Considering Cards - 10.The Fake Fireside

 

Another beautiful card.  I admit that on first glance I simply thought this was quite a nostalgic scene that someone had taken in their grand living room and that had found its way onto a card.  Then I looked harder.

 

That's always a good thing to do at Christmas I think.  I realise that it seems humbuggish but perhaps looking at the true nature of things helps us appreciate the truly good things.

 

The shaft of light rising up from the Christmas tree is a bit of a giveaway.  That's not a wall of panelling but a screen as can be seen in the mirror.  Speaking of which, whoever in their house rests a mirror on a mantelpiece rather than hang it up?  Speaking of which mantelpiece - the decoration on it blocks sight of the cards!  Real homes add cards later and where they can be seen.   They're not real logs either, are they?  But saddest of all, none of the 'presents' have any names on.  They are not from anyone to anyone.

 

In the end this is a fireside that never has any people.  It is for cameras only.

 

A Christmas without people is no Christmas at all.  You cannot have an Immanuel (God with us) unless there is an 'us'.  The Saviour of the World doesn't want a fireside, he wants a family, and he came to save one for himself from the sad story of the human race.  He is a present from heaven to humanity.

 

May God draw you into his family this Christmas!

Considering Cards - 9. Undercamelled

For everyone who does assemblies, carol services, sermons and written articles the challenge of Christmas returns each year demanding a new angle on an old and rather short story of angels, shepherds and wise men.

 

Just when you think there is no possible variation or speculation that you haven't considered along comes a Christmas card that introduces a new 'train' of thought. What if . . .

 

Biblically the story of the incarnation is animal-free.  A manger but no animals mentioned, shepherds that have left their sheep and wise men who must have travelled on something but we don't know what.

 

Tradition bequeaths us three wise men and therefore three camels.  It's speculative but tidy.  This card introduces the thought that there was only one camel.  It's certainly a new angle.

 

Did they have to sell the other camels to pay for the expensive gifts?

Is this where car lifts to church really began as they shared the one camel?

Most provocatively of all (as the wise man on the camel appears to have no gift) was Gold, Frankincense or Myrrh actually the name of the camel??

 

Considering Cards - 8. Parental Neglect

This beautiful but mysterious card captures a non-canonical incident when the Holy Family visited Bethlehem Children's Zoo and Jesus' parents neglectfully abandoned him in Pets Corner.  I cannot trace this story anywhere else though.

 

 

Considering Cards - 7. Christmas is for Atheists too!

Today is Sunday, the last Lord's Day before Christmas.

 

But so what?  Why should anyone miss out on the commercial lightfest?  Here's just the card you need if the whole God-Jesus-Prince of Peace-Mary-Manger-Carols-Wise Men-Shepherds-Religion-Bethlehem thing is too much for you.

 

And you dislike Santa too.

 

However - it was sent us by someone who's been an ordained Christian minister longer than me!

Considering Cards - 6. Simon Cowell's Entry

This card depicts the scene were the Magi (Wise Men) to appear on The X Factor.

Yes, we can see that's what it depicts. 

But why?

Considering Cards (and envelopes) - 5. The Postman's Challenge (Part 2)

One of our elderly relatives sent us a Christmas Card in this envelope:

 

We thought it was more than a little surprising that this got to us. Well done Royal Mail!  Just as well I'm not at some of our nearby churches - like Grace Church or St James or St Andrews!

The formula we end prayers with is also very simple - in Jesus' name.  God has made a way to him that is as simple as can be.

Considering Cards - 4. The Problem of Joseph

Two cards that illustrate the Problem of Joseph.

 

Joseph is portrayed as a very good man in the Biblical narrative.  Certainly a step or three ahead of most of the Apostles as things are recorded.  Then he disappears.  For all the attractive whimsy of Jesus working as a twenty-something alongside his father (as it were) in the carpenter's workshop we do not know to what extent this was true.  We do not need to know.

 

Christmas plunges the somewhat obscure good man Joseph next to the world-changing good Man who was God, Jesus.  And, thanks to the unfortunate development of Marian devotion in the ancient Church, taken up with a vengeance (literally) by post-Reformation Roman Catholicism, next to the Divine Child and the obscure man is the Blessed Virgin Mary. 

What is a mere card manufacturer to make of it all?  Giving Jesus a halo is easy.  Giving Mary a halo is, well, Catholically easy.  Giving Joseph a halo?  So-so.

Considering Cards - 3. Infant in Spontaneous Combustion Horror

The title and the picture say it all really.

Is it a prophecy of Pentecost?  Did the artist find babies hard to draw?  Did someone spill bleach on the card? 

We'll never know.

Considering Cards - 2. The Postman's Challenge

Sometimes cards arrive late.  Sometimes cards one might have expected don't arrive at all.  There are perhaps many reasons for this.  However, should the sender live in the town depicted on this card the cause of the delay or non-delivery is obvious enough.

 

 

It's a brave card sender who risks that tiny gap between post-box and river.  And it must be slippery too in the snow.  Maybe they never made it?  Think of the postman/woman though - perched on the ice by the river's edge to empty the thing.

 

Any community that can fund such bright lights in the top of the church tower should invest in a little health and safety for the postman I reckon.

Considering Cards - 1. The Tree and the Church

It's that time of year.

When so many people are lonely we are so privileged to have friends and family.  Most of all we are privileged to be part of the people of God where there can be feelings of loneliness but the loneliest Christian is streets ahead of their saddest secular counterparts, especially in old age.  Little breaks my heart more than seeing lonely elderly unbelievers living out painful, pointless years toward a lost eternity.

 

In this context we are really grateful for every Christmas Card we receive and for what it means in friendship.  Thanks!

 

Some readers of this blog will know that I do, however, like to give my Christmas card pictures a second look.  This year I'm sharing some of my second looks with my blog.  If it's your card, don't worry - you will not be identified and we were really glad to receive it whatever I say on here!

 

Exhibit 1:

Presumably this picture comes from a Christmas Tree producer or their decoration-making cousins.  There is a church so as to nod at the religious meaning of Christmas but the church is grey and distant.  There is snow (I love snow!) but whereas it has obliterated the church and kept the people indoors the tree seems mystically unaffected.

 

Well, that's a secular Christmas for you.  Trees starring in front of churches and people.

 

Except that this card is published by . . .

 

. . . The Salvation Army!

A December 6th Moment

Thomas was certainly clever.

Very few preachers, theologians or philosophers will have failed to mention him a few times.  But even if they choose to leave him in what they think is medieval history he will find them anyway if they are engaged with the Western world at all for his writings are that foundational to the history of thought.

 

 

 

Yet Thomas Aquinas's masterwork, his epic summary of theology, was never really completed.  Though it has shaped so much directly or indirectly it was put into best perspective by its author himself.

 

In early December of the year before he died he was in worship (a Mass of course, it being the medieval era) when he suddenly said that he would write no more.  His personal experience of God in that place on that day had left him lost for words.  All his writings, he estimated (in a way that even the militant atheists might hesitate to concede) were as straw.

 

As I watch a thousand texts being texted and blogs blogged and 'friends' messaged I cannot help thinking that every Christmas and every Advent is another opportunity to be lost in wonder that is lost in writing.

 

We can only ever know God when we stop and realise how little we have grasped of Him so far and how beyond words he and his love is.

Disaster's Song

 November 22nd 1873.  A November night in the Atlantic gives us a great hymn from an awful family disaster couples with a deep faith.

 

 

Mrs Green

A year and a half ago, not many miles down the road from my Mum, an elderly lady in a Nursing Home slipped quietly away to meet her Maker.  It was a predictable event, given that she was nearly 111 years old - by any contemporary reckoning her passing was almost overdue.

 

What made Mrs Florence Green's death into news was that she was the last living First World War Veteran.  This is a technical term in that as a 17 year old she joined the newly formed Royal Air Force right at the end of the war and worked a few weeks as a waitress in the Mess but this rendered her a servicewoman and therefore an official Veteran.  By starting late and living long she became the symbolic end of the living human story of the Great War, closing the book on the war to end all wars almost 100 years after it began as the reporter rather beautifully put it.

 So there you have it.

The unpalatable human fact that every single man and woman who served in the First World War died.  On Sunday at the Cenotaph Isaac Watts version of Psalm 90 was sung . . .  Time like an ever rolling stream bears all its sons away.

Some of us feel very blessed to have avoided the historically frequent shortening of life that war brings on the young.  How much more blessed the believer who realises that death itself has been subject to defeat in Jesus; that the sons of time can be the children of eternity in him. 

Name - Crofton Brown

One hundred years since the Great War began.  The amazing field of poppies by the Tower of London is quite a sight.  It is not easy to know whether it is good or not.

 

It is very beautiful.

 

Should the deaths of war be commemorated by beauty though?  Would we, for example (in reverse) commemorate the birth of a baby with the ugliness of birth leftovers?  It is hard to know if beauty helps or hinders. 

 

Memorialising is so hard because we interpret everything from our own place in history.  I have been extraordinarily blessed to live through wars only on television.  Even a cursory glance at the statistics of international terrorism indicate that at its worst it is a pale reflection of the Somme, Ypres, the Blitz, Auschwitz or Hiroshima to name but a few.  What do I know of the buzzing excitement of young recruits who often well realised that they might not come home?  How can I, who sees soldier's bodies returning in ceremonial procession from the back of transport planes at RAF bases imagine the slaughter that left tens of thousands of bodies unaccounted for?

 

This morning in Church we considered each of the men memorialised on the plaque in our Chapel building,  One of them is simply among the unknown who were never buried but never came back.  Would a ceramic poppy help?  No.  What helped was that we knew his name and that he was missed by name from the community that placed the plaque in his memory.

Likewise our value to God is not our equal part of a great number.  As the Scriptures teach, our names are written in the Lamb's book of life.  We are not valued as one of the many.  We are simply, personally valued.

It's that Day again

October 31st.

Reformation Day.  The date when, in 1517, Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg, Germany.   Beset by the Papal money-making indulgences that supposedly bought dead relatives out of purgatory (but more importantly raised money for building St Peter's Basilica in Rome) Luther inspired North European revolt against the greedy grip of the Roman Church of his day.

28. It is certain that when the penny jingles into the money-box, gain and avarice can be increased, but the result of the intercession of the Church is in the power of God alone.

Which this evening we might adapt somewhat.

It is certain that when the penny sweets plop into the bag, gain and avarice can be increased, but the way to change spiritual darkness is in the power of God alone.

Prayer

Here is a clip from the video our Church Young People showed on Sunday morning when they led our service . . .

 

 

Starting Well

A good start is such a sealing happiness.  When we roar off the blocks it is clear to us and to all that we are heading for  the stars.

Take the Church where I am currently Pastor, for example.  It was founded (at the height of British Free Church popularity) in 1902.  I have been Pastor or Interim Pastor of several churches including one MegaChurch.  What they all share in common is that they began in tiny rooms with a handful of people.  The number of people covenanting together to form the first Church Membership was usually in the teens or the twenties at most.

Muswell Hill Baptist Church in its leafy London suburb roared off the blocks with 116 members.  One hundred and sixteen!!  And that's not all.  Just two years later the membership had more than doubled.  After six years it had nearly trebled.  Even a cursory statistical projection would mean that at that rate of addition the current membership would be many thousands. (It isn't).  At that rate of multiplication the membership of Muswell Hill Baptist Church would, many years ago, have included every human being on earth!

It was a good start.

Probably no-one thought about it too much in those heady times, but the Bible is very short of encouragement regarding sparkling starts.  It seems almost obsessed with a good ending.

For example we might think of the story of the sower.  Some seed starts badly but much of it well.  All that matters is the ending, the harvest.  On another track, we cannot understand the mission of Jesus Christ by stopping at Christmas or the Sermon on the Mount.  We may go further: the very definition of a Christian is someone who finishes - Be faithful to the point of death and I will give you a crown of life.  You cannot go through a deconversion.  You can stop professing and this is a mark of non-conversion.

Starting well is never the end of the story.

In Vain

Tonight England played San Marino in an International.  But the question is - why?  San Marino are the lowest ranked of 208 football nations and have lost every one of dozens of games they have played in competitive football.  If any team ever turned up in vain it is them.

 

In vain.  Only two small words, but they conjure up rotten thoughts for most of us.  At its least threatening it will be memories of queues that were endured only for the doorman to turn us away, the cashier to close or the shop shelf to prove empty.  We waited in vain.  Worse - much worse = an investment, an emigration, or a nation’s decision to go to war.  No-one wants such things to be in vain.

 

In literature the greatest and therefore most painful experience of acting in vain is summed up by, among others, the English poet Abraham Crowley,

 

A mighty pain to love it is,

and 'tis a pain that pain to miss;

but of all the pains,

the greatest pain is to love,

but love in vain.

 

Whatever else we do in vain, the last thing of all we want to do in vain is to love.  Yet in a myriad of broken relationships - spouse with spouse, child with parent, brother with sister - human beings inflict this emptiness upon one another so that whole swathes of lives appear to have been invested in vain.  Could any feeling be worse? Could anything be worse?

Unfortunately yes.  And there is a whole Bible book devoted to reflecting upon it.  Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, bewails the wisdom of Ecclesiastes.  “Let’s look at everything”, says the writer, “and look - it is all, from cradle to grave, from king to pauper, from nurture to wealth-creating, from history to hope - in vain.”  Life is Vanity Fair.

 

But then, as the Apostle Paul reflects on the Resurrection of Jesus (1 Corinthians 15) he in the living Christ the key of purposeful living:   For you know that your labour is NOT in vain in the Lord. 

Perish the thought

We thought about many things at our Harvest Thanksgiving on Sunday.  One thing we thought about was perishability.  How long would anything last that was on display?

 

 

 



Typically, the Star of the Show - homemade bread without preservatives - though much admired was deemed to be the first to go in the perishability stakes.  So we ate it for harvest Lunch, which was very nice.  It seems that so many wonderful things just don't have the legs to last (or in the case of food items get legs and for that reason don't last . . .).

What, though, would last the longest?  "Canned stuff", was the general answer. The question was spontaneous, so I am quite proud (sorry) that I may have even got the answer right as I looked at the display and made my own guess - Bisto.  The combination of being sealed and dried and salty makes it almost everlasting - certainly half a lifetime.  Not much fun compared to homemade bread though.

What I was really looking for, though, (and it wasn't there) was honey.  Honey lasts for a very long time too and is great to eat as well!

 

Then there is the honey for your soul:

 

My son, eat honey, for it is good, and the drippings of the honeycomb are sweet to your taste. Know that wisdom is such to your soul; if you find it, there will be a future, and your hope will not be cut off.

Trust or Rust

How brilliant it was to think about these words on Sunday. 

Yesterday I was waiting for a bus.  Maybe my eyes played tricks on me but I thought I saw one coming in the far distance of a straight road where I was waiting.  I was wrong.  It wasn't a bus but a truck.

 

So did I stop waiting?  Of course not.  I trusted that, with no sight of it, a bus would come.  We must learn to trust if we are to wait upon the Lord and be made new.

Falling Apart

A few blog readers will know to whom I refer , but out of internet modesty I will content myself with the relative anonymity of writing that I was recently in a meeting with a Government Minister.  The purpose of the meeting was itself interesting (and not at all confidential).  What caught my attention was a little phrase that the minister used in passing:  referring to the general state of the nations the minister commented, "things seem to be falling apart everywhere at the moment".

 

 

In itself it is plain obvious.  Libya, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, Nigeria, Somalia, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Mali and even, in its own way, the (formerly) United Kingdom.

 

I suppose if I'd heard two congregants in Church, two people at a bus stop or two people watching the news on TV saying it I'd have barely noticed.  But a Government Minister?  So even up there at the Top it looks scary?

 

Well, thank God that Top is not the real Top.

 

Among a thousand Bible verses that help - but less well known than most - the disasters of the human story are characterised as God gathering grapes . . .

 

Still another angel, who had charge of the fire, came from the altar and called in a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle, "Take your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of grapes from the earth's vine, because its grapes are ripe."

 

From the real Top it really does look different.

Trebah

As August comes to its end its most pleasantly memorable day for us was certainly the one spent at Trebah Gardens.  It was one of those perfect days at a perfect place that it is quite possible to get through years - or the whole - of life and never have (especially taking holidays in England!).

 

 

Bathed in glorious summer sunshine, visitors end their walk through the gardens at a private beach area, complete with ice cream of course.  It was almost too hot to sit there but we managed it  . . .

 

 

If only.

If only we could hold these moments as our constant way of life.

 

Poignantly, however, Trebah bears its own testimony to the simple reality that life is not a bed of hydrangeas.  There by the beach is a picture of another year - 70 years ago - at the same spot.

 

 

On our summer idyll came the reminder that as needs must on D-Day this spot had been found to be very suited to launching part of a military invasion.  The walk that we had just done had been the last peaceful walk that many of those soldiers did before losing their lives in Northern France.  It is the stark story of human life amidst creation's beauty.

A Greater Love, A Higher Vow

Here's the video we used in this morning's service.  It repays waiting for the remarkable transitioned coda at the end - it'll give me words to sing along with at the next royal wedding or coronation.  Jesus is what it's all about . . .

 

Methodist Heaven

It's a very nice balcony.

And a very nice cup of tea at a modest price.

Not at all in keeping with the prime spot overlooking the prime square of a Cornish tourist honey-pot fishing village on a brilliant summer's day.

 

The modest price is explained by the setting as the balcony of a Church.  The Church in fact.  But this is not a St Jibble's or St Jessica's but just a plain old Methodist Chapel.  The question is, why in Merrie Olde Englande was there a fishing village which the state church ignored yet where the Methodists took root?

The answer is on the plaque beside a tiny fisherman's cottage . . .

 

Two Months back in London

So, what's been new about being back in London, two months on?

Here's five things:

1. Akee and Saltfish for breakfast

This was a first for me:  there are other ways to get it such as flying to Jamaica where it is a National Dish but one of the beauties of London is that the world comes to you instead of having to travel the world.  Akee and Saltfish was on offer at one of our local church's Prayer Breakfasts and it's very nice (as long as, like me, you like fish!).  Well, didn't Jesus serve fish for breakfast by Galilee?

 

2. Flight Tracking

Ah yes; not only can you sit in the garden watching the planes overhead approaching Heathrow - these days you can use the FlightRadar app to identify every passing plane and its flight route.  A dangerously addictive practice on a warm summer morning.

 

3. M25 monitoring
Of course there are apps to do this but our bedroom window works as well even though we are miles inside the motorway.  It's quite complicated but here goes:

a) When the northern section of the M25 Motorway is badly congested - especially in the rush hour if there is an accident, the traffic tries to get round London on the next best road, the North Circular. 

b) The North Circular is too busy in its own right, but especially so a mile north of where we live where it both narrows and (after being like a motorway) suddenly requires a right turn at some traffic signals.  Not good.  Very not good when there is extra traffic.

c) The extra traffic tries to avoid this gridlock by using two roads that are even nearer our house.  These roads in turn have traffic lights and are usually congested.  Now they are mega-congested.

d) To try to make some progress some more enterprising cars and vans try using nearby streets to at least get 10 or 20 vehicles ahead in the new gridlock. 

So when our usually quiet street suddenly has several cars using it, it is as good as certain that miles away there is a problem on the M25 . . .

4. Instant Recycling by White Van
The day we moved into our house there was a broken washing machine to throw away.  Everywhere else I've lived disposal of this would require spending money for the local council to take it away or finding a generous-hearted friend with a pickup truck or trailer.  We were advised to simply put it on the pavement (sidewalk).

Within an hour a van passed by, then stopped, and a man asked, "Can I take that?".  It was in the van in seconds and gone.  Whenever you walk up a residential street there seems to be something outside to be taken - this morning a fireplace up the street.  Later on it is always gone!

5. Council Plums
Granted this is a suburb thing, but it is fairly amazing to me that some of the trees in the streets near us are plum trees.  You have to negotiate squished ones on the pavement but also you can take unsquished one home to eat!  Thank you, Haringey Council!

 

Cats and Dogs

Here's a picture from a Garden Centre we visited recently.  It is so amazingly inappropriate that I had to take to the picture so I could believe what I had seen!

 

I suppose it is, if nothing else, a reminder that we need to look like the message we claim to convey.  Is this really any different to the good old fashioned Church split (you'll know our faith by our fellowship and love but just wait while we have an argument and go off in another direction first).  Is it actually any different to the grim-faced atmosphere that would greet the happy pagan on arrival in church (we're joyful, you know).  Is it really any different to looking at me?

Congratulations?

If there is one point in an Induction when I wince it is when someone (often someone who I feel should know better) congratulates the new Pastor on their appointment.  The Biblical verbal phrase that seems to cover this kind of appointment is being set apart.  The implication - no, it is the explicit meaning - of congratulation is of human achievement, of promotion, of a new job successfully negotiated, of privilege or of some combination of some of those.

Setting apart is not a reason to be congratulated or commiserated.   If the year 4 teacher in one school is promoted to be Deputy Head in another you send a congratulatory message.  If the year 4 teacher is assigned year 2 next year you observe and note the change.  That is setting apart and exactly characterises the New Testament's approach to Christian ministry though of course not the disciples' - which earned them a telling off from Jesus.

 

“You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones exercise authority over them.  It shall not be so among you. But whoever would be great among you must be your servant,  and whoever would be first among you must be your slave,  even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.”

 

This seems clear enough.

 

Today one of the Gentile rulers, David Cameron, changed his Government cabinet around - in the lordly manner that Gentile rulers do when an election is looming.  Meanwhile, in the Church of England Synod  the decision was made to allow the appointment of female Bishops.   David Cameron thought this was a great idea - most specifically, "a great day for the Church and for equality".

 

It all sounds so plausible.  It is a total denial of the meaning of ministry.  What is this equality?  Seen in the skewed vision of a venerable British establishment Institution and through the eyes of a Gentile ruler women have just broken through a glass ceiling.

 

Seen through the eyes of Jesus and the radical values of the Gospel they have secured a lower place than they had when generically left at home doing the ironing.  No congratulations there then.  Wait a minute: here comes (my italics) Regional Minister (Team Leader) of the East Midlands Baptist Association the Revd Dianne Tidball with the official Baptist line:

 

“Congratulations to our Anglican friends on having the wisdom, courage and grace to open the door to women becoming Bishops.  We are pleased to learn that the vote enabling women to fulfil all roles within the church has been passed.  We are delighted that the wider church will have the opportunity to benefit further from the gifts and experience that women, already in senior roles, will bring."

 

That's it I guess.  If you believe in senior roles, you offer congratulations.  Is there anyone out there who believes Jesus actually meant what he said?  If we are denying ourselves how can we thereby be congratulated or achieve a this-worldly equality?

Induction

So many people kindly travelled to my Induction today.  Many, many thanks to them and those kind enough to write their greetings and promise their prayers.  Here's the statement I read:

 

My calling to Christian ministry in its dedicated full-time form came when I was working for NatWest Bank.  I was at the Keswick Convention in the Lake District, a large annual gathering of people seeking to know God better.  Following that clear sense of call the first role I enquired about was in administration for a medical facility in Bangladesh.  I was told it would be a good idea to go to a Christian training college first. 

So I left my home in North London and went to BTI in Glasgow, the furthest I’d ever travelled up to then! I wondered what far-flung place or places in the world my commitment to follow Jesus might take me.  I wonder where then I’d have guessed I’d be called to in 2014?  To what obscure desert, mountain range, city ghetto or jungle valley?

What I wouldn’t have expected was to be just 2¾ miles away from my then home in Finchley and be here in Muswell Hill.  Not only that, but I have been called to Pastor a Church that I occasionally attended when I lived up the road.  In the event, I used to travel twice as far as this from Finchley commuting each day to work in Central London.  It is, I suppose, a reminder that the adventure of Christian service is not to see the world but to change the part of it the Lord calls us to serve in. 

When the opportunity arose to explore a call to this Church I was excited by the opportunity to work for God in our capital city.  Through our multi-national congregation and the church’s long history of support for missions we will yet touch many parts of the earth in the years ahead even though we don’t visit them.

At the same time our Church offers the privilege of ministry in a real local community.  In our years of local church ministry Diane and I have enjoyed immersing ourselves in genuine community.  We have felt very kindly welcomed to Muswell Hill and we look forward to doing good here in the name of Jesus Christ bringing comfort and challenge in the Good News of the Gospel.

I am especially grateful to be called to Pastor a Church which was founded, to quote its original Trust, holding ‘the Deity of the Lord Jesus Christ and the Sole Authority of the Holy Scriptures and that interpretation of them usually called Evangelical’.  These are the roots from which, by the grace of God, we will seek to bear fruit in this community for his glory.   

Together as Pastor and people we do not appear to amount to very much in a great city.  But as Pastor and people with the Spirit of God and the Word of God and the Love of God I believe that in the unfolding years we will make a real difference.

One Month back in London

Celebrating this Anniversary today it strikes me that there are a bunch of London things that I am reliving after years of being away.

 

1. My driving has diminished.  On ringing the Car Insurer to discuss my new (higher of course) premium the receptionist suggested I might do only half or less of my previous mileage.  She was right.

 

2. My driving has deteriorated.  Perhaps not in quality, but certainly in politeness.  The tipping point occurred about the third or fourth time I was cut up by a white van that was deliberately using the wrong lane to get past a line of traffic I was in.

 

3. My parking has improved.  Basically, if you can't park your car in a space that is smaller than it there's no point in having a car in London.

 

4. I no longer associate the Oyster with the seaside but with Red Buses.
 



5. I now assume that everyone in church comes from a different country to everyone else.  e.g. Brazil, Japan, Costa Rica, Iran, South Africa, Nigeria, France, Cyprus, Poland, Malaysia, Singapore, Romania, Italy, Burma . . .

6. I am reminded that every church building in London seems to have at least two churches meeting in it, and usually one or two based in a different language.

7. I assume everyone in London has a baby - it is not at all hard to understand why London is projected to grow by a million people in the next ten years as I negotiate a thousand prams in the shopping street.

8. I have rediscovered that, while everyone outside London thinks of living there as their worst nightmare, nearly everyone who does live there loves it to bits.

9. Every loft is converted.

10. There is always an airliner overhead.

 

Wrong Way

 

Here's the YouTube clip we showed in Church on Sunday.  What is truly amazing, as the reporter points out, is that not only does the player run the wrong way when he was on the verge of a touchdown: everyone on the field seems to join in the mistake.  So he gets tackled by the team that stood to gain if he kept running, his team-mates help him to run the wrong way too.

 

When we head the wrong way in any area of life, there's no telling how we disorientate others around us.  Well, there will be a telling one day in fact  . . .

There are two places in the world where men can most effectively disappear

(according to 19th century American novelist Herman Melville)  — the city of London and the South Seas.  He might have added - Sundays at Church.

 

In these weeks of being effectively between pastorates I get to experience what happens when you go to church as an outsider.  Of course on one level I am far from an outsider.  I was at a church today where we recited the Nicene Creed and was possibly the only person in the room that knew it off by heart.  I rarely stand up at the wrong time, rarely fail to know who wrote a hymn or song, let alone how to sing it, rarely fail to find the Bible reading quickly and even know where to sit and where not to sit.  Nevertheless, no-one knows that about me when I arrive.  This morning I attended my fifth service during this personal inbetween-time.  My wife and daughter add a couple of extra experiences to this mid 2014 survey of being a newcomer at British Churches of all kinds.  As I have found on Sabbaticals gone by there is a nearly unfailing theme here.  Let's try a picture:

 

I count it the highest privilege to belong the church of Jesus Christ.  I do not deserve it.  My sin properly excludes me from its fellowship but One has paid for my sin.  The cross is the reminder I did not properly belong apart from God's grace.  I do not need the gathering Christians to act out my deserved exclusion. Yet time and again I walk through open doors, receive a wan smile from a busy steward, find my way to a seat or bit of pew, then watch 50, 80, 150 people come in, sit around me and talk to each other with warm welcoming reunions.  The key word there is watch.

I conclude that this is a British Church epidemic of inhospitality.  I am the same person who has people gathering around me when I am the known Pastor or visiting preacher.  I wear just the same aftershave and am indeed far more friendly and relaxed than when I am about to lead a service.  My wife and daughter are the same people that people gather round when they are known.  But become a stranger and at once you are strange.  Where that leaves you if you really are generally strange in some way I dread to think.

 

A very special moment happened in one church where a pleasant older lady eventually engaged me in conversation well after the service had finished.  Her husband moved away and returned with two mugs of tea.  I was very grateful.  He gave one to her and then to my surprise turned away and drank the other one - his!

 

I note that Christ's measure of discipleship is not how we welcome each other (though how we love and forgive each other is another story).  His measure is how we welcome the stranger.  I am embarrassed that the average Estate Agent is (albeit from other motives) more exemplary of Christ's pattern of welcome than his alleged people when they gather to worship.

Days to Remember 10: Dem Bones

One memorable day the builders laying the foundations of the Church's new building downed tools and left the site.  They had found human remains.

 

A very detailed plan of the graveyard the Church had between 1845 and 1854 (after which it was closed) exists.  However it has no reference point, just lines of named graves.  If you could find Mrs Jones you could possibly find Mr Smith a few feet along but there was no way of fining either of them.  Tales were told of a line of headstones that once formed a kind of fence down the side of the property next to the car park.  The assumption was that they had been moved in some previous building enterprise.  They exist no longer.  Plainly Baptists are a lot less careful about the dead than the Church of England who seem to have graveyards of antiquity well-kept around many of their churches.

 

The coroner however did not question my predecessors' carelessness in respect of their predecessors remains.  Instead he declared me entirely trustworthy - 'as priest' - to judge the remains as old and to 'reinter them with suitable dignity'.  I suppose this conjured up the idea of the churchyard sexton doing the honours with a robed vicar overseeing with prayers.

 

Baptist Colleges, though useful in many ways, help little with the really scary things of church life like baptising people without drowning them, dedicating infants without dropping them or marrying people without embarrassing them. Failure in such common practicalities indicates the total unpreparedness most Baptist ministers would feel at standing on a building site with a builder in a suit holding a black bag full of unearthed bones of former members and the Church Administrator standing nearby watchfully.  I duly felt unprepared.  The coroner's trust weighed heavily on me as the builder turned the sack over and a pile of old bones fell at my feet.  This action did not lend itself to great dignity, any dignity really, though I was wearing a jacket and tie as a start.

 

The plot of land where Mrs Jones and Mr Smith and the others would end up would be hidden under the path and entry way of the new building.  The temptation (had I been alone) to leave the pile intact would have been strong.  A sort of old Baptist ballast.  My onlookers and the distant brooding instruction of the coroner ('due dignity') led me to attempt a certain dignified reconstruction. 

 

Suppressing the part of me that wanted to burst out in despairing laughter, I began the task of placing the parts of Mrs Jones and Mr Smith in reasonable order - two leg bones, two legs, two hips, the middle bit (if the reader is unfamiliar please rewatch the earlier YouTube).  I laid these ancient Baptist remains with admirable dignity given my internal sense of the bizarre.  But like any old jigsaw from before 1854 there were pieces missing - most alarmingly a shortage of skulls which created special problems as it was not a lack that could be hidden from the beady-eyed builder in a suit.  There were too many legs as well though that was easier to deal with by some clever positioning as I learned my new trade.

 

Quite what parts of Mrs Jones and Mr Smith ended up in what order I shall never know and I trust the Good Lord to sort matters out on the Great Day.  I reflected that it was the one experience of Christian Ministry when I had the most authority over Church Members and even then I couldn't get them into order  . . .

Days to Remember: 9. The danger of parking outside the Church (Part 2)

The relatively unusual experience of a minister is to travel in a hearse while fully conscious (before the later single trip more universally undertaken).  Nobody who has spent any time in local church ministry is short of funeral stories, though public blogging is not the most pastorally sensitive way to disseminate them.  I will stick with just one from my time in Wycombe.  It's about that busy street outside the church where, on the snowy night previously reported, people nearly died. 

 

The service was over.   It is a few hundred yards to the town cemetery and the easiest way as minister is to take the hearse there and walk back.  I sat in the rear seat, my head adjacent to that of the deceased.  

 

She'd had just a tenuous connection with our premises through another church. As best I recall, apart from the family and friends only our church funeral functionaries (me included) had been present.  The funeral directors, unusually, were from out of county.

 

 

'Nice cars these hearses,' I often thought, 'shame about the function.'  In went the ignition key.  A kind of electronic whirring but nothing resembling an engine sound.  And again.  And again.  I thought, 'This is going to be interesting.  I wonder what they do when the hearse won't start?'  Unfortunately it turned out that the driver was also thinking, 'I wonder what I do when the hearse won't start?'   The Funeral Director was pulled away from the family gathered by the other funeral car to be told the news.  He then seemed to think, 'I wonder what you do when the hearse won't start?'

 

It became clear that in their home town they would have had a spare car as a rule.  They were not in their home county, never mind town.  They started ringing local funeral firms with whom they were connected.  These helpful funeral firms were being helpful by helping other people have their funerals.  There is a limit to the number of available hearses of course.  Hope dwindled. 

 

A few minutes later and a phone call came in.  One of the local companies had a spare hearse in a town a few miles away.  We sat, we waited, with reasonable dignity the transfer was eventually made.

 

I figured that the person (perhaps not quite the right word) for whom this was the least traumatic was the one whose head silently reclined a few inches from mine in her coffin.  RIP meant Rest in Peace for her, and Ring in Panic for everyone else.

Days to Remember: 8. The danger of parking outside the Church (Part 1)

Union Baptist Church is situated on the A404.  There are clues there.  At one end the A404 is Regent Street in Central London.  It is not a quiet road (though long years ago the cows walked along it to the common land east of the town, hence Easton Street.

 

No-one ever knows what the future holds but I am confident that at no time in the years leading up to that winter's night did anyone imagine that people would have to be encouraged to leave the cars they had abandoned on the street outside and come into the warmth of the church for their own safety.  It happened in 2009.

And so it was that we were asked to open our Church as an Emergency Rest Centre for people stranded by the snowy roads and icy hills. Roads normally busy with traffic had only pedestrians struggling between cars and vans abandoned at the roadside.  Read about it here.

Through to 2:00 am people arrived.  Some walked in as though they were arriving for a meeting, some arrived as though they had trekked from the Arctic, one or two looked as though they had been mistakenly delivered by emergency ambulance to us instead of the hospital.

Thirty five people slept for the night at 'Hotel Union'!  About 20 others came through the doors and were fortified and warmed for the next stage of their epic journey home.  Never has the town or Church witnessed the need to be a Town Centre Snow Shelter before!

God, on the other hand, seemed less surprised and to be working to a nicely visible plan (his plans are often invisible of course).

Days to Remember: 7. The Sick Pastor

A very arresting topic in Christian ministry is that of sickness and healing.  Some people don't believe it at all, some people are more devoted to it than anything in the whole panoply of spiritual things.  One way or another though, nobody seems to want a sick Pastor.  Sympathy is rife, but only briefly.  After all, a sick Pastor is like failure totem on the weekly notice sheet . . . 
 

From the point of being the pastor this is somewhat unfortunate because few of us choose to be sick or especially enjoy it and having a load of other people willing you better by next Sunday makes you feel worse.  Churches like to welcome the weak and sick - but not to the pulpit.

 

 My track record is not too bad but took a very unfortunate dip on my arrival in Wycombe.  I suppose I was vaguely aware of the existence of something called a gall bladder in the body.  Within a few weeks of touching down as the dynamic new Pastor of Union Baptist Church I became acutely aware of the gall bladder.  Several times.

Before the machinations of the National Health Service sent people in Wycombe to far-flung hospitals for emergencies as now is, I was admitted to Wycombe Hospital.  And a few weeks later again.  Once in a kind friend's car, once in a blue-light ambulance.  Each time I was in for a few nights.  Among the first church people I got to know were the nurses and volunteers who worked in the hospital . . .

This yielded a Day to Remember.  I sat by the bedside of an older, unwell lady in one of the hospital three months into the pastorate. 

"Well," I said, "this is the third time I've visited the hospital since my induction.  But it's the first time I've come through the main entrance and not Accident and Emergency.  It's nice to be a visitor instead of a patient . . ."

The church put up with all this fairly stoically.  I imagine that after a few years without a pastor, one in the local hospital is a small step forward.  One church member even brought their gallstone in a jar to church to show me, what had been removed from their body some years before . . .  In fact I think that I'll show you a picture so you can share the experience.  Nice, eh?

 

Days to Remember 6: That 22nd Feeling

I am not privy to what David Cameron feels when he has his regular audience with Her Majesty the Queen.  I imagine he feels somewhat smaller than in many other settings.  Here's one reason - the list of British Prime Ministers who've served under Queen Elizabeth II:

 

Winston Churchill 1951-55
Sir Anthony Eden 1955-57
Harold Macmillan 1957-63
Sir Alec Douglas-Home 1963-64
Harold Wilson 1964-70 and 1974-76
Edward Heath 1970-74
James Callaghan 1976-79
Margaret Thatcher 1979-90
John Major 1990-97
Tony Blair 1997-2007
Gordon Brown 2007-2010
David Cameron 2010-

 

He may be Number One just now, but in another way he's Number 12.

 

It is manifestly unsuitable for a Pastor to compare himself with the hierarchy of politics, though some perhaps do and others do on their behalf. 

 

And yet it evokes a thought remembering one day visiting our oldest Church Member at the time.  My relative longevity and seniority was put into brutal perspective.

 

"It's the Pastor to see you", said the carer down her ear.

 

"Who?"

 

"THE PASTOR"

 

"Oh, I don't know"

 

"YOU DO KNOW HIM.  THE PASTOR FROM UNION BAPTIST CHURCH.  YOUR CHURCH."

 

"The Church?  Who?"

 

"IT'S THE PASTOR - PASTOR JOHN FROM THE CHURCH.  HE'S COME TO SEE YOU"

 

"Oh, I don't know."

 

"YES - YOU KNOW HIM - JOHN ROBERTS -THE PASTOR"

 

"Who?  I don't know, there's been so many of them . . ."

 

Ah yes, you have to have stamina to outlive the elderly ladies of a church.  I may have had the microphone on many Sundays but I was just another in a long, long, line for her!  22nd overall in fact.

 

It reminded me of a pastoral visit I did in the storied First Baptist Church of Dallas where Dr W A Criswell had been the celebrated leader for nearly 40 years at that time.  The elderly lady complained about the new preacher and how she had much preferred his predecessor - who finished in the mid 1940s. 

 

Thank God (albeit perhaps through slightly gritted teeth) for those who remind us we are but parts of chapters in a Greater Story.