The Rev Richard Coles, Anglican Vicar and broadcaster, has just retired from active parish ministry and has moved to the South Downs in East Sussex. He was recently asked what he plans to do in retirement. He said “take time to notice things.”
When we see something exciting we react positively to it. A sunset, bumping into someone we haven’t seen in ages in the supermarket, a tv programme that draws us into its content and keeps our attention, a point or two for the UK at Eurovision, a pot of lemon meringue pie in the freezer at Minskip Farm Shop which I went ooh at, but it was just like eating a pot of sugar! So never again; a poster in a window that invites us to join something or go to something we hadn’t known about before. When we are out in the countryside or by the sea we notice the beauty of the world around us. My late Auntie Doris used to sit in the passenger seat of a car while out and notice things and say very loudly, “look at that!” To which my late Uncle Bob would begin to respond and be slapped down with a curse “ don’t you look, Bob!” My late aunt and uncle really were like Hyacinth Bucket and her poor husband Richard, if you remember Keeping Up Appearances.
When’s the last time you got really excited about seeing something, noticing something that just makes your heart leap with joy? Families who live apart from each other who have recently met perhaps some travelling from a different country to this one haven’t been able to see each other physically for over two years. How might such a reunion feel? When I was minister in Lancashire we used to have regular coach trips with church to Blackpool. What do you do when you approach Blackpool? You shout “ Tower!” when you see it. The sabbatical before this last one I did some writing about traditions. Remember some of the mill towns went en masse to Blackpool when they had wakes week and all the mills were shut down for a week.
Here’s a quote from “The Blackpool Tower: A Seaside Icon”: “The Mass-Observation research group in the 1930s recorded that working-class visitors often described the effect of their first view of the tower from the train journey to Blackpool. It created great excitement, confirmed that you were on holiday and was a sign of the ‘other world’ of pleasure about to be entered where the ‘cotton and factory chimney are finished with’. Just like the Eiffel Tower, the distant view of Blackpool’s tower was what transformed an essentially utilitarian structure into a ornament of the town, the oriental iron crown being the most potent symbol of entering another world, one that reversed the normal associations of the factory chimneys of visitors’ home towns.” How exciting to notice something that gives you joy and life.
“Take time to notice things.” I’m taking the Church Anniversary service at Sawley chapel on Sunday evening. The chapel was opened on Wednesday 20 May 1924 at a cost of £1650. Methodist presence began in the village in 1817 in a building on Lowgate Lane but 107 years later it was too small. Now we’ve the problem some of our Methodist buildings are too big and expensive to run! And some Methodist congregations are leaving buildings behind and hiring rooms in village halls and community centres. But Sawley is still here and this weekend we celebrate 205 years of Methodism and 98 years of witness out of our building. What we will do for our centenary in two years time? There would have been much to notice as the new chapel began to be built. Was there excitement in the village? What did that first congregation who gathered in May 1924 look like? What were the big issues of the day? Ramsay MacDonald was the Prime Minister. The first ever Labour government. What was on his agenda?
The designers of the chapel decided to put a text from Psalm 100 at the front of the chapel that you can’t help but notice as you gather for worship: “Enter into his courts with praise.” It’s the whole point of why we come. And think how many have sat and thought about those words generations before us, in 1924, through world war, at times of uncertainty and times of celebration: “ Know that the Lord is God, it is he who made us and we are his, we are his people and the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise, give thanks to him and bless his name. For the Lord is good, and his loving kindness endures forever, his faithfulness continues to all generations.”
Psalm 84 is part of what we call the psalms of assent. These psalms would have been sung as people journeyed on foot to the temple and climbed up to it. A sight of it was exciting. How great to be able to come to worship and meet the living God. “Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere, I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God then dwell in the tents of the wicked.” So we come to be still and to notice what God is doing in his world and with us every time we meet as church together.
But what sort of Anniversary will chapels like Sawley celebrate in the future? I’m doing a major church review in another of my churches on Sunday afternoon and asking the folk who gather to ponder what sort of church they will be in 2027, five years time. Or even ten years time in 2032. It is a bit scary that and I suspect I’ll get laughter that I dare to ask the question. But you know what, God is working his purpose out as year succeeds to year. And maybe just maybe we’ve stopped taking time to notice God and we’ve stopped being expectant in our worship and that God might even be noticed out in the world. We dare to put God in a box and bring him out like the best china now and again… we’ve forgotten that God in Jesus is found in mess.
So we need to take notice again. Moses has it right. In Exodus 3, he sees a burning bush by the side of the road and is compelled to step aside and see what’s going on. Like a decent sized poster on a church notice board should do.
Burning bushes are those circumstances or events that interrupt life and grab our attention. They are not part of our plans. They take us by surprise. They stop us in our tracks and cause us to turn aside. We take a second look. Sometimes we are brought up short, speechless, at a loss for words. We cannot but look at them.
Regardless of how it comes to us the burning bush shatters the horizon of our expectation. Moses never thought it possible for a bush to be on fire but not be burned up. He never expected or planned on being the one to bring God’s people out of Egypt.
God says to Moses “I have observed the misery of my people.” “I have heard their cry.” “I know their suffering, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians.” Now it sounds like we’re getting somewhere. God is coming to rescue God’s people. But listen to what God next says to Moses. “So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of the land of Egypt.”
“I have come down to deliver them,” God says. “So come, I will send you,” God says to Moses.
God is going to deliver God’s people by sending Moses. Moses is to give existence to God’s call for deliverance. Moses is to make real and enact God’s desire for the people. What if that’s how God is working in our lives too? I wonder when you and I have not turned aside. When have we failed or refused to respond to the call on our lives?
The burning bush experience does not happen apart from or in spite of every day life but in the midst of life, in the keeping of our flocks. That’s what Moses was doing when this happened. He was keeping the flock of his father in law. He was doing the ordinary routine things of his life, the same things he did the day before, the week before, and the month before. Burning bushes show up as we keep our flocks of routine and every day life.
How does Moses know if he’ll get it right? He doesn’t. He doesn’t know any more than we do. There will, however, be a sign. The sign, God says, will come after the people have been delivered, not before. It’s as if God is saying you’ll look back on all this and see I was there all along. A Church Anniversary is about two things it seems to me. Thanking God for our life and our story and our being together in fellowship today, but also being prepared again to know we will be challenged by God to notice him on a Monday as much as on a Sunday and that chapel or church is as much even maybe more about what we do in the village and in the world in the week having entered his courts with praise on a Sunday.
Perhaps most of all we need to remember God is here. We’ve become so worried about the future of the church we’ve stopped being church. We need to be with God more. We need to enter his courts with praise and remember him rather than keep worrying about whether we can be church as we know it anymore. We need to keep worshipping together however many of us there are and we need to keep looking for burning bushes. The Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett-Browning put it this way:
“The earth is crammed with heaven. Every bush is ablaze with the glory of God. Those who see take off their shoes. Those who do not pick berries.”
On Wednesday 20 May 1924, the ladies, according to Lilian Chandler’s book on Sawley, provided a “sumptuous tea”! We celebrate with the people called Methodist at Sawley chapel this weekend on their 98 years of worship and witness, friendship and support and Christian presence. To them, and countless little chapels up and down the country who might be struggling a bit, my prayer is keep the faith, enter his courts with praise, know that the Lord is good, and take notice of burning bushes, step aside. You never know how God might surprise us.
“Take time to notice things.”
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