Approaching leave taking (2)

Here's the sermon that I shared this morning at St Andrew’s Wickford:

In May I spoke about ways to approach leave taking, a topic that is on our mind at present because our much-loved Revd Sue Wise is soon to retire. The prompt for doing so was Jesus’ statement that his disciples would do greater things once he had ascended to his Father. Our Old Testament passage today (2 Kings 2:1-14) gives us another way of thinking about and preparing for leave taking.

Elisha asked to inherit a double portion of Elijah’s spirit, when he knew Elijah was to be taken from him to ascend to God in heaven. Elijah said that, although a difficult ask, Elisha’s request would be granted if Elisha saw Elijah at the point of his leaving.

We can ask for something similar in relation to Sue’s retirement. We have all benefited from Sue’s ministry over the 11 years that she has been in the parish and can inherit from her a double portion of her spirit as she leaves us.

That involves looking at the person she is that the gifts and interests she has shared in order that we learn from these and continue to use ourselves those things that she has shared with us.

Wellbeing has been a major focus of Sue’s ministry, whether utilising and sharing learning, skills and approaches from Acorn Christian Healing Foundation’s listening and pastoral attentiveness training or leading a number of Kintsugi Hope Wellbeing Groups. The former helped people grow in compassionate, attentive care through a combination of listening, healing, and reconciliation. The latter create a safe and supportive space where, through a structured yet flexible programme, people can accept themselves, understand their value and worth, and grow towards a more resilient and hopeful future.

Care for creation has been another of Sue’s particular interests and enthusiasms. Under her direction all of our churches have obtained the Eco-Church Silver award with this meaning that we have together looked at: Worship and teaching; Buildings and energy; Land and nature; Community and global engagement; and Lifestyle. She has also ensured that we understand creation-care in the context of the Five Marks of Mission where TREASURE involves striving to safeguard the integrity of creation, and sustain and renew the life of the earth. This fifth mark of mission articulates the ecological dimension of mission, widening the circle of responsibility to its furthest extent. This mark reflects a mature theological understanding that God’s redemptive plan is cosmic in scope. It calls human beings to their divinely appointed role as stewards of the earth, presenting environmental care not as a secular agenda but as an integral component of faithfulness to the Creator God.

Additionally, Sue has helped us embed this understanding within the church calendar. We now keep Creationtide, when churches and congregations are called to pay special attention to the responsibility of humanity for the Earth and for all that lives upon it and take part in Churches Count on Nature, when Wickford Wildlife Association identify wildlife in our churchyards.

These are two of Sue’s many interests and areas of ministry where she has invested time with commitment and imagination. There are many others. We need to look at what she has been and done if we are to inherit a double portion of her spirit.

Jesus said that his followers would do greater things by doing more and different things than he could do within his own ministry. This is how we approach leave taking by doing more of the same in the spirit of the one who has gone. Elijah promised a double portion of his spirit to Elisha if he saw Elijah as he left. We can have a double portion of Sue’s spirit if we all take what we have learnt from her and apply in our own lives and ministries. Then the impact of her ministry will be doubled.

We will miss Sue greatly when she leaves but we will honour her time among us best if we take what she has shared with us and use it in new ways within our parish. May it be so for each one of us. Amen.

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Iona - Beyond These Shores.

The prayer of transfiguration

Here's the sermon that I shared during today's Eucharist at St Andrew's Wickford: 

The dictionary definition of transfiguration is: a change in form or appearance or an exalting, glorifying, or spiritual change. Those aspects of transfiguration can be seen in our Gospel reading (Luke 9.28-36), but the story defines the word best.

Sam Wells, the Vicar of St Martin-in-the-Fields, puts it like this: “There’s glory – the glory of the Lord in the face of Jesus Christ. There’s the pattern of God’s story in Israel and the church, a story that finds its most poignant moments in the midst of suffering and exile. There’s the loving, tender, presence and heavenly voice of God the Father – a voice that for the only time in their lives, the disciples hear and understand. And there’s the extraordinary realisation that, even though all this could have gone on without them, the disciples have been caught up in the life of the Trinity, the mystery of salvation, the unfolding of God’s heart, the beauty of holiness.”

The way he describes it, transfiguration involves the glory of seeing a person or event in the bigger story of God’s loving purposes for the world. Up until this point, “the disciples know Jesus does plenty of amazing and wonderful things and says many beautiful and true things, but they still assume he’s basically the same as them.” It’s only as they go up the mountain with him that the veil slips and they’re invited in to a whole other world. A world in which “Jesus is completely at home,” “even when the Father’s voice thunders from above.” “And more remarkably still, it seems there’s a place for them in it, hanging out with the likes of Moses and Elijah. They’ve been given a glimpse of glory. It’s a glory that’s faithful to the story of Israel, a glory that has Jesus at the centre of it, a glory that has God speaking words of love, a glory that has a place for them in it, however stumbling and clumsy they are, and finally a glory in which Jesus touches them tenderly in their fear.“

Sam Wells suggests that this experience, this glimpse of glory, can shape the way we pray by giving our prayers the same extra dimension. In fact, he details three different ways to pray. The first involves Resurrection. “Resurrection prayer is a prayer calling for a miracle. It is prayer of faithful risk. We look to the heavens with tightened fist and say, ‘Sweet Jesus, if you’re alive, make your presence known!’”

The second way to pray is Incarnation. This is “a prayer of presence. It is, perhaps, more silent than a prayer of Resurrection. It is a prayer which recognizes that, yes, Jesus was raised, but that it happened through brokenness. Through Christ, God shares our pain and our frailty. So we pray acknowledging that God suffers with us.”

The third way to pray is Transfiguration. Sam writes, “God, in your son’s transfiguration we see a whole reality within and beneath and beyond what we thought we understood; in … times of bewilderment and confusion, show … father your glory, that [we] may find a deeper truth to … life than [we] ever knew, make firmer friends than [we] ever had, discover reasons for living beyond what [we’d] ever imagined, and be folded into your grace like never before.” “In other words, it is a prayer that, in whatever circumstance, asks God to reshape our reality, to give us a new and right spirit to trust that even in the midst of suffering and hardship, truth can still be experienced and shared.”

“On the mountain, the disciples discovered that Christ was part of a conversation with Israel and God and was dwelling in glory in a way that they had no idea of and could hardly grasp and yet it put everything on a different plane.”

As a result, the prayer of Transfiguration is a different kind of a prayer. “The prayer of resurrection has a certain defiance about it – in the face of what seem to be all the known facts, it calls on God to produce the goods and turn the situation round. It has courage and hope but there’s always that fear that it has a bit of fantasy as well. The prayer of incarnation is honest and unflinching about the present and the future, but you could say it’s a little too much swathed in tragedy … it’s so concerned to face … reality … that there’s always that fear that it’s never going to discover the glory of what lies above.”

The prayer of Transfiguration is different. “Not so much, ‘Fix this and take it off my desk!’ Nor even, ‘Be with me and share in my struggle, now and always.’ But something more like, ‘Make this trial and tragedy, this problem and pain, a glimpse of your glory, a window into your world, when I can see your face, sense the mystery in all things, and walk with angels and saints. Bring me closer to you in this crisis than I ever have been in calmer times. Make this a moment of truth, and when I cower in fear and feel alone, touch me, raise me, and make me alive like never before.’”

Maybe you would like to make the prayer of transfiguration your prayer for yourself at this time, “in the midst of whatever it is you’re wrestling with today.”

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John David - Closer To Thee.

Realising the sovereignity of God

Here's the sermon I prepared for St Catherine’s Wickford this morning:

I wonder how you feel at this stage in the Covid-19 pandemic. Many of us have been unwell. Many of us know people who have died. Many of us, understandably, feel anxious about the extent to which Covid continues to circulate. Many of us have concerns about the impact the pandemic has had on the Church, the extent to which people have come back since we were able to reopen and the underlying financial challenges that have been exacerbated by the pandemic.

Our feelings in this situation are not so dissimilar to those experienced by Elijah in our Old Testament reading (1 Kings 19:1-15). Elijah was depressed, disheartened, isolated and on the run. He felt as though the whole world had turned against him and that he was left bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders alone.

He had gone from a great triumph in which he alone had stood up for God against King Ahab, Queen Jezebel, and all their priests. He had called down fire from God on the altar he had erected on Mount Carmel. The priests of Baal had been unable to do the same, but by undermining them, he had incurred the wrath of Queen Jezebel, in particular, who had put a price on his head and sent death squads to seek him out and kill him. He had fled, taking nothing with him and needing God to provide for his basic needs.

In today's reading, he reaches Mount Horeb expecting God to reveal himself in fire and thunder and lightning, as had been the case when God gave Moses the 10 commandments. Elijah knew the story of the 10 Commandments and had experienced fire from heaven on Mount Carmel. That was the way God acts. When God wasn’t visible through fire and brimstone, he wasn’t there. That, in essence, was the problem Elijah had been experiencing, God had not smitten his pursuers, therefore God must have abandoned him.

But God was about to open up a new paradigm for Elijah and reveal a new dimension to relationship with him, as well as a new way of revealing himself within Israel. The question was not, where was God, but was Elijah up for receiving from God in new ways that were outside his current frame of reference.

To help Elijah, God took him through a process of new understanding. First, he experiences all the old phenomena – wind, earthquake, fire – that he associates with God’s presence or revelation. Yet God’s voice is not heard in any of these ways. Once again, as Elijah experienced these phenomena without hearing from God, he must have been thinking that he had been abandoned and was on his own. Then, the dramatic signs stop, there is quiet, sheer silence, complete absence of speech or gesture, and yet this becomes the moment of revelation, the moment in which Elijah hears God speak in a new way; in a whisper, in gentleness, in presence, within and with Elijah; not through external phenomena but instead an internal conversation – Spirit speaking to spirit.

Not only is the means of transmission new but what God says is new, too. Elijah had come to believe that it was all about him; that he could stand in the breach between God and a world gone wrong and by calling down fire from heaven reveal God in his actions. His sense was that he, and no one else, could do this and that, anyway, he was on his own in standing up for God.

Not so, says God, in reality there are thousands of others quietly making their own stand for God where they are and there is Elisha, ready and waiting to take on Elijah’s mantle and lead the ongoing resistance, which ultimately does not depend on Elijah, or any other human being, because it is all about God and God’s purposes being fulfilled in God’s ways. Elijah has to learn that it is not all about him but instead about God, that God’s purposes are fulfilled in God’s ways, that God always has new ways of acting in human history and speaking into human lives, and that God’s people are more diverse than he, or we, are usually prepared to acknowledge or recognise.

God wants to speak into our worries and fears at this time in similar ways. Just as Elijah needed to realise that God’s purposes in his day and time were not solely reliant on him, it is also fatal for us to think God’s purposes for Wickford and Runwell rely solely on us. Equally, it is fatal to think that God’s purposes for Wickford and Runwell rely on the existing churches in the Town, or even the Church of England churches. Were they no longer to be there, God’s purposes for this place would still be able to be fulfilled.

The most fundamental element to relationship with God and to God’s mission is God. It is God who first reached out to us, it is God who equips and leads, it is God who will bring the kingdom of heaven. Each of us has a part to play, a contribution to make, is loved individually and absolutely, while being equipped for the roles we are called to play. But does it all depend on us? Well, the answer to that question is, ‘No’. This understanding is vitally important because it means we can relax – not in the sense of doing nothing, but in the sense of acting from a place of confidence rather than anxiety. It better to fail in an enterprise that will ultimately succeed than to succeed in an enterprise that will ultimately fail. That is our situation and when we understand it and take it to heart, we will act with confidence in God, rather than from our own anxiety.

Just as Elijah needed to hear God speak in a new way, so we need to realise that God is always doing a new thing because the Gospel always needs to be presented afresh in a new generation. Our job is to look for and discern the new thing that God is doing in our time and our community. That means asking who are the people of peace where we are? Where are those who are creatively reaching out across divides and dismantling barriers in order to bring divided people together? Who are they that stand with those on the margins, who are they that are with the dispossessed, who is it that hears the voice of the voiceless?

It is as we ask ourselves these questions and look for such people, that we will see the new thing God is doing in our area and can get involved. Now is always the right time to look for the new thing that God is doing because God is always doing a new thing.

Asking those questions and looking for those people will also lead us to new partnerships because God’s people are always more varied and diverse that we tend to perceive. Just as Elijah needed to understand that the deaths of the other prophets did not mean that God had no followers left, so we need to look outside our congregations and those of other churches to find those in the wider community who are God’s people, just not aligned with a particular church.

The pandemic has changed us and the Church. The changes that have occurred are not all negative and not all reversible. Change is inevitable – despite the Church sometimes appearing to be the one place where change does not occur – because God is always doing a new thing. The pandemic necessitated changes that we are only just understanding and to which we are only just getting used. As just one example, livestreaming services has meant that people who are housebound have been able to join churches again in ways that they couldn’t previously. It has also meant that people who are not used to church and are reluctant to cross the physical threshold of a building because they don’t know what they will encounter can now check out church from the comfort of their homes before deciding whether to come in person. These are good reasons for continuing to livestream services, even when those who can come to the building no longer need that themselves.

Just as our experience and understanding of God can never define God because God is always deeper and fuller, broader and wider, than we can ever experience or understand, so it is also true that our experience of church can never define God for exactly the same reasons. We constrain God and bring God down to our size when, like Elijah, we come to view our understandings, practices, approaches as definitive. Not only so, but, like Elijah, we become anxious, depressed and defensive, so we think we have to defend what we believe has always been.

Instead, there is freedom and release in coming to the place that Elijah eventually reaches of understanding that God is sovereign, is endlessly creative, is entirely trustworthy, indeed, knows exactly what he or she is doing, and will, in his or her time, bring the kingdom in full on earth as in heaven when all will be well and all manner of thing be well.

So, like Elijah, let us let go of our tendencies to seek to control, and instead let go and let God. It is from just such a change of heart and mind that our revival and renewal will come. Amen.

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Gungor - Dry Bones.

East London Three Faiths Forum Tour of the Holy Land: Day 6 (1)

During our visit to Mount Carmel I shared the following with the East London Three Faiths Forum group:

The Carmelite Order was founded by St Berthold in Palestine around 1154. Hermits, following the example of Elijah, adopted a solitary lifestyle on Mount Carmel. They lived in small cells near the spring called Elijah's fountain and practised shared solitude. After 1206 they asked the Patriarch of Jerusalem to draw up their way of life in a rule. This directs that they celebrate the eucharist daily and gather weekly to encourage and correct each other. Soon after they received their rule Jerusalem fell and they migrated to the West settling in Sicily, Italy, Spain, France and England.

Elijah was an inspiration to them as he was solitary figure on Mount Carmel, who challenged his people to chose one God. Elijah heard God as an unexpected whisper while on Mount Horeb and, as a result, what the Carmelites call Carmel is a way of life in which they try to be aware of the presence of God in the most ordinary, everyday things. Elijah also said, 'God lives in whose presence I stand', so Carmelites seek to recognise God in everyone they meet and serve.

St Teresa of Avila, who reformed the Carmelite Order in Spain in the late 1500's, said this, 'But here the Lord asks only two things of us: love of His Majesty and love of our neighbor. It is for these two virtues that we must strive, and if we attain them perfectly we are doing His will and so shall be united with Him. But, as I have said, how far we are from doing these two things in the way we ought for a God Who is great! May His Majesty be pleased to give us grace so that we may deserve to reach this state, as it is in our power to do if we wish. The surest sign that we are keeping these two commandments is, I think, that we should really be loving our neighbor; for we cannot be sure if we are loving God, although we may have good reasons for believing that we are, but we can know quite well if we are loving our neighbor.'

St Teresa spoke of prayer as sharing friendship with God. Their emphasis was on intimate communion with God as in this poem by St John of the Cross:

The Living Flame Of Love

Songs of the soul in the intimate communication of loving union with God.
O living flame of love that tenderly wounds my soul in its deepest center! Since now you are not oppressive, now consummate! if it be your will: tear through the veil of this sweet encounter!

O sweet cautery, O delightful wound! O gentle hand! O delicate touch that tastes of eternal life and pays every debt! In killing you changed death to life.

O lamps of fire! in whose splendors the deep caverns of feeling, once obscure and blind, now give forth, so rarely, so exquisitely, both warmth and light to their Beloved.

How gently and lovingly you wake in my heart, where in secret you dwell alone; and in your sweet breathing, filled with good and glory, how tenderly you swell my heart with love.

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U2 - The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

East London Three Faiths Forum trip to the Holy Land (7)

We've had another excellent day which began by going to Haifa where we travelled along Mount Carmel seeing Stella Maris (the headquarters of the Carmelites), the Baha'i botanical gardens, and the Carmelite Chapel at El-Murakah which enabled us to view the sight of Elijah's confrontation with the prophets of Baal. Rabbi David Hulbert read the account of Elijah on Mount Carmel and I spoke briefly about Carmelite spirituality.

From there we went to have a delicious lunch with a Druze family and heard a little about the Druze faith and way of life. Our final stop was at Caesarea where we saw the remains of Herod's Palace including the theatre, hippodrome and aqueduct. There, I read from the account in Acts of Peter's meeting with Cornelius highlighting its significance for the growth of Christianity.

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Mendelssohn - Elijah.

Coming down from the mountain-top

I find it very encouraging that the Gospels are so honest about the disciples. They are just like us; falling asleep when they should be praying and misunderstanding what God is doing and why he is doing it. Don’t you often find yourself doing those sorts of things? I do. But Jesus still loved and persevered with his disciples despite their shortcomings and he does the same with us. We are not expected to be perfect followers of Jesus just to keep trying and learning.

As they looked back on their experiences with Jesus the disciples were able to see that the sight of Jesus transfigured had been an important assurance for them that Jesus was God’s Son and that the path he followed, even though it led to his death, was the path that God had mapped out for him. Earlier in Luke 9 there had been much discussion about who Jesus was and what Jesus was here to do. In verse 7 we read about Herod’s confusion as he thinks Jesus is John the Baptist come back to life. In verse 18 Jesus asks the disciples to tell him who the crowds think he is. The disciples say that some think he is John the Baptist and others Elijah. Jesus asks Peter to say who he thinks him to be and Peter answers, “You are God’s Messiah.” Then Jesus tells them about his plan to go to Jerusalem where he will be arrested and killed and we know from the other Gospels that the disciples were greatly disturbed about this plan.

In the midst of this confusion and disturbance they have this experience which, in hindsight, they can see answers both questions. Jesus is seen in glory speaking with the great patriarch and the great prophet of the Israelites, Moses and Elijah, and then God speaks to confirm Jesus as his Son. Everything about this experience speaks of Jesus as God. Moses and Elijah speak to Jesus about his plan to fulfil God’s purpose by dying in Jerusalem and God confirms to them that everything Jesus says comes directly from God himself. This experience should, then, be a confirmation of everything that Jesus is and was about to do. But for the disciples, at the time, it seems to be too much for them to comprehend. They are afraid, confused and keep the experience to themselves. It is only later, looking back, that they can see the confirmation that this experience provided.

I wonder if we have had experiences of events and plans coming together in ways that confirmed to us that we were on the right path. It may be that we are needing that kind of confirmation at this point in our lives and should be asking God for his confirmation about our direction in life. What God wants to do for us, as he did for the disciples, is to give us a greater vision of Jesus as he really is. That will not answer all of our questions but can strengthen our ability to trust and follow him through our questions and uncertainties.

More than anything else though, the Transfiguration was preparing Jesus to walk the path that led to the cross. God had confirmed that Jesus was his Son at Jesus’ baptism which led to his temptation and then into his public ministry. Here at the point that Jesus resolves to walk the path of suffering which leads to redemption, God again confirms his Sonship to Jesus in the same way as at his baptism. Jesus came down from this mountain knowing that he was God’s Son walking in God’s way and that sustained through all the trials that endured.

We too will have mountain-top experiences in our lives. Times of great blessing and revelation when all seems well with the world and when we know without any uncertainty that we are God’s children. Our mountain-top experience might be a great worship service, an experience of healing, answered prayer or the gifts of the Holy Spirit, it might be a sense of overwhelming joy or of union with every other living thing in the whole created order. Whatever it is and however wonderful it is, we will inevitably, as Jesus, did come down from the mountain-top to experience suffering or in our case failure. We cannot live on the mountain-tops but those experience sustain us when we are in the valleys. Such experiences are one of the means God uses to go with us through the valleys, even the valley of the shadow of death.

Mountain-top experiences are often not looked for but are gifts to us to appreciate and enjoy. The disciples only recognised the full significance of their mountain-top experience as they looked back. At the time, they felt afraid and confused. Are you able to look back on events that may not have been clear at the time but which have been significant, sustaining experiences for you in your life? Have there been times of joy, wonder or blessing which you have now lost sight of in your life and need to rekindle and relive?

The disciples relived their experiences by telling them to others and by having them written down so that their stories could be passed on to others including us. It may be that you need to relive your experiences of refreshment, blessing and revelation by telling others about them or by writing them down to share with others.

Jesus was changed as he went up the mountain; his faced changed its appearance and his clothes became dazzling white. But it was not just Jesus that was changed by this experience as the disciples too were changed – not instantly but over time as they looked back and thought about the significance of what they had seen and heard. Their responses at the time were confused but time and reflection brought the understanding and assurance that enabled them to stand for Jesus in their lives and follow him on the path where he had led.

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U2 - I Will Follow.

A Falling Mantle: What Legacy Are You Leaving?

This Sunday I shared with our congregation at St John's Seven Kings a condensed version of a sermon by Leighton Ford which I found on the internet and which was first preached at Wee Kirk, Linville, North Carolina, on August 13, 2006.

I found the way in which Leighton Ford interwove personal and other stories with the content of his two texts (Mark 4:26-33, 2 Kings 2:1-14) to be moving and profound. I was intrigued by his identification of the biblical story as one of a legacy passed on from generation to generation, in faithfulness to God’s kingdom – and sometimes, tragically, of a legacy wasted. I was challenged by the questions he posed: What do your heirs expect and want from us? What are we called to pass on to them? And will we do it with faith and faithfulness, and confidence in God?

Ford's focus on the passing on of a legacy is of particular relevance to us as we shortly begin our Lent course Handing on the Torch.

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The Barratt Band - Your Love.