Bring me to life

Here is my sermon from yesterday's Choral Eucharist at St Martin-in-the-Fields:

On their debut album, entitled Fallen, the rock band Evanescence combined metallic power pop with spiritual lyrics with gothic imagery. ‘Bring me to life’ is a song about a personal resurrection; one that could, perhaps, have been sung by Lazarus (John 11. 1 - 45):

'Bring me to life'

“Bring me to life,” “wake me up inside”; these are helpful images and phrases for reflecting on the experience of resurrection. Another band, The Harbour Lights, sing:

“How easily we forget
The grace with which we started
How quickly we become
Tied up and locked away
Bound by our own frustrations
Till all our senses numb

Awaken from the Winter
To the colours of the Spring
Keep your heart wide open
So you do not miss a thing
For all the birds are singing
It’s time for resurrection
It’s time for letting go
Of all the things that might have been
For living out your promises
And dusting off your dreams
Time for you to fly again
time for resurrection" (‘Resurrection’)

Resurrection, as imaged in these songs, is about being freed from the bounds of our own frustrations which numb our senses. As we are brought to life, we come alive to the colours of the Spring with hearts which are open so we do not miss a thing. This is an understanding of resurrection in which we can all potentially participate.

So how, where and when do you come alive or experience resurrection? To help you think about your answer to that question, here are some occasions and ways in which I have experienced resurrection:

I come alive

When I stand in snow on a mountain slope viewing a cobalt lake,
I come alive.
When the morning mist forms a white sea on the Somerset levels, islanding trees,
I come alive.
When my daughter nestles up and hugs me tight,
I come alive.
When my wife and I lie, skin touching, sweat mingling in the heat of summer and passion,
I come alive.
When a friend listens with understanding and without advising,
I come alive.
When I sing and dance in the echoes of an empty Church,
I come alive.
When words cannot express Your praise and I sing in tongues,
I come alive.
When I hear the rustle of angel’s wings above me in the eaves,
I come alive.

I come alive to endurance
when I see a hesitant smile form on the face of the Big Issue seller.
I come alive to pain
when I hear a friend’s story of depression and unanswered pleading.
I come alive to patience
when I see a husband answer again the question from his alzheimered wife.
I come alive to injustice
when the Metro contrasts Big Mac obesity lawsuits with African famine victims.
I come alive to suffering
when I see Sutherland’s Crucifixion and read Endo’s Silence.
I come alive to grief
when I remember the aircraft shattered and scattered across Kosovan heights.

I come alive
when I am touched and see and hear
the beautiful or broken, the passionate or poor.
The mystery or madness
of the Other in which God
meets and greets me
and calls forth the response
that is love.

Let us pray … Lord Jesus, we are frozen inside without your touch, without your love. You are the life among the dead, so wake us up inside. Call our names and save us from the dark. Bid our blood to run before we come undone, save us from the nothing we’ve become. Bring us to life. Amen.

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Evanescence - Bring Me To Life.

First fifteen music meme

I was tagged for this meme by Philip Ritchie:

1) Turn on your MP3 player or music player on your computer.

2) Go to SHUFFLE songs mode.

3) Write down the first 15 songs that come up–song title and artist – NO editing/cheating, please.

 
‘New Home’ - Eric Bibb (Booker’s Guitar)

‘Building Up’ - Al Green (Gospel Collection)

‘Thank You For The Cross’- Various Artists (Songs of Fellowship Vol. 5)

‘Primitives’ - T Bone Burnett (Twenty Twenty)

‘Brown’ – P.O.D. (Brown)

‘Quechua Song’ – Jan Gabarek/Hilliard Ensemble (Mnemosyne)

‘Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend’ - T Bone Burnett (Twenty Twenty)

‘Rock, Salt and Nails’ – Buddy Miller (The Best of the Hightone Years)

‘My Immortal’ – Evanescence (Fallen)

‘This Time’ – P.O.D. (Testify)

‘Stop’ – Spice Girls (Greatest Hits)

‘Mr Tambourine Man’ – Bob Dylan (The Bootleg Series Vol. 5)

‘All My Trust I Place In You’ – McIntosh Ross (The Great Lakes)

‘On The Grind’ – P.O.D. (Testify)

‘Ubi Caritas’ – David Fitzgerald (God is Love)

Make of that what you will! Here is something different again ...
 
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Bill Mallonee - River Of Love.

Spirituality, creativity and the Arts (2)

Last Saturday I was involved in '... hearts and hands and voices...’, this year’s Exploring Spirituality Day in the Diocese of St Albans.

Revd. Nicholas Cranfield, Vicar of All Saints' Blackheath and Arts Correspondent for the Church Times, was the keynote speaker. He spoke about the significance of shaping sacred space in churches, as much for those who are secular but visit churches, as for those who do share the Christian tradition. Symbols, in particular, mark out sacred space; as with the Christ in Majesty seen at St Andrew's Bedford, where we were meeting. He noted the various extremes within the Church in relation to this issue from the Iconostasis' of Orthodox Churches to the boarded up stained glass of Anglican churches in the Diocese of Sydney but outlined a Biblical basis for the Christian visual tradition beginning with Bezalel and his fellow workers who were filled with the Spirit for their artistic design work through to Christ as the visible image of the invisible God.

In the workshop which I led, we explored connections between the Psalms and popular song. Statements on different aspects of the Psalms made by Dennis Potter, Nick Cave and Bono were illustrated with songs from Stacie Orrico, Evanescence and the Black Eyed Peas. Discussion of these statements and songs led on to workshop participants beginning to write their own contemporary psalms.        

This was my second year of leading workshops at the Exploring Spirituality Day and on both occasions those attending have been particularly enthusiastic and engaged.

Alan Stewart, Vicar of St Andrew's Hertford, who is one of the Exploring Spirituality Day organisers has an exhibition at St Mary's Hertingfordbury on Friday 19th and Saturday 20th November. The exhibition will feature striking charcoals and vibrant oils.

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Black Eyed Peas - Where Is The Love?

Seeing spirituality from a gothic perspective

It was probably inevitable that after Fallen, their major-label debut, propelled Evanescence to sales of nearly 14 million albums worldwide, that a series of other bands would emerge cut from essentially the same template of female-fronted metallic power pop combining spiritual lyrics with gothic imagery.

The inherent drama in Evanescence’s music which derives from their marriage of rock, goth and classical is also clearly apparent in the music made by Flyleaf, where dual guitars trade orchestral riffs that seesaw from soaring to searing and singer Lacey’s vocals build into beauty from pain. Their second album, Memento Mori, links together 13 tracks to form a sort of parable:

"Every track is like another chapter of the story. In my head it feels like a movie. The story becomes a parable for important life lessons we’ve learned over the years. After coming through these life and death experiences, we have learned to be more grateful and purposeful with the time we are given. We want to pass the torch at the end during ‘Arise.’ Perhaps someone will come away from the story and be more grateful and purposeful with their own life and the world will change for the better."

Emo band Paramore have more of a pop-punk sound but have increasingly taken their imagery into similar territory to Evanescence and Flyleaf. Lead singer, Hayley Williams, has said of the songs on their most recent album:

"I was like, 'This isn't a feel-good song, because I'm writing about something I'm going through right now, and it's still painful.' And I confused that with actually not liking the songs, when actually I was prouder of them than I've ever been before. They're heavier emotions for me... I'm still going through some of this stuff, and these songs are really healing to me."

Paramore decided to name the record brand new eyes because of the allusion to seeing things from a whole new perspective, "Just trying to let go of whatever we might have struggled with the past and just see each other in a new way," explained Williams.

The newest band in this vein take us right back to the beginning. We Are The Fallen is comprised of the original members of multi-platinum trailblazing band Evanescence, guitarists Ben Moody and John LeCompt along with drummer Rocky Gray, with enigmatic American Idol finalist Carly Smithson powering the vocal reins of the new group. Respected touring and studio bassist Marty O’Brien (Disturbed and Static-X, among others) rounds out the iconic five-some.

The energetic creative engine behind the launch of Evanescence, Moody and the other members of We Are The Fallen found a true partner in Smithson, who always envisioned a band environment as her dream move following Idol. Ben Moody who co-founded the band, was a principal writer of the 15-million selling debut, Fallen, departed Evanescence in 2003. Since that time, he has enjoyed a prolific career as a producer and songwriter. When asked about the formation of We Are The Fallen, he shared, “I am finally home.” Singer Smithson added, “As an artist I have never been happer. Creatively, musically visually, and on a comedic level we are united and together on the same page. We are a family.”

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We Are The Fallen - Bury Me Alive.

Resurrecting individuals & cultures

Imagine a bed surrounded by the debris of a week’s illness, soiled sheets and slashed pillows, pills and vodka bottles, used condoms and tissues. This is My Bed an installation by Tracy Emin was first exhibited in 1999. You’ll probably remember reading about it in the press at the time as it prompted the usual “call that art, my two-year old could have done better” kind of articles.

A bed is a powerful symbol of birth and death, sex and intimacy but this controversial installation was perhaps an image of our culture’s sickness and dis-ease surrounded by the remnants of those things through which we seek a cure; sex, alcohol, drugs, tears, aggression. And the bed, like many lives, was empty. The morning after the cure that never came.

Our Old Testament reading from Ezekiel 37. 1-10 suggested something very similar about the people of Israel. Ezekiel saw a valley of dry bones and God said to him that the people of Israel were like those bones, dried up without any hope and with no future.

Sometimes our lives feel like these two pictures - dried up, no future, diseased, empty, dead. Our relationships may have broken down, we may have been abused, we may be anxious, stressed or worried, our work might be under threat or have ended. For all these reasons and many others we can feel as though our lives have closed down becoming barren or dry or dead.

Our communities and culture can feel like that too. Many years ago now, at the end of the 1970’s, The Sex Pistols sang about there being no future in England’s dreaming. And many people still think that our society is changing for the worse. When I had a holiday in Spain a few years ago I stayed on a street that was mainly occupied by British people who had left because they didn’t like the changes that they saw in British society. Such people think of Britain as being diseased and dead with no future for them.

Being in the Church it is also easy to feel the same. We are regularly told in the press that the Church is in decline (although many of the Churches in the Deanery suggest otherwise) and my Church, the Church of England is dealing with major conflicts over women bishops and gay clergy that threaten to pull it apart. Again, it is easy to feel as though the Church is washed up, dried out and dying.

Whatever we think of those issues and views, the God that we worship is in the resurrection business. And that is where we need to be too. In Ezekiel God promised that he would put his breath into the people of Israel and bring them back to life and in our Gospel reading (John 11. 1-45) Jesus said that he is the resurrection and the life and demonstrated this by bringing Lazarus back to life. Jesus was the fulfillment of God’s promise to Ezekiel that he would bring the people of Israel back to life. In Jesus, Israel lived life as God had intended and fulfilled Israel’s mission of bringing light to the rest of the world. In this way, Jesus resurrected a society and culture transforming the entire world as he did so.

He calls us to follow in his footsteps by looking for the places where our society and culture is dried up or dying and working for its transformation and resurrection. This is why it is important for us to support the work of the Church Urban Fund during Lent as their funding helps disadvantaged people escape their disadvantage. It is why it is important for us to live and work with people of other faiths, as we have been thinking about through our evening Lent course, so that we can escape the dead-end of racial conflicts. It is also why it is important for us to be involved in the regeneration of our area and borough. The beginning of this week saw a deanery meeting on Redbridge and Regeneration held here at St John’s and the end of the week the first public meeting of the Take Action for Seven Kings group.

Each of us can do the same as Jesus through our work and community involvements and we need to be asking ourselves how God wants to use us, through those involvements, to transform parts of our society and culture.

Raising Lazarus from death was a sign of what would happen after Jesus’ own death on the cross. By rising from death himself, Jesus conquered death for all people enabling us to enter in to eternal life after our physical death. This is good news for us to share with other people around us wherever we are - in our families and among our friends, neighbours and work colleagues.

After Easter we plan to run another Alpha course. Courses like Alpha provide great opportunities for us all to share our faith. There maybe someone that you can invite and bring along to the course or you may be able to help with running the course by helping with refreshments or setting up the room or helping in a discussion group (see me for more details after, if you can help or would like to come on the course). Think for a moment about the people and places where you can share the good news of life after death through our Lord Jesus.

Jesus also resurrected lives before physical death came. Look for a moment at John 11 with me. In the first section of that chapter from verses 1 to 16 we see the disciples struggling to understand what Jesus is saying and doing. He is wanting them to see how God is at work in Lazarus’ illness and death. They keep looking only at their physical and material circumstances - if Jesus goes back to Judea then he will be killed, if Lazarus is asleep then he will get better, and so on. Jesus wants them to see that God can work even through death and in verse 16 he draws out of them the commitment to go with him even though they may die with him.

Then in verses 17 to 27, Jesus helps Martha to move beyond her theoretical belief in the resurrection to a belief that Jesus himself is the promised Messiah. Finally, in verses 38 to 45, he helps all those present to move beyond their focus on physical realities to believe in God’s ability to do the supernatural. Throughout, Jesus is challenging all the people he encounters to move beyond their comfort zones, to step out in faith, to encounter and trust God in new ways. He wants to do the same with each one of us. Wherever our lives have got stuck, have become dried up or closed down or have died he wants to challenge and encourage us to move out of our comfort zones and to encounter him and other people in new and risky ways. He wants us to come alive to God, to the world, to other people and to life itself in new ways.

Jesus is in the resurrection business. Whether it is transforming society, sharing the good news of eternal life or encouraging us to step out in faith, Jesus wants to bring us to life. How will you respond to Jesus this morning? Is there an area of your life that he can bring back to life or will you commit yourself to join in sharing the good news of eternal life with others and transforming society where you are? As you think about that challenge let us pray together briefly, using the words of a song by Evanescence:

Lord Jesus, we are frozen inside without your touch, without your love. You are the life among the dead, so wake us up inside. Call our names and save us from the dark. Bid our blood to run before we come undone, save us from the nothing we’ve become. Bring us to life. Amen.

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Evanescence - Bring Me To Life.