Collegiality

Last year's Elders' Social at AFC

This Sunday at Amersham Free Church we have the joy of ordaining one new Elder and recommissioning the rest of the team.  We do this once a year after the 'elections' which took place at the March AGM.

For over twenty five years I worked in a 'Baptist' context where we had Deacons - now in the ecumenical environment of AFC I'm getting used to Elders.

There is, I think, no blueprint for Church leadership in the New Testament.  Although it may be a rather simplistic conclusion there is probably some truth in the notion that Greek speaking churches had Deacons whilst Hebrew speaking ones opted for the title Elder.

One of the things I'm getting used to here is that in the URC tradition an Elder is 'ordained' for life.  That means there is a delightful custom that although you may now be a 'retired' Elder you will still have the privilege of serving the bread and wine at Communion.  I just love seeing that Communion Procession at AFC and noting the many members coming up the aisle who, although no longer on the Eldership, once gave up loads of time to attend meetings and take part in this side of church life.

Whether we call our ordained leaders: priest, pastor, minister or bishop - and whether we designate our lay leaders as elders or deacons it seems to me the essence of leadership within any church is that it is best when it is 'collegial' - that is the exact opposite of 'one man band'!!

It's as we serve as a TEAM that I hope we best sense God speaking to us through each other.

I've never been one to despise and ridicule committees because I'd much rather make decisions alongside my fellow leaders than in glorious and lonely isolation.

That came home to me once when I was Moderator of a Baptist Regional Association.  We were travelling through the choppiest of waters with lots of people getting hot under the collar and I was due to be in the chair at a big Association General Meeting.  To be truthful I, along with all my fellow Trustees were dreading it.  But in our preparations one of the Regional Ministers gave me such good advice.  'Ian', he said, ' If you are presented with an impossible proposal from the floor next week, pause the meeting, ask the trustees to come up to the front, gather around you and TOGETHER we'll decide how to deal with things.'  I've never forgotten those wise words - I didn't have to face that meeting alone - of course God was with me and he had given me colleagues with whom I could share the burden.  In the end it was a much easier meeting than any of us could have anticipated!!!

So I'm deeply grateful for teamwork and the way God works through that.  I'm deeply grateful to those Elders who stepped down at the AGM and those who accepted the affirmation of the Church Meeting and will commence a three year term of service on Sunday.

Collegiality - for me it's been one of the joys of local church ministry.

All good wishes,

Ian

Exclusion to Community...something about Easter on Spinalonga

Spinalonga - outside 'Dante's Gate'

We have just returned from a sun drenched week on Crete and one of the highlights of our trip was a visit to the island of Spinalonga.

This is a place with a story.

Greece has some 6,000 islands scattered in the Aegean and Ionian seas and Spinalonga is one of them,  recently made famous by the novel based on its history as a Leper Colony by Victoria Hislop - and soon to be made into a Holywood film!

This is a small island yet it has in its past sustained an Ottoman fortress and at the beginning of the 20th Century a significant independent municipal population.

Yet it is probably most famous for the years 1903 through to 1957 when it served as an isolated 'sanctuary' for those afflicted with leprosy.

Boat trips from Agios Nikolas where we were staying were not yet running to Spinalonga so we took a bus ride through the hills to Elounda, the next port along the coast and immediately opposite the island, and caught one of the first boats of the season to make the journey.

Today Spinalonga is something of a Ghost Town, a rather spooky place with an atmosphere which is slightly disturbing.

Upon landing and paying your entrance fee you walk through a dark archway called 'Dante's Gate' knowing that many hundreds of people walked nervously this way in times gone by as they started a new life in a strange place literally 'cut off' from all they had known before.

In Victoria Hislop's novel Eleni first makes that journey, lasting only a few years on the island.  It's a harrowing read as she discovers she has leprosy and leaves her family in the town of Plaka opposite the island.  Imagine being able to see your house yet be so separated from your family.  In the end her daughter Maria is also 'exiled' to the island - yet she has the joy of living at a time of new medical treatment and eventually leaves Spinalonga to start a new life once again on the mainland.

This small island has so many stories to tell: the tragedy of  hundreds of people living with a disease that at one time meant certain death, the campaigning of 'significant' lepers who ensured that residents received social security, could live independently for as long as possible and have fresh food delivered, the dignity of that community which over the years developed shops, businesses, churches and even a cinema, and the 'happy ending' when multi-drug therapy eventually meant that every resident could return home and the last person to leave the island was a Greek Orthodox Priest in 1962.

Of course I couldn't help remembering those wonderful gospel stories of Jesus encountering lepers in his country and astonishing people by the way he treated them with so much respect and warmth.  In these accounts we encounter the Compassionate Jesus.

I think one of Spinalonga's main stories is the way that people who thought they were going to a life of cruel exclusion actually found a place of supportive community.

Of course it wasn't easy, it wasn't always optimistic, it had so much tragedy at its heart....yet...yet... something of the Easter message could even be found on Spinalonga, found through the triumph of the human spirit which made community out of exclusion.

Yet another example, I believe, of the divine all mixed up and made manifest in the human.

Best wishes,

Ian

Resurrection - The God who colours us in!

In her book The Risen Existence, Paula Gooder, who among other things is Theologian in Residence at Bible Society, tells us the story of her daughter asking a question one day at tea; it’s rather a good and perceptive one for the child of a theologian – ‘How does Jesus make us real?’  And like all good teachers Paula Gooder suggested her daughter make a stab at answering it herself.  So the little girl said: ‘I think he draws us and then colours us in’!!

The mother thought this was a brilliant way of describing our Resurrection Life.  Jesus draws us – re-configures us, if you like.  And then throughout our lives, in all the experiences which come our way, it’s as if we are being coloured in.  Jesus doesn’t leave us in greyscale, but fills our life with his resurrection presence – with the vibrant colours of life.

This ‘transformative’ colouring in is for us ad for the whole created order.  So this is how Dr Gooder, a PhD from Oxford yet still learning from her daughter around the tea table, ends her book on the resurrection:  If we are in Christ we are called to become life-givers, life-breathers, life-makers.  We become people who bear resurrection with us wherever we go.

Today, on this Easter Day 2016, let us celebrate that the life of Jesus can continue through our hands and feet, and let’s live that life colourfully and to the glory of God.

Christ is Risen!
He is Risen indeed - Alleluia!

With my best wishes,

Ian
(Now a Blog Holiday!)

Stations of the Cross (4) Jesus is taken from the cross

So what are we to make of Esparmer’ 13^th Station of the Cross?

Jesus had died so what could be done for him?  A burial with dignity is one answer.  Joseph of Aramathea offers a family tomb and Mary, at least in the drawing, with a broken heart oversees this ritual.

She held him at his birth, she followed him with her feet during his life and in the days to come she would surely carry her love for him in her heart.  But on the evening of Good Friday maybe the burden was just too much for her to hold – someone else had to lift him down from the cross and take him to the garden tomb.

We are gentle with the bodies we love.

Like all ministers I sometimes sit beside people who are spending their final days on earth – I witness relatives holding the hand of the person who is dying, lovingly offering them a sip of water, mopping their brow or rearranging their pillow.  There is great love and profound dignity in these precious moments and I always come away deeply touched by the beauty of our humanity.  I simply don’t see the world getting worse and life becoming hopeless – I see it populated by loving and courageous people whose journey alongside us makes this pilgrimage a privilege.

After his brutal death Jesus was surrounded by such folk who lovingly and courageously took him down from the cross and honoured him with the burial rites of his Jewish culture.

In his devotional book accompanying Erspamer’s drawings, Father Timothy Radcliffe writes of this 13^th Station:  We must not wait to show our gentleness until someone is dead.  Be tender while it can be felt and reciprocated.  Say the word of love or gratitude while it can be heard. 

To illustrate the point he reminds us of the lady who just before the Last Supper anointed Jesus’ feet with precious ointment.  As the disciples protested against this seemingly inappropriate extravagance Jesus said: She has done a beautiful thing to me...she has anointed my body beforehand for burying.

Just last week a lady from our congregation did something similar to me.  Well – let me qualify that – she neither anointed me nor measured me up for a shroud but she did send me an email.  Because she has been following a Lentern series and that day the author suggested the reader send an email ‘blessing’ someone – saying ‘thank you’ to someone.  And this lady sent an email to Erna and I thanking us for being her ministers.  I was deeply moved by such a kind act in the middle of Lent.

We can all do it – we can all show our appreciation, offer our encouragement or simply be there for someone this day.

As Timothy Radcliffe ends his meditation on this particular drawing: He writes - Carpe Diem: grab the moment to show your love.

Stations of the Cross (3) Jesus Dies

And so, upon the cross as a young man years before his time – isn’t that what people might say? – Jesus dies – or as the King James’ version of the bible euphemistically puts it: He gave up the ghost.

I’ve only been present at one person’s death.  Ralph was a very old member of the congregation I served in Hertfordshire at Hitchin.  One Saturday lunchtime just as the bangers and mash had been placed on the table his daughter phoned to say Dad was failing fast could I come down and pray with him – she felt as if he was hanging on for a final prayer.  I went, I prayed and immediately I said Amen Ralph died.  One of the greatest privileges of these last 29 years of ministry.

As Jesus died the evangelists in the gospels record it all went dark, the veil in the temple separating the holiest place from the rest was mysteriously ripped in two and some writers even say tombs were opened and the dead walked free.

Perhaps it’s Matthew, Mark, Luke and John’s way of saying this was no ordinary death.

Yet in so many ways that’s exactly what it was.  It was the death of a beloved son.  It was the death of a good friend.  It was the death of a young man with so much more to give. 

Because in dying Jesus really does share our living.  He shares our life, birth and death.  For part of the beauty of this Jesus is his humanity.  Not his separateness from us, not his ‘otherness’ but the shared humanity we have in common.  Like us, like all humanity in every time and every place, Jesus dies.

I was once in the art department of our local school and the teacher showed me the Holy Week poster they had produced that year for the churches of our town.  These were students whose brief was to design a picture of Good Friday.  So that’s what they did – they imagined Jesus dying and what they came up with looked pretty bleak, sad and quite frankly life like.  Yet that was the poster displayed that year in hundreds of house windows and church notice boards. 

I couldn’t help but contrast it with art installation crucifix I’d seen that week at the local cathedral.  It was life size and striking.  Shocking too in its own way, and perhaps most of all because it was covered in gold.  Its message was not so much the pain of death for the human Jesus but the triumph of death for the divine Son of God.

Art is never neutral – it makes a point and has a message.

I’m more and more drawn to the humanity of Jesus and in it see something utterly beautiful.  That we are all made in the image of God and that to separate the human from the divine brings all sorts of unhelpful divisions.

Today as we remember Jesus’ death – the sadness it caused, the grief it prompted, the hollowness it created – why can we not also remember Ralph’s, our parents, husband’s, wife’s, son or daughter’s, friend or colleagues. 

Jesus – God – shares our living and our dying. Life and death are sanctified, hallowed, given deeper sense and purpose by God.

Death is a great mystery and I sometimes think silence is the only response.  But perhaps trust is a better one. 

To trust in God’s love and to place ourselves and those we love – at the moment of death – into the love of God.

Or as a shepherd boy walking around Bethlehem once put it:
Yeah, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will not fear, for thy rod and they staff they comfort me.


Prayer: by Cardinal Newman;

May he support us all the day long, till the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed and the fever of life is over and our work is done. 
Then in his mercy may he give us a safe lodging and a holy rest and peace at the last. 
Amen

Stations of the Cross (2) Jesus Falls

Friends from St Michael’s will be joining us on the Walk of Witness on Friday and whilst I was in their church attending the Revd Debbie’s Institution and Induction last week I noticed they had placed handmade Stations of the Cross around the building.

It’s traditional to have Jesus falling on his journey to Golgotha – and to have him doing that not once but up to three times.  In scripture we are told he simply was too weak to carry the cross so he fell and Simon of Cyrene was press-ganged into service to do it for him.

So this is Erspamer’s drawing of Jesus’ first fall.

First falls can be shocking yet truly character forming. 

First falls pulsate with disbelief – the sort that comes from that moment when you realise the person you married isn’t perfect, the job you so much longed for isn’t much different than the one you’ve just left or the church you’ve recently been inducted to bears no resemblance to the profile they submitted during the settlement process!

First falls have the potential to knock the stuffing out of us and crush us.  How could this happen?  It wasn’t what I was expecting.  This isn’t the way I thought the world was, they were or I am.

More importantly First Falls move us from idealism to reality.  And faith has to cope with how life is rather than a sugar coated version of it.

That’s why it saddens me sometimes when people pray a prayer like this before a service:  Lord, as we come to worship help us to leave all our troubles and worries behind so that we might concentrate fully on you.

To pray like this is to miss the point that part of our worship is to make that vital, transformative connection between our lives as they really are both inside and outside of the church. 

So if the bible readings we listen to, the sermon we hear, the hymns we sing and the prayers we say touch our troubles and worries with God’s love, hope and strength then surely our worship has been meaningful. 

For this to happen we need to acknowledge that we do fall down and life is far from perfect for any of us. 

The Franciscan writer, Richard Rohr puts it like this: We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than doing it right.

Last week, in a Christian organisation I chair, I finished working with someone on their annual appraisal – that would have been a wonderful line to have included don’t you think: We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than doing it right.  It’s rather like the line that has sometimes thrown me at a job interview – please could you tell us what you are not good at!

Because so often we want to be seen as successful, especially by our peers.  I used to dread the Christmas Round Robbins that told me just how annoyingly perfect our friends’ children had become.

The story of the Prodigal Son surely tells us that the message at the centre of the gospel – at the centre of this day we call ‘Good’ – is that falling over, getting it wrong and making a mistake doesn’t have to be the last word.  What is so important is how we pick ourselves up, turn around, face a new direction and walk home to the welcome of that loving, open armed Father we call God.

None of this explains our falling and failings away because we need, in picking ourselves up to face our demons, ask for forgiveness, hold out a hand of reconciliation or simply understand our situation and context with greater honesty.

I have sometimes heard folk say: I don’t know if I’m worthy enough to join your church or take communion.  Well the truth is none of us are in a way. 

Here’s what the English Dominican Friar, Timothy Radcliffe says about all this: God smiles on us as we are, warts and all.  We may not be perfect but neither are we despicable worms.  We are fallible human beings who fumble our way to the kingdom, keeling over from time to time.

Prayer:

Welcoming God thank you that you smile on us.  Thank you for this picture of Jesus falling.  And on this day when we remember cross shaped grace – enable us, with your help and inspired by your love to pick ourselves up from our falling and to continue our pilgrimage knowing ourselves better, reconciled to neighbour and more conscious of you.  Amen

Stations of The Cross (1) Jesus before Pilate

Could Pilate ever have won in this situation?  He was caught between a rock and a hard place – a context that must be well known to almost every leader or politician.

He is presented by a conundrum from the religious authorities and he is presented with an enigma from Jesus.

And all the time there must have been a voice whispering at the back of his mind – be careful – Rome wants peace, your Emperor wants good relationships with the local leaders – deal with this little local difficulty speedily – be pragmatic.

So, after a token resistance Pilate goes with the crowd – but not exactly, because by washing his hands doesn’t he really show us that at least he is unsure, at best he is actually deeply aware that his sentence is wrong and unjustified.

Maybe we do the same at some pressurised moments in our lives.  We make judgements on little evidence, we let pragmatism dominate over principle and live all too easily and comfortably with our prejudices.

Pilate is, in my book at least, one of the saddest figures in the gospels.  He may have had many good qualities yet he goes down in history as a man who didn’t really bother to discover truth.  In place of eager and open enquiry and the willingness to explore – he simply washes his hands.

Surely one of the greatest joys of our faith pilgrimage is being open to new discoveries – about God, about ourselves and the world around us.  To search for broad horizons rather than sit back and accept the comfortable and unchallenged view.  To be open hearted seekers after truth rather than its overconfident guardians.

Or as Gregory of Nyssa said way back in the fourth century: Sin happens whenever we refuse to keep growing.

Let us pray:
Lord, help us to struggle, to ponder, to think outside the box.  Give us a willingness to ask the difficult question and live honestly with the answer.  Help us not to wash our hands of this task but to grow to love discovering new and deeper truths about you, ourselves and the world around us. Amen