with God as something to be grasped at, held onto, but he emptied himself, and took the form of a servant.

And we are to follow him tonight. Follow him to a cross, to sacrifice, to substitution, to love beyond words and understanding. The servant king.

And we need to radically rethink our churches as we do this night, living this new commandment, loving one another as he has loved us. We have to be prepared to let Jesus serve us, and then we have to be prepared to serve ourselves.

Stephen Cherry wrote a lovely book a few years ago called “Barefoot Disciple” – it was the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent Book in 2011. He says we have to be prepared to have our feet washed. Remember Peter could not get his head around that. “Having your feet washed is all about receiving. What makes it difficult is that we cannot receive this gift without adjusting in a profound and deep way.” Let this leader lead you like this tonight, minister to you, come to your deepest need, wash away your crud and dirt and make you clean. Let this leader help you start again, believing in you. The one who serves has come to serve… you. “Unless you let me wash you, you can have no share with me.”

But be aware, he then invites you, if you take his leadership seriously then to do the same. Not just in our town here supporting the Food Bank, or working in it. Not just supporting Street Pastors or offering to be one or a prayer pastor. But through pastoral sensitivity, standing up for injustice, showing Jesus’ love where it is needed most, not wanting your own way, or to feel important. Making a difference by being a servant where you are called to be.

What sort of leader do we need? And if we need a servant leader, will we be radical enough to get dirty and make a difference?

Let me end with some words of a hymn I find powerful:

Lord, you call us to your service, each in our own way. Some to caring, loving, healing; some to preach, or pray; some to work with quiet learning, truth discerning, day by day.

Life for us is always changing in the work we share. Christian love adds new dimensions to the way we care. For we know that you could lead us, as you need us, anywhere.

Seeing life from your perspective makes your challenge plain, as your heart is grieving over those who live in pain. Teach us how, by our compassion, you may fashion hope again.

Lord, we set out human limits on the work we do. Send us your directing Spirit, pour your power through, that we may be free in living  and in giving all for you.

What sort of leader do we need? And if we get that sort, what will it mean for us? “Then Jesus poured water in to the basin, and began to wash the disciples feet, and to wipe them with the towel with which he was wearing… then Jesus said to them, “You call me teacher and Lord; rightfully so, for so I am.  If then, the Lord and Teacher washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.  For I gave you an example that you also should do as I did for you.”