Last

The invoice makes it seem so very ordinary.  It blandly states,

28 May 2010  Posterior Composite Filling Lower Left Molar

I have been very blessed to have a dentist as a friend!  It goes without saying that he did not become a friend by being my dentist - that's about as likely as making friends by being a Traffic Warden - but having become a friend he became my dentist (and stayed my friend - perhaps even that is difficult!).

Thursday was disconcerting.  A relatively useful day fell apart as a result of an apricot.  It doesn't happen to everyone, and I've had several uneventful apricot encounters over the years, but this one ended with part of the previously mentioned molar sticking closely to the apricot instead of to itself.  A broken tooth!  A phone call.  A Friday drive to my friend's surgery.  A read of the National Geographic in the waiting room.  The most enormous drilling sound - no, it was alright, just a gardener next door power sawing a rhododendron bush!  The smiling welcome.  The chair (aargh).  The light.  The inspection and confirmation of the evil apricot's misdemeanour. "Shall I fill it now?"  The grimaced "Yes, please". Then,

"You're my last ever patient"

Some of the potential threat from such a claim was mitigated by me knowing that some time in the next month or so my dentist was moving over to a teaching post.  But it doesn't take much to set the mind racing in a dentist's chair.  My mind raced between two poles. 

Maybe this was his least important filling ever.  After all whatever happened it would be some other dentist that would next work on my molars. 

Or was it his most important filling ever?  A whole dental career leading to the grand terminus of one of my lower left molars.

Like good professionals everywhere he just filled the tooth as he would have done any other day.  And, having told me not to eat for a couple of hours, departed into post-patient paradise to eat with his staff in celebration.  I wasn't sure what to say as a patient in such historic circumstances, but of course with a numbed mouth saying nothing much was most suitable.

I am fantastically grateful to my dentist.  I vaguely feel the dastardly apricot let me in to a privileged moment.

What I know more certainly is that when on the cross my Lord said, IT IS FINISHED, he really was describing the finale that everything about him had led towards.  Not only the most important moment in his life, purpose and future, the most important moment for me and my dentist too.

Pentecost

Sing Out

Here's part of last Sunday Evening's worship at our Church.  We're lining up to sing one of our worship songs at the front of the Church building.

Why?

To remind ourselves, as Pentecost approaches, that the closed walls of the Jerusalem Upper Room were for the time before the Holy Spirit came.  Once He came down, the only way for the Church was (supposed to be) out!

Ordination

Yesterday we had a fantastic service in which one of our young men was ordained into Christian ministry. Hundreds of people came, and the Word of God was preached from Exodus 3, drawing us to the greatness of God who calls us.  If anything made the day a little less golden for me personally it was the reflection that whenever I've come to such days marking my pilgrimage points I always seem to be given Scriptures that are at once deeply meaningful and somewhat, well, disconcerting.

It started at my Baptism when, being baptised as a believer, I was blessed with 'endure hardness, as a good soldier of Jesus Christ'.  I suppose one unspoken practical advantage of the Baptism of Infants practised in other traditions is that you don't get to comprehend any ominous texts if they're spoken over you.

On to my Ordination. The speaker chose for his sermon Ezekiel chapter 2, here translated in The Message,

"Son of man, stand up. I have something to say to you." The moment I heard the voice, the Spirit entered me and put me on my feet. As he spoke to me, I listened. He said, "Son of man, I'm sending you to the family of Israel, a rebellious nation if there ever was one. They and their ancestors have fomented rebellion right up to the present. They're a hard case, these people to whom I'm sending you—hardened in their sin. Tell them, 'This is the Message of God, the Master.' They are a defiant bunch. Whether or not they listen, at least they'll know that a prophet's been here. But don't be afraid of them, son of man, and don't be afraid of anything they say. Don't be afraid when living among them is like stepping on thorns or finding scorpions in your bed. Don't be afraid of their mean words or their hard looks. They're a bunch of rebels. Your job is to speak to them. Whether they listen is not your concern. They're hardened rebels. Only take care, son of man, that you don't rebel like these rebels. Open your mouth and eat what I give you."

When I looked he had his hand stretched out to me, and in the hand a book, a scroll. He unrolled the scroll. On both sides, front and back, were written lamentations and mourning and doom.

My ordination speaker was a good preacher (in the technique sense) though as it happens I can't remember a thing he said - just the forbidding chapter and the preacher himself.  The preacher, who for internet purposes will remain anonymous, a few years later did that 10th/7th commandment thingy of coveting his neighbour's wife and then some.  Not so long after he did it again somewhere else after undergoing the restoration/repentence routine, thus unintentionally giving me a lifelong demonstration of the very characteristics God warned Ezekiel about.

If the Word of God sometimes tastes to the ear like unpalatable cold remedies, it's because God knows the preachers who preach it and the hearers who listen.  As he kind of said to Ezekiel, "Swallow that, it'll do you good".

Shower

For some people what matters about this week has very little to do with events in Westminster.

Dave and Nick

Vote for change, we're always told.

But you don't have to vote for change because change happens whether we like it or not.  Now into the shoes (or perhaps mules or spats) previously worn by First Lords of the Treasury and/or Prime Ministers named His Grace the 1st Duke of Newcastle, His Grace William Cavendish-Bentinck, Henry Temple The Viscount Palmerston and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman arrive Dave and Nick.

It reminds me of the Church Membership List with which I was confronted on leaving training college on which not a single first name appeared.  If someone said that she was Elsie I simply had to best guess which of the Mrs or Miss Es she was, a process vexed with potential disaster.  Mr D. Cameron, Mr N. Clegg.

Now I have bizarre discussions about Ann, Ben, Carol or Darren before finding out later that the other party was talking about a different Darren, Carol, Ben or Ann.  Things have changed completely, yet in that peculiarly human way that sees the Garden of Eden replicated by people's Internet behaviour, nothing has changed at all.  The first name issue has become the last name issue! 

Dave and Nick, take note. 

Undecided

Here we are, the Sunday after the Thursday before, and we still don't know who'll be Prime Minister next month or which party(ies) will form the next UK Government.

A hung parliament.  It's all so wonderfully post-modern.

Nothing is certain.  Nothing is absolute.  Nothing is true for us all.  Nothing is inevitable.  Anything is nothing if I want it to be. 

I guess the financial markets, which are not so post-modern, will get some decisions made shortly.  And that reminds me that while everything seems to be relative, the opposite is actually true.  The future only has a single destination when it comes to bowing the knee.  Yep, Jesus has the Hung Parliament thing well sorted in the long run.

Dissembled

Having spent a busy May Day holiday weekend at home and serving my church and a nearby fellowship it's been time to catch up on what I missed.  I missed the Baptist Assembly in Plymouth so the best I could do was to catch up by reading some of the bloggers who had been there.  Some made me a little envious, others (these are Baptists and no two ever agree entirely) a little grateful that I was not there.  Then this - from one College lecturer much admired in the higher Baptist world -

Delegates (and this is very impressionistic) – nearly all rather elderly, middle aged, middle England, conventional, dated, Isle of Wight, Daily Mail/Telegraph. Not that all of those things are in themselves bad but they are certainly not representative of the wider population – overall really rather dull in comparison. On the way down I read Cole Moreton’s "Is God Still An Englishman". Moreton paints a now largely familiar picture of the last fifty years and the changes in English society and in particular how we do God. This certainly feels much more like the old England, and not in a good way.  

Can't get much more middle in England than Wycombe, more middle in age than me (currently - but heading for elderly I guess - ah, but so are you!), dated (at least my daughter thinks so), conventional (Bran Flakes nearly every morning), read the sports pages in the Daily Telegraph and do the crossword, even went to the Isle of Wight on holiday once.

Perhaps I should be glad I didn't go and comprehensively contribute to the gentleman's perceived problem.  But while we have Christian leaders who treat their brothers and sisters in these stereotypical ways we will never have the Church that Jesus came to bring.  After all, his first disciples were all Jewish, male, young adult, mid-Galileans as far as I can tell. 

Or perhaps it isn't only the politicians campaigning in Rochdale that need to learn to value people for what they are rather than dismiss them for what they're not.

River

This evening we looked at Jesus' amazing promise of the Holy Spirit.  He is the river that flows from Jesus for us.  Springing from the perfect Saviour, from the hill where Jesus died, from - as Ezekiel saw it - the altar, this river gives life in a world that is otherwise a spiritual desert.  A river of living water, never stagnant.  Never stopping, it is yet a place to rest.

Why is this 'amazing'?  Because the River is God himself.  Not a religious metaphor for a long ritual or an ecstatic spinning.  God himself comes to us.

When the General Election is over I do not expect to hear from the politicians much until we meet again at the next election.  Yet when Jesus went up to somewhere more exalted than Westminster or Washington or Brussels, God immediately came back to give us more and more life.  If only we could, we'd certainly elect God!  In fact, and more amazingly still, he elects us!!