Start:Stop - Steer us through storms

Bible reading

On that day, when evening had come, he said to them, “Let us go across to the other side.” And leaving the crowd behind, they took him with them in the boat, just as he was. Other boats were with him. A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But he was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, “Peace! Be still!” Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, “Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?” And they were filled with great awe and said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (Mark 4:35-41)

Meditation

Jesus' reaction to the storm (to sleep) and his response to his disciples after the stilling of the storm ("Why are you frightened? Have you still no faith?") suggest that he had expected the disciples to ride out the storm both by acting as responsible sailors and trusting in God to see them through. Jesus is able to sleep because he trusts his disciples to get him safely to the other side of Lake Galilee, even in the midst of a storm. After all, many of them are fishermen, experienced sailors, while he is, as a carpenter, a landlubber. The disciples know boats and they know the lake, it makes sense that he would trust them to sail safely from one side of the lake to the other. He trusts them enough that he can catch up on some sleep while they get on with doing what they are actually very good at doing. The disciples have skills and knowledge of sailing and Jesus expects them to use these and trusts that they will use them well.

Instead, they are panicked by the storm, forget to do the things that sailors should do in a storm and, as a result, come close to going under. The problem comes, of course, when they don’t use their skills and knowledge well. The strength of the storm is such that they panic and don’t take actions (like taking down the sail, bailing out the water, and steering against the storm rather than with it) which would have enabled them to ride out the storm and get to the other side of the lake. They made the situation worse by panicking and it was their panic which could have got them killed.

This, I think, is why they are rebuked by Jesus for lack of faith. Essentially, he was saying, “If you had trusted in God to see you through the storm, you would have done the sensible things that would have enabled you to survive. But, because you didn’t trust in God to see you through, you panicked, didn’t take sensible actions, nearly got us all drowned, and needed me to intervene to save you.”

This seems a saluatory tale for us in the unanticipated storms of life – whether, the credit crunch and the recession it caused or more personal storms such as ill health or redundancy. Instead of panicking and looking for a miraculous instant solution to the storm in which we find ourselves, the faithful thing is to act responsibly, securing what can be secured and steering our way through the storm, trusting that we will come through, battered and blown, but alive nevertheless.

Prayer

Lord Jesus, help us respond to the challenge of your question to the disciples as we face the storm of this time of austerity. May we trust, and in our trust, take the responsible and sensible decisions that will secure our futures and those of others, both those we support and those who depend on us.

Steer us through storms, as we trust in the skills and experience you have given.

Lord Jesus, guide us as we make decisions in difficult times – the storms of life. Enable us to take the long view as we decide rather than acting only in the short-term, enable us to act in the wider interests of others – the common good – rather than thinking and acting primarily in our own self-interest.

Steer us through storms, as we trust in the skills and experience you have given.

Lord Jesus, thank you for giving each of us skills and experience. We pray that these will not be negated by a sense of panic in times of storm and difficulty but that we will trust enough in all you have given us to believe that if we use our skills and knowledge well, we will come through.

Steer us through storms, as we trust in the skills and experience you have given.

Blessing

Trust in God, trust in God’s leading, trust in responsible actions, trust in the skills and experience God has given, trust in the midst of storms and difficulties. May those blessings of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, rest upon you and remain with you always. Amen.

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Belle and Sebastian - The Ghost Of Rockschool.

Discover & explore and Lamentation for the forsaken

Shared service with St Martin-in-the-Fields - Monday 21st March, 1.10pm at St Stephen Walbrook. 

This will be a Discover & explore service with the Choral Scholars of St Martin-in-the-Fields, the Choir of St Stephen Walbrook and our organist Joe Sentance. The choirs will sing the anthem which has given the themes for this Discover & explore service series; Eric Whitacre's 'Hope, Faith, Life, Love'.

The theme of this service will be 'Soul' and the preacher will be Dr Carolyn Rosen. Following the service, the artist Michael Takeo Magruder will discuss his digital art installation 'Lamentation for the Forsaken, 2016'. 

This installation can be seen until Good Friday at St Stephen Walbrook (weekdays, 10am – 4pm, except on Wednesdays, 11.00am - 3.00pm), as part of ‘Stations of the Cross 2016’ an exhibition across 14 iconic locations in London during Lent. In his installation, Takeo offers a lamentation not only for the forsaken Christ, but others who have felt his acute pain of abandonment. Click here to view Arriving at Station XIII, a short series of videos exploring the development of this newly commissioned artwork for the Stations of the Cross project. The videos follow Takeo's progress as he conceives, develops and finally presents his installation at St. Stephen.

The Tablet has said of this installation:

"In the richly harmonious interior of Christopher Wren’s St Stephen’s Walbrook, Michael Takeo Magruder’s Lamentation for the Forsaken is inspired by a passage from Lamentations (5:1-2) whose contemporary relevance is achingly obvious: “Remember, O Lord, what has befallen us; look and see our disgrace! Our inheritance has been turned over to strangers, our homes to aliens.”

On the tomb-shaped installation’s four modular screens an image of the Turin Shroud comes in and out of focus as parts of Christ’s body merge with news photographs of Syrian refugees. In the place of Christ’s feet we see migrants in transit, littering railway lines and piled on to overloaded boats; in the place of Christ’s hands we find refugees caring for loved ones, alive, injured and dead; in the place of Christ’s body we witness asylum seekers caught up in conflict, clashing with police with riot shields. Christ’s face, meanwhile, yields place to a hollow-eyed young woman and a wide-eyed child dangling a limp doll. Underlying the shifting images is a mesh of Roman capitals recording the names of the dead as a roll of honour."

Before then our next Discover & explore service at St Stephen is Trust (Monday 15th March) at 1.10pm. All are most welcome.

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Eric Whitacre - hope, faith, life, love.

Candlemas: Patience has formed itself in me a virtue

Tonight we were please to celebrate Candlemas at St Stephen Walbrook with our patrons, the Worshipful Company of Grocers. Here is the sermon that I preached as part of their Candlemas Service:

50% of mobile users abandon a page if it doesn't load in 10 seconds. 3 out of 5 won't return to that site. 1 in 4 people abandon a web page that takes more than 4 seconds to load. T-shirt slogans say, “I want instant gratification and I want it now” and “Instant gratification takes too long.”

The advertising slogan once used by the credit card Access – "take the waiting out of wanting" – illustrates how many people want to possess things the minute they decide they want them, whereas waiting is seen as passive and boring. At the time it was first used, that slogan would have seemed perfectly acceptable. Now, it seems to sum up all that has gone wrong with a culture built on credit.

Simeon had been waiting throughout his life to see Lord’s promised Messiah, as the Holy Spirit had assured him that he would not die before the promised event occurred. His wait had been and it must have felt to him like a long time. He was tired from waiting and so ready for death that, as soon as he had seen Jesus, he prayed, “Now, Lord, you have kept your promise, and you may let your servant go in peace.”

Why, I wonder, should we wait? As we have just seen, often we don’t like it and we can’t see the point. And yet the Bible is full of waiting. Abraham is promised that he will be the father of a great nation and that promise is fulfilled but only many years after Abraham himself has died. The children of Israel spend 40 years waiting and wandering in the wilderness before they enter the Promised Land. Later they spend 70 years in exile in Babylon waiting to return to Jerusalem. There were approximately 400 years between the end of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New, with the birth of Jesus. Why so much waiting?

One reason is that waiting can lead to revelation. Anna was in the Temple every day looking and listening for all that God would reveal to her. Simeon, too, was alert to the prompting of the Holy Spirit who led him into the Temple to see Jesus. As we wait for God, are we looking and listening for all that God wants us to see and hear while we wait?

W. H. Vanstone wrote a wonderful book called The Stature of Waiting in which he argued that it is only to human beings as we wait that “the world discloses its power of meaning” and we become “the sharer with God of a secret – the secret of the world’s power of meaning.” For many of us because we don’t stop and reflect the world exists for us simply as a “mere succession of images recorded and registered in the brain” but when we do stop, wait, look and listen then we “no longer merely exist” but understand, appreciate, welcome, fear and feel.

Waiting can also grow the virtue of patience in us as to wait is a test of our patience and an opportunity to build patience. We would like God to solve all our problems right now, but our patience and perseverance is often tested before we find answers to our prayers. How would we actually practice patience if there were not times when we were called to wait upon the Lord?

We all know the saying that good things come to those who wait. Waiting can sharpen our sense of anticipation and also our sense of relief and appreciation when we receive that for which we have been waiting. We can sense something of this in Simeon’s prayer:

“Now, Lord, you have kept your promise,
and you may let your servant go in peace.
With my own eyes I have seen your salvation,
which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples:
A light to reveal your will to the Gentiles
and bring glory to your people Israel.”

When the Bible mentions waiting, patience, perseverance or longsuffering, it is often in connection with trusting in God. Waiting reinforces for us that what is achieved is achieved through God and not primarily through our own ability. As a result, we learn to trust fully in him. If we will not wait, we will inevitably trust in someone or something other than God - usually our own abilities or righteousness.

I imagine all these to be thoughts and insights which became part of Simeon’s experience, as they can also be for us. I also imagine him finally saying something like this:

I have passed my days in expectation,
anticipation of a time which has not come.
Not yet come. Through long years of watching,
waiting, I have questioned my vocation,
understanding, calling, yet patience has formed
itself in me a virtue and I have been sustained.
And now in wintertime when the seed of life itself
seemed buried, my feet standing in my grave,
at the last moment, when hope had faded,
then you come; a new born life as mine is failing -
now, Lord, let your servant depart in peace.
Hope, when hope was dashed. Wonder, where
cynicism reigned. Spring buds in winter snow.
Patience rewarded. Divine trust renewed.

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Bruce Cockburn - Waiting For A Miracle.

The dishonest manager

Often working people (usually rightly) say that work barely gets a mention in Church yet when you look at the stories Jesus told large numbers of them are to do with work.

Luke 16. 1 - 13 is one of those stories and it may well be the one that it is most difficult to understand. The story and the teaching based on it seem contradictory and it doesn’t seem to fit with other things that Jesus said and taught.

A manager is wasting his employer’s money. He is found out and fired. The beginning of the story makes sense to us. It’s what happens next that causes a problem. The manager then reduces the debts that various people owe to his employer in order to get on good terms with them before he leaves his master’s employment. Although he is again wasting his master’s money, this time the master praises what he has done.

Jesus goes on to say that we should use our money to make friends and that this will help us to be welcomed into eternity. That seems almost the reverse of his saying store up treasures in heaven rather than treasures on earth. Then to compound all the complications he commends faithfulness after having told a story in which the dishonest manager is praised for his dishonesty.

How can we find a way in to a set of teaching that seems contradictory and confused? It may be that the key is Jesus’ statement that we should make friends for ourselves. Although the dishonest manager remains dishonest there is a change that occurs in the story. And we can see that change most clearly if we think about the manager’s work-life balance.

At the beginning of the story, friendships and responsibility seem low on his list of priorities. He is managing his employer’s property but wasting his employer’s money. It is likely then that his life is focused around work and money. However, when his job comes under threat, he suddenly realises that relationships – friendships – are actually more important than work and money and figures out a quick way of building friendships. At the end of the story, if we return to his work-life balance, work will have decreased in importance to him while friendship and responsibility for his own future will have increased.

The teaching that follows the story makes it clear that Jesus does not condone dishonesty; if this manager is dishonest in small matters then he will also be dishonest in large ones. The manager’s fundamental dishonesty does not change but the priority he places on relationships does. In other teaching Jesus sometimes uses the formula; if someone who is bad can do X then how much more should you or how much more will God do X. He uses it, for example, when he talks about God giving the Holy Spirit: if fathers who are bad, he says, know how to give good gifts to their children, how much more will God give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.

What Jesus does in this story is similar. He is saying that if shrewd, worldly people, like the dishonest manager, can come to see the importance of relationships, then how much more should we do the same. Not following the example of the manager in using dishonesty to build relationships but following his example of learning to prioritise relationships in life and in work.

The Relationships Foundation sounds like it is likely to be a dating agency but is actually an organisation founded and run by Christians that believes that a good society is built on good relationships, from family and community to public service and business. They study the effect that culture, business and government have on relationships, create new ideas for strengthening social connections, campaign on issues where relationships are being undermined and train and equip people to think relationally for themselves. They are one example of an organisation that is seeking to prioritise relationships in life and in work as Jesus encouraged us to do. There are, of course, others, with the Mothers’ Union being among them, but the work that the Relationships Foundation attempts to do aims to encourage good relationships throughout society, not just within family life.

Why is this so important? Jesus throws out a hint when he says “make friends for yourself … so that … you will be welcomed in the eternal home.” Jesus seems to be hinting that the relationships we form now in some way continue into eternity. Paul says something similar in 1 Corinthians 13 when he writes that faith, hope and love remain using a word for ‘remain’ which suggests that acts of faith, hope and love continue into eternity. Building relationships Jesus and Paul suggest may not just be good for the here and now but may also have eternal implications. All the more reason then for us to learn from this story and, whether we are at home, at work, or in our community, to prioritise the building of good relationships with those around us.

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The Clash - Card Cheat.

Trust can be repaired

"The crisis in trust many organisations are facing can be repaired, but not if we continue to blame the economy and focus solely on senior leadership. In reality, we all need to recognise that we each have a stake in the future success of the organisations in which we work.
That's according to new research published by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), which found that the crisis in trust predates the economic downturn and is a function of a breakdown of five types of trust relationship within an organisation. The report's authors are warning that relying on any single one of these relationships will not suffice to build the climates needed to enable the economy to grow and innovate.

The research, led by Professor Veronica Hope-Hailey at Cass Business School, found that the most important types of trust are 'trust in each other' and 'trust in direct line managers' but each relationship is interconnected and trust must be reciprocal. 'In organisations where 'trust in each other' was emphasised, there was a strong and persistent focus on maintaining trust across all relationships; if one became strained, the others were sufficiently strong to maintain overall trust even in the face of pay cuts, redundancies and restructuring. Conversely, in organisations relying exclusively on 'trust in leaders', there was a high risk of trust being eroded when those leaders suddenly (often because of the pressures of the recession) started to make decisions which revealed a lack of ability, integrity, predictability or benevolence."

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Leigh Nash - Trust.