Saturday 26 June 2021

And are we yet alive?





The opening hymn at the annual Methodist Conference which is meeting at the moment begins with the words, ‘And are we yet alive, and see each other’s face?’
The question is a good one to ask ourselves at the moment as individuals and as churches.  ‘And are we yet alive?’  

The whole hymn is worth revisiting:

And are we yet alive,
And see each other's face?
Glory and praise to Jesus give,
For His redeeming grace.

Preserved by power divine
To full salvation here,
Again in Jesus' praise we join,
And in His sight appear.

What troubles have we seen,
What conflicts have we passed,
Fightings without, and fears within,
Since we assembled last.

But out of all the Lord
Hath brought us by His love;
And still He doth His help afford,
And hides our life above.

Then let us make our boast
Of His redeeming power,
Which saves us to the uttermost,
Till we can sin no more.

Let us take up the cross,
Till we the crown obtain;
And gladly reckon all things loss so we may Jesus gain.



Someone suggested to me recently that the Methodist Church has lost its way. Has she? I’m a cradle Methodist, having been brought up in a Methodist chapel where my faith was learnt and nurtured, I’ve been a member of the Methodist Church since I was confirmed in 1983, I was accredited as a Methodist local preacher in 1990, went to train as a Methodist minister in 1994 and was received into the full Connexion of the Methodist Church and ordained 22 years ago this Sunday, at the Methodist Conference which that year was held in Southport, in what was then called the Floral Hall, and my ordination was at Leyland Road Methodist Church. I’ve served in seven Circuits, three of them as Superintendent and I’m still a strong believer that Methodism is still here for a purpose, although I’m also a very strong believer that we are called to ecumenical partnership. Over the last few years I’ve been more and more content in the formal liturgy of the Church of England, especially Evensong - but that’s okay because Mr Wesley was an Anglican and we were never meant to be separate but a movement within that denomination.

“And are we yet alive?” Or have we lost our way or become boring and irrelevant? 
We know the old jokes:

After worship one Sunday a little boy told the minister, “When I grow up, I’m going to give you some money.”

“Well, thank you,” the minister replied, “but why?”

“Because my daddy says you’re one of the poorest preachers we’ve ever had.”


Why was Methodism raised up? It’s not often I quote from CPD!

 The Methodist Church claims and cherishes its place in the Holy Catholic Church which is the Body of Christ. It rejoices in the inheritance of the apostolic faith and loyally accepts the fundamental principles of the historic creeds and of the Protestant Reformation. It ever remembers that in the providence of God Methodism was raised up to spread scriptural holiness through the land by the proclamation of the evangelical faith and declares its unfaltering resolve to be true to its divinely appointed mission.”

So how are we? Alive, or dead and buried?

I’ve nearly left the Methodist Church twice. But something on both of those occasions kept me in it. Both times I needed a church that was relevant and that cared and accepted where I was on life’s journey. For me, the Arminian call of Methodism that all are welcome and accepted is the heart of our message. My Methodism does not exclude. Just count how many times the word “all” is in a Charles Wesley hymn. Charles Wesley first wrote “And are we yet alive” for his 1749 collection, Hymns and Sacred Poems. John Wesley included it in A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodist at the beginning of the section titled, "For the Society... at meeting." Sometime around its appearance in that collection, Wesley began using this hymn at the opening of annual society meetings, a practice that has remained largely in use since. Every year around the world, Methodists gathered together stand and sing the nostalgic strains of Wesley's text, recalling the journey of the last twelve months. So it’s about some sort of annual appraisal, what troubles have we seen etc…

This week, the 2021 Methodist Conference is meeting in Birmingham, and I do see signs we are very much alive both nationally and locally. I want to pay tribute to our outgoing President and Vice President, Richard and Carolyn. They have had a year of office unlike any other, doing most of their leadership of us virtually. But they’ve taken time to be there for us every week in a Facebook live session and have told good news stories of small acts of kindness done by Methodist folk up and down the country and have reminded us that in Wesley’s final words “the best of all is God is with us.” It’s been great to at last hear that the small rural church is alright thank you. For too long, the small chapel with life in it has been threatened by people who just don’t get small chapels! 

Sonia our new President will be a strong advocate of justice, equality and inclusion. She’ll be great fun. We used to sit and laugh together at South East District Superintendents conferences! Barbara our new Vice President has done amazing work with our Methodist schools. I’ve sat when I was part of a Methodist primary school in her training sessions. She’s passionate about children finding faith. 


This year’s Conference will be an important one for the Church of the future as it makes decisions about marriage that will either delight or deeply upset some of our folk. I believe though we are strong enough in fellowship to walk together even if we disagree. I also want to mention what I think is a brilliant bit of our work and that is the Joint Public Issues Team, shared with the Baptist and United Reformed Church. A new focus on working for justice called “Walking with Micah” has just been launched and a few weeks ago some of us watched the first Methodist Justice Lecture given by a very animated Gordon Brown. Are we beginning again to look outwards to a world in need of knowing everyone matters? I think so. And what of our little local churches? “And are we yet alive?” Well, yes we are! I’m beginning to see after ten very strange months in a new Circuit all eight of my churches discovering a different narrative might be being written. It’s not about what we can’t do but what we can. 

I remember my dear Gran who once when we had a visiting preacher in our little chapel who seemed to shut his eyes a lot in his sermon and have very long pauses saying out loud “has he died?!?” We are a smaller and older, in the main, people, but there’s still hope! Just maybe we need to buy new coffee and not rejoice that the coffee in the cupboard we last used in March last year is still in date. Maybe we need to pour the remnants of the opened bottle of communion wine down the sink and buy a new one. Maybe the Methodist Church is believing again that God is calling us to watch for the new thing he is going to do. 

“And are we yet alive?”  What do you think?





Sunday 6 June 2021

Out of the depths








Passage for reflection: Psalm 130


I’ve told you many times that the Psalms is perhaps my favourite part of the Bible. They are a glorious set of 150 prayers, with honest words for every human emotion. In my life they have kept my spiritual flame alight in hard times. When I’ve not had the words to pray, I’ve found listening to the ancient people of God praying, has joined me to them. I am a keen recipient of Anglican Evensong. It’s been so sad to have arrived in a cathedral city and to receive an invitation from the Dean last September to use the cathedral as my safe me and God space, that I’ve not been to Evensong once since we arrived. To place your day, your life, where you are, to the story of the people of God and to hear every night in the Psalm that God is always present even in the mess we find ourselves in, is a wonderful thing. I love that Evensong doesn’t ever leave out the horrible bits of the Psalm, so we are reminded even in the darkest place, God can be found. The Psalmist is good at crying out, and his or her prayers are raw and speak of the reality of life, that let’s face it, life can be shitty! 

Psalm 130 is the Psalm for this Sunday. Here is a desperate cry to the Lord. The Psalmist is in a low and deep place, crying to God: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord; 2 O Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to my cry.” (Psalm 130:1-2)

The depths here portray a place very low down. It’s a water image, a picture of the ocean depths. There is similar imagery in Psalm 124, in one of the earlier Psalms of Ascent: “The flood would have engulfed us … the raging waters would have swept us away.” (Psalm 124:4-5) This speaks of when you hit rock bottom and you realize you can’t fix this on your own. The Message version says: “Help God – the bottom has fallen out of my life!” The depths can be a place of deep and personal pain.

But even in this place we can praise God.

Corrie Ten Boom, a Dutch Christian, was sent to a Nazi concentration camp during World War II Germany for hiding Jews in her home. Corrie said: “There is no pit so deep, that God’s love is not deeper still.” And we need to remember that when the bottom falls out in our lives, God is still there. When we cry out to him from the depths, He will hear and He reaches into these depths because His love is deep. And his love reaches out to us wherever we find ourselves. 

The overwhelming experiences of bereavement and isolation that many have endured during the pandemic have added a new poignancy to the first verse of this psalm: ‘Out of the depths I cry to you O Lord.’

Many people reach out to God especially when they are at their lowest ebb, and it’s wonderful that we can do so. But I found this in a commentary: “We should not just file away Psalms like this for a rainy day. Lament psalms, although very common in the Psalter, are perhaps not made as much as they should be as a general resource for prayer. This might be because we believe that feelings of negativity should have no place in the life of faith, and we think it somehow unseemly to seem vulnerable before God.”

I’ll always be grateful to my Old Testament tutor at Hartley Victoria College, David Wood, who taught us the importance of lament in the worship and prayer life of God’s people. Aren’t there times we come to worship after being in the depths all week? Aren’t there occasions in life, we just want to look God in the eye and say “it’s not okay today.” Isn’t there a need for us to place where we find ourselves before God, honestly. We don’t do honesty. It’s all about this not wanting to appear vulnerable or weak, so when someone asks us how we are we say “I’m fine” even though we aren’t. Yet God unlike those around us who run away when we need to share our rawness, mysteriously comes to our cries and in his time cares for us enough to bring us out of the depths and back to life in all its fullness and joy. 

Jonathan Aitken was sent to prison after some dodgy dealings in public life. While in prison he found a faith, and after release studied theology and is now an Anglican priest. He wrote a lovely little book called “Psalms for People under Pressure. Here’s an extract:

There was an incident right at the end of my prison sentence that served as a good illustration of the universality of the appeal in the Psalms. My friends in our prayer (or fellowship) group, as it began to be known, asked me to give a valedictory talk on Psalm 130 two weeks before my release date. The event was advertised on various notice boards. As a result, the attendance swelled beyond the usual Christian suspects. Indeed, there was a general astonishment when just before I got up to speak, we were joined in the prison chapel by no less a personage than The Big Face. Every prison has among its inmates a head honcho called “The Big Face.” The term originally derives from the time when notorious criminals had their faces plastered on “Wanted” posters. Nowadays, it was for the most feared and ferocious prisoner in the jail. Our Big Face was an old style gangland boss, coming towards the end of a lifer’s tariff for a string of revenge killings. As the old Wild West saying has it, he was not a man to go to the well with. His unexpected arrival at our fellowship group made several people distinctly nervous, not least the speaker.”

“I began my address by saying that this Psalm had made a great impact on me throughout my prison journey. I had come to believe that it might have a great message for anyone suffering in the depths. I mentioned that it was not only my favorite Psalm, it also happened to be the favourite Psalm of Augustine, Luther, and Calvin. The Big Face nodded gravely at this. Towards the end of my exegesis, I noticed that The Big Face was visibly moved. Tears were trickling down his cheeks as he listened in deep concentration. As I finished with a prayer, he joined in with a booming “Amen.” A few moments later, he drew me aside. “John-o,” he said, “That there Psalm was beautiful, real beautiful. Got to me ‘eart, it did. And I want to ask you a favor. Do you think you could come over to my cell on a wind tomorrow night and say your piece over again? I’ve got a couple of me best mates it would mean a real lot to.” I may have looked a little anxious at the prospect of spending an evening in the company of The Big Face and two of his closest associates. Sensing my hesitation, he enlarged his invitation. “And, John-o, to make yourself feel comfortable, why don’t you bring a couple of your mates along with you? I mean, how about bringing those geezers you said liked the Psalm so much? Augustus, and What’s-it, too, if they’re friends of yours in the B-Wing.” Although I was unable to produce Augustine, Calvin, and Luther as my companions, Psalm 130 went down well second time round in The Big Face’s cell. Although this surprised me at the time, the more I’ve come to know the Psalms the less they surprise me in their power to speak to a wide variety of people and situations. How I wish I had discovered their spiritual riches earlier in life.”

Remember despite where he finds him or herself, the Psalmist is confident that God will do something. So what’s the next step after venting of the spleen a bit, it is waiting. Waiting here is not negative or wasted time, it is an intentional time of focus towards God. It is a deliberate reliance on the power of God to sort this out this horrible place I find myself. “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.” It’s quite interesting actually: in Hebrew the word for wait and hope is the same word! It’s the same: you can’t wait unless you’re hoping for something, and if you don’t hope you give up waiting. If there’s nothing to hope for, I stop waiting! But if there is something to hope for, then I can wait. And I can wait because I’m waiting on the Lord. It’s what prayer is. We listen from where we are for the voice of God leading us to where he would have us be. That’s what God is like! So let me end with a verse of a hymn which I’m beginning my service at Sawley chapel with on Sunday afternoon. The God the Psalmist knows comes into the depths and turns our disorientation and despair into direction and hope. 

For the love of God is broader than the measures of the mind. And the heart of the Eternal is most wonderfully kind.”