New Year's Eve

There were a lot of people on the train from Ashford to Hastings earlier this afternoon, clearly travelling to get to parties. People were armed with bags of food, bottles of wine, large cases full of party clothes I guess, one man struggled on at Rye with an enormous set of golf clubs! 

I used to get worked up about tonight, especially if I was not invited to a party. In Storrington, the Rector had "New Year Bells" followed by "seasonal refreshments" - any excuse for the then Rector of Storrington to have "seasonal refreshments"! That little service where at 11.55 we went outside and were quiet together at the end of the year altered my needs for this night. Similar was New Year's Eve in 1999, where we were all invited to light millennium candles prior to the year 2000. I remember having boxes of them in every room in my house in Mossley and the vicar, Father Lindsay being obsessed with candles for months before we lit them! 
I did parties as a teenager with church youth group. I remember walking along Harpenden High Street with about ten others (you know who you are!) dressed as a hedge. No drink was involved!

But Malcolm Acheson's dear old New Year bells in Storrington and those millennium candles are more important in memory for me really. The end of a year is a chance to light a light to say thank you God for light shining through some pretty dark times in 2015. I guess most of my readers will have had some. I will light a candle here at 11.55 and remember you.

Perhaps you might do the same to remember others who need to know that light tonight. 2015 for me has largely been a very good year. Work (I think!) is going well, my Circuit (I think!) is in positive spirit; my four delightful churches (I think!) have strong foundations on which to move forward to in some cases exciting new possibilities in 2016. One will be worshipping elsewhere from the end of September, another will have some major refurbishment, the other two will have looked with me at some material for small churches doing rural ministry. Messy Churches, school work, some integration into the community will develop further. I have a delightful group of people to work with. Personally, my friendships have deepened, I thank God for them every day. I delight in the people who build me up and make me laugh and who walk with me when things are tough. My divorce is still not complete and I wish i were now, The passing of Molly hit me really hard. I loved that cat so much :) My Mum is not in a good place and that is hard. I have a problem also that doesn't seem to go away after nearly two years of it rumbling on and it is a dark shadow for me. But as I say, 2015 has been largely fab. 

2016 will at last bring my sabbatical, well overdue. I love my ministry here but to have a gift of three months doing something a bit different and having no phones ring or e-mails sent and no pastoral responsibility sounds good just for a bit. I then have to think hard about whether I am going to offer to stay here beyond 2017. The reinvitation process is not pleasant. I will not make the decision to offer or not offer until after my sabbatical. (I think some of you know what I would like to happen though. Hint - I am VERY HAPPY here!!)

So, what to do with tonight. I am very content, the introvert that I am to be here and to be quiet. Last year some of us enjoyed Facebooking and texting through Queen and Adam Lambert from Central Hall. I hope some of us in might join together that way later on. I read this though in today's Guardian:     
"We will turn the television on, and see in a heart-stopping moment of panic that BBC1 is literally spending the last half-hour of 2015 broadcasting a live Bryan Adams concert, even though nobody on Earth has wasted so much as a single thought about Bryan Adams for two full decades, and you all sit there watching it anyway, watching Bryan Poxy Adams sing the Robin Hood song over and over again on New Year’s Eve, wondering if this is how you wanted your life to turn out and if this is how it’s going to be for ever? The fireworks come on afterwards and you notice that the only thing worse than seeing a full-length firework display in person is watching a full-length firework display on television?"

Well, if you are joining me watching Bryan, come and join me in a virtual celebration. Light a candle and weep at that Robin Hood song. Has Bryan Adams enough hits to last over an hour? We shall see. Sir Tom Jones is on Jools Holland on the other side.     

I wish you whether you are quiet (introverts can do New Years Eve quite happily) or loud tonight, at a party, at a church, with family, or alone, with a glass, or without, a peace filled and hope filled 2016. Whatever 2015 has brought to us, we need to remember our blessings. Often the small things need celebrating. Without them, acts of kindness especially, life would be poorer. Thank you if you reading this for being you. 

Regular readers of this blog will know it is titled after a Bonhoeffer quote.  I end these thoughts with him. One of the last messages received from Dietrich Bonhoeffer before his execution was a poem entitled “New Year 1945.”  Written from a Gestapo-run prison during the air raids on Berlin, Bonhoeffer’s words speak as New Year 2016 dawns:

With every power for good to stay and guide me,
comforted and inspired beyond all fear,
I’ll live these days with you in thought beside me,
and pass, with you, into the coming year.

While all the powers of Good aid and attend us,
boldly we’ll face the future, be it what may.
At even, and at morn, God will befriend us,
and oh, most surely on each new year’s day

The old year still torments our hearts, unhastening:
the long days of our sorrow still endure.
Father, grant to the soul thou hast been chastening
that Thou hast promised—the healing and the cure.

Should it be ours to drain the cup of grieving
even to the dregs of pain, at thy command,
we will not falter, thankfully receiving
all that is given by thy loving hand.

But, should it be thy will once more to release us
to life’s enjoyment and its good sunshine,
that we’ve learned from sorrow shall increase us
and all our life be dedicate as thine.

To-day, let candles shed their radiant greeting:
lo, on our darkness are they not thy light,
leading us haply to our longed-for meeting?
Thou canst illumine e’en our darkest night.

When now the silence deepens for our harkening,
grant we may hear thy children’s voices raise
from all the unseen world around us darkening
their universal paean, in thy praise.

While all the powers of Good aid and attend us,
boldy we’ll face the future, be it what way.
At even, and at morn, God will befriend us,
And oh, most surely on each new year’s day!

The Sunday after Christmas - considering change

I shared these words today - it was good to preach incarnation...

Does your house look like a bomb site when you come downstairs on Boxing Day? You leave everything where it is late on Christmas Day and go to bed, perhaps a bit worse for wear. Saucepans and remnants of dinner, wrapping paper and crackers, all over the place. It is done and dusted and all that is to be done is to tidy it away.

But actually this is only the third day of the Christmas season.                       

Imagine for a while you are just getting on with life, it is hard, you don’t expect anything exciting to happen. Imagine today you are a Palestinian shepherd in the hills above Bethlehem.   

Sheep were considered dirty, dumb, and stubborn and the men who herded them were just a notch above.  And if they claimed to hear any angel it was entirely possible because they were either mentally ill or drank a little too much cheap wine. No one thought very much of shepherds and what happened to them or what they said.  You get the picture: there are plenty of “shepherds” among us now. They may not be herding sheep but they’re in front of us every day. Chronically unemployed, mentally ill, homeless, not clean, and generally people we would not have over to our homes for dinner. In fact, we often turn away when we see them or maybe even pretend to we don’t see them at all.  

But in Luke’s Gospel, these are just the people the angels first reveals the birth of Jesus to and it is intentional. 

 I read this quote which helped me:

“Should we really be surprised, then, that these are the first people who will hear the message of God’s redemption? Across Luke’s Gospel one of the dominant themes is that God comes for those who are on the outside—those who are poor, vulnerable, and of no account to the world. Why? Perhaps because they are the ones predisposed to listen and rejoice. Angels could have visited Herod or Augustus or Quirinius or any of the other powerful characters that have made their cameo appearances in Luke’s story.

But why would they rejoice at the announcement of a king? . . . What need have they of God’s redemption when, to all outward appearances, they themselves were like gods?

No, the angels come and sing their news to those for whom it means something. Outcasts, ne‘er-do-wells, the lonely, poor, and lowly— unwed teenage mothers and loser shepherds and all the rest—all, that is, who are in need. For, ultimately, the only requirement to receive God’s love is to need it.”

Isn’t it true that we know God’s love when things change for us suddenly? When we need to reach out for help?  Doesn’t God come in the dark? To people when they need him desperately to lift them up? Isn’t Christmas Day about remembering we are loved, whether through being with family, feeling better watching a positive film, being affirmed by fantastic friends, or being quiet in prayerful reflection? 

Jesus in his life reached out to the marginalized so the fact his birth is announced to the shepherds makes sense. It helps set the tone from the beginning of Luke’s Gospel and proclaims something new is happening here. God, through Jesus, is coming into the world in a new way and saying in essence, who I find valuable is very different and much broader than who the world finds valuable.

Perhaps because life was hard for shepherds but it was all they knew, and they got on with it, the theophany of angels in the sky blew them over so powerfully they were able to see and respond in the way we all should, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this thing that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.”

Consciously and with a sense of anticipation, not necessarily certainty. They didn’t know exactly what they would find but they went anyway, which may be as good a definition of faith in action as any there is.  

Here is the promise of Christmas: God will reach out for us often from the most unlikely of circumstances or persons: a shepherd, even a tiny baby born to an unwed teenage mother but the essence of the message will always be, “listen to me, come to me, and know you are loved.” Christmas is an event in which we can rejoice and be glad and full of joy even if life is routine filled and hard at the moment.

David Adam in his book “The Awesome Journey” tells of his time as a very shy choirboy in St Michael’s Church in Alnwick. The boys were practising the anthem for the fourth Sunday in Advent which was based on the epistle for the day “Rejoice in the Lord always, again I will say, rejoice.” David Adam says they practiced the anthem again and again until the choirmaster felt they had mastered it. At one point the choirmaster came over to him and put his face close to his which was terrifying enough – before saying in a loud voice, “Rejoice, boy! Let me see you smile when you sing this. Show that you are glad that the Lord is with you!” Perhaps that is the response to incarnation – “Smile, the Lord is with you.” Change has happened. You know what, God is going anywhere. You can’t tidy him away, not bother with him anymore and get him out again next year like sprouts. You know what God is in the change and will continue to surprise us with the manner of his coming. He comes when we are just getting on with it. He comes in our deepest need and blubbering tears when we think we cannot go on because the pain is too awful to bear. He comes to churches and encourages us to see what is happening. To get up and go rather than remain with today. 

I look at the churches I try and help every day here. We are not where we were because we’ve been open to the Spirit of God changing us. Messy Church here is a prime example of that as we move to doing it monthly in my largest church. Ninfield is another example, no longer in my care, but they have a youth group now as well as Messy Church. I went to the youth group party and said to one of the older members “if I had told you three years ago you would have a youth group in your church, you wouldn’t have believed it would you?” They had 60 – lots of families  - there on Christmas Eve.

My St Helens church are perhaps about to do something interesting as we end our time in our rickety old building in September. 92 there for Messy Church on Christmas Eve. A group of people embracing change that is coming, scary change but a deep sense that God is calling us to something different.     

           

So, let’s try and embrace change. Let’s try and see God in the changes that come. That way we will have understood what we have been singing about and listening to in his word in these last weeks.

Let me finish like this. I am so grateful to Sam Funnell my neighbouring Superintendent to the east in South Kent. Sam turned up on my doorstep yesterday as I was writing this with a little package for me I might she said “find helpful.” I led a quiet morning in Advent for our Circuit staff and her Circuit staff and quoted from my favourite book for this time of year Maria Boulding’s “The Coming of God.”  I told them I had lent the book to someone years ago and never got it back. In the package was a new copy of the book. So grateful… I end with Maria Boulding’s words about God changing us and being in change:

“ “Come” is God’s creative word to us. He calls us into being at our first creation, into the light of life. All our lives we are creatures of becoming, always incomplete, always pilgrims and discoverers, finding our way to our destiny by our choices, our orientations, and our decisions about where to set our love. This is the law of our creation, and still more the law of our new creation, whereby God calls us out of darkness into his marvellous light. Revelation and salvation are a love affair in which God says “Come” to humankind, calling us to come and see him as he is, and share his life.”   

I guess we can pack Christmas away, tidy it up.

But we could perhaps live it. Look around us, see angel song, and be invited to encounter what God is up to.

We could perhaps recognise even when we don’t get what life is doing to us that God is in those fragile vulnerable moments and gives us his peace.

We could perhaps not hope things carry on as we are, but expect and welcome divine change.  

Let’s carry on Christmas for a bit - celebrate the birth of an infant in whose life lies the hope and great promise of the world.   May all of us say this season and beyond, “Let us go now to Bethlehem and see this that that has taken place, which the Lord has made known to us.”

Boxing Day - Reflecting on Christmas

I was not looking forward to Christmas after my horrible few days and missing Molly. But sometimes you know God comes when you need him most through the kindness of God's people who turn up just when you need them. I had Christmas Day on my own and last night before zonking out post Baileys (!) lit a candle and was powerfully quiet. 

We had an amazing Christmas Eve here. I didn't want to lead worship a few hours after saying goodbye to Molly but I found the strength and we have had four very special times over the last couple of days. 92 people rolled in for Messy Church at St Helens, and later 53 at Calvert on Christmas Eve - wow! 

I was upheld by phone calls and messages from special people in the Circuit here on Christmas Eve, and a fun time round my neighbours (Christmas pudding vodka!) then encouraged by two lovely friends at church to join them at an Anglican Midnight Communion to enable me to be and receive of God. That helped. Christmas morning services were lovely, people were lovely and I enjoyed a quiet day, chocolate liqueurs, Christmas Top of the Pops, the Queen, Wizard of Oz, a nice dinner, too much Baileys hence I missed the programme I had been waiting for all day! I was thought of by texts from friends. A lovely day in the end, even if the house felt empty and I expected a cat to appear.     

This quote spoke to me yesterday:

"God has acted. Darkness has been overcome! The son has been sent and because he is born–glory is given to God and peace to those whom he favours. That is us! The ones he favours! That is us!

The Mystery has spoken without words. In the smooth cheeks of a baby, in the loving touch of a mother, in the tear filled eyes of dad, in a herd of shepherds come to see, the Mystery speaks. Today the Mystery speaks again. How are you going to hear it? How am I going to hear it? It remains with us in our joys of this day and even if we are sad this day and are coping with huge loss. It remained with Mary and Joseph and shepherds and kings. It has happened." 

My Mum has decided she is not well enough to come and stay - so it is looking like I will be in Harpenden on Tuesday and Wednesday. If any Harpenden readers want to lure me out on Tuesday night let me know... 

Happy Boxing Day everyone!

Christmas - a different one - remembering Molly

Thank you for all the kind words and sensitivity about Molly no longer being with me. It was a real shock for me to be told she was so poorly. Her last week here was horrible - she was so weak, but she is now at peace, after nearly 13 years of being bonkers and absolute joy. 

Molly came to us from Sleaford in Lincolnshire in March 2003, about six months old. She was in a state with a broken pelvis and other problems, probably from being kicked. There was no hesitation in deciding to take her home to Oakham with us. She loved her first manse in Oakham, especially the wooden posts to scratch in the lounge, embarrassingly, and horsing about on the long landing upstairs. She also loved climbing on the church roof next door, leading to trips to the vet for pelvis pain! She often trotted round to church, passed the windows mid service, and once appeared in the room above church through an open window during a funeral! We moved manses in Oakham in 2004 to a new house. I will always remember David Cook, the Circuit Steward fitting a cat flap in our kitchen door, and trying to catch her armed with a tape measure. I asked him what he was doing. He said "the instructions say "measure cat"!" 

Molly moved to Shildon in County Durham with us in 2006 and changed character a bit. She didn't like living in a manse where there had been a dog and had to fight her corner in some cat turf wars in the park up the road. We then brought her to Storrington which she loved, a lovely garden, and a field at the back with plenty of field mice to bring home. 

Molly always liked to explore but never went far. She loved being in Hastings and trotting to the cemetery one way and to see the neighbours the other!  

               

Molly has got me through some tough times. Many of you will know I was very very seriously ill in the autumn of 2011 and couldn't walk or talk very much for four months. She knew when you were poorly and we bonded on the sheepy blanket especially during Downton Abbey. To almost the last day. we had to have an hour on the sheepy blanket before bed! I miss her most at the end of the day. Sadly her tumour was so uncomfortable she needed to sleep and sit on the floor towards the end. Molly also got me through marriage break up. She was our cat, but I am glad I was able to keep her after we split.  

       

I don't think I will ever have a cat with such attitude again - she loved rooves, and she loved coming to meetings and being involved. She once sat on the Chair of District's head which was a tad embarrassing! Molly was one of God's gifts to me for which I am thankful. She was a one off and made every day fun. She hated cat camp - Uncle Eddie in County Durham used to have to wear a cricket glove to deal with her! She hated the cat hospital. The vet in Hastings used to say I must love her very much as she was so vicious! She growled there to the end but was too weak to fight the vet this last time.

Rest in peace dear friend. Thank you for everything. 

 

Oh, and how am I going to finish the Circuit preaching plan now???!?! 

Advent Day 23 - Sunset Song

I've been to the cinema in Rye on my day off and have sat through two hours of hard viewing but brilliance in the adaptation of the novel "Sunset Song" set around the outbreak of World War One. The relationships in it are not easy to watch. The abusive father,, a turn-of-the-century farming patriarch torn between the anger of devotion (he sings hymns while harvesting) and the demons of violence and lust (he beats his son and beds his wife “like a breeding sow”, the screams of sex and childbirth intermingled). The yearning female voice, Agyness Deyn providing internal monologue narration for Chris, who is torn between the beauty of the ancient Scottish land on which she toils, and the “sharp, clean and true” English words of an education that may yet take her away from all this. And there is unforgiving religion, from father’s belt to the damnation poured from the pulpit upon those (including Chris’s true love, Ewan) who have no enthusiasm for war, branded as “pro-German cowards” in league with an Antichrist Kaiser.

There are in the film themes of denying yourself, anger, violence, love, death, duty, and narrow religion, coming back from war damaged, and much more. I thought of Christmas and darkness as the last words of the film and the novel were shared about the last light of the day: 
" You can do without the day if you've a lamp quiet-lighted and kind in your heart."

A hard watch - but a worthwhile one. 

Advent Day 22 - More carols!

A good day: three carol services, a lunch round the neighbours and a Christmas tea and the right result on The Apprentice just now!

I used this reading today. So tired so have no original thoughts tonight but share this. It is from a book my colleague Peggy brought to a quiet day earlier this month called Kneeling in Bethlehem by Ann Weems.

The words point me to the heart of what I have tried to share today. It has been a real joy to be with three of my congregations today - the atmosphere in each was very powerful. 

The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;

God’s mercies never come to an end.

They are new every morning.

The Lord God gave the peoples of the earth a garden,

and the people said; “That’s very nice, God, but that’s not

enough. We’d like a little knowledge, please.”

The Lord God gave them knowledge,

And the people said, “Now that we have knowledge,

we’d like things.

The Lord God gave the people things,

but they always said, “That’s not quite enough.”

So the Lord God gave them gifts unequalled:

the sun

lightning and thunder

rain and flowers

animals and birds and fish

trees and stars and the moon.

God gave them the rainbow.

God parted the Red Sea and gave them manna.

God gave them prophets

and children

and each other,

 but still the people said, “That’s no quite enough.”

God loved the people,

and out of ultimate merciful goodness

God gave them the Gift of Gifts,

a Christmas present never to be forgotten.

God gave them love

in the form of God’s son,

even Christ Jesus.

There are some that don’t open their eyes

or their ears or their hearts

and they still say, that’s not quite enough.

They wander through the stores looking for Christmas.

But others open their whole being to the Lord,

bending their knees to praise God,

carrying Christmas with them every day.

For these the whole world is a gift!

Advent Day 21 - A song to be sung

Has anyone reached the point where you would like to rip certain carols out of every carol sheet and hymn book because you never want to sing them again? Oh just me then!

I am using these words to introduce my carol services tomorrow. I find them powerful:

"When nations rage with hatred and war, and innocent people are slaughtered for no cause, when humans terrorise one another in body and spirit and the clamour of the streets is but a massive cry of despair and groans of hunger; when there appears to be no reason for a child to be born to endure the insensibilities of life, when it seems that all is lost and there is no hope, there is still a song to be sung, a song which unites the music in the soul."

I do more carol services and carol singing in this appointment than any other I have had. Tonight we have been at Pickham Farm in Pett in a barn surrounded by cows and sheep and donkeys and we have sat on hay bales and excited children have loved it: "That cow has just done at POO!" exclaimed one little boy. Carols express some of the deepest incarnational theology we have, I wonder if people who sing them once a year understand what they are singing. Whatever, they lift us up and help us see a different way.