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.

Days to Remember: 5. The Ordinance of Holy Communion - or not.

Anyone who thinks that improvisation is what the keyboard player does between verses/bridges etc. in worship services has never attempted to do a communion service in a Rest Home.  Now we're talking improvisation.  Today I went for a monthly visit to do this locally as I have done for years. 

Problem 1: There was no lift/elevator working so our Communion was limited to those who were resident on the ground floor where the lounge is.  Solution: Sing up.

Problem 2: The carers had been to busy to prepare the Communion.  Solution: DIY

Problem 3:  A man in the lounge is visiting his mother and trying to Skype other family members for her viewing.  Solution;  Providence - the other family members weren't answering so he headed home.

Problem 4: No Ribena blackcurrant juice, the passable substitute for wine.  Solution: use cranberry instead.

Problem 5; Carer discovers there's no cranberry juice either.  Solution: use orange juice instead and be very careful about references to 'this fruit of the vine' etc. in prayers.

That was today.

Conducting Communion at the Rest Home has yielded many Days to Remember, many deeply moving, some side-splittingly funny.  The one I choose to reference here was the latter and can be accounted for in part by the time of the service.  Ostensibly 3:30pm it almost always starts late with assembly and preparation taking a while.  Although it takes but 15 minutes this includes the hour of 4:00pm.

The bread [this is my body, broken for you] had been served.

The wine/ribena [this is by blood shed for you] was about to be beginning to be served.

In comes a carer.  Walks over to (let's call her) Ethel, "FOUR O'CLOCK, ETHEL.  TIME FOR YOUR MEDICINE".  This non-liturgical addendum to the service was confusing on several levels.

Confusing to me and Helen (who helps me by serving [quite brilliantly may I add]) because we didn't see it coming until the announcement was made.  After all we were always doing the Communion at 4:00pm.

Confusing to Ethel because she was about to be served - in an identical plastic container - the symbol of faith.  I doubt that Ethel had much idea where faith ended and medicine began or vice versa.  What the theology of this is I do not venture to know. 

Worse still, Ethel was less than hurried in her medicine-taking.  We stood there in mid-communion and waited while the carer - let's call her the interrupter - while the interrupter completed her timely task over what seemed like several minutes.

Maybe unconsciously I always hurry the transition from bread to wine in church just in case the medicine round begins . . .

Days to Remember 4: 9/11

This is a date that not many of us will forget.

On September 11th 2001 I was also in  a tower, smaller by far than the World Trade Center, yet one of the tallest in our town.  Here it is:

I was visiting Ellen.  She was an older lady and beset with very serious illness (from which within a month she died to this world).  It was soon after 2:00pm British Summer Time and I had picked up a story of a potential bomb or plane crash in New York.  By the time I was at the hospital there was that general muttering about something big happening and my last listen to a radio emphasised how big things were becoming.

Sitting at Ellen's bedside it was possible to sense that a nurse here and there was speaking to another along the lines of, "Have you heard the News?" or "Something's happening in America, isn't it?".

What I will never forget is how, on that least normal of all 21st century afternoons, my pastoral visit to Ellen was absolutely unaffected.  She, it was clear, was coming to the close of her life.  We spoke together; we prayed to God who was not phased by unfolding drama elsewhere (he who upholds all things). I was about to travel through turbulent days: My sister in Christ was coming to that Place of Rest where such things are overwhelmed by the love of God and seeing her Saviour face to face.

It has always given me a perspective on 9/11.  As a Christian Pastor I have a higher calling than world events, even those triggered (as many of them have always been) by socio-religious frameworks.  Soul work is the real work.

For, as Jesus might have said, what does it profit a man if he gains [a lot of media attention and influence in Manhattan Planning Department] and loses his own soul? 

Days to Remember 3: The Baptism of John

Every Baptist Pastor faces a central dilemma when the baptistry is full and ready to use.  What if someone has a sudden urge to be baptised?  Opinions differ.  Some make a virtue of it and encourage the instant response, most baulk at that.

We are about to have a baptism at church, just as we hope to do every Easter. 

And that reminds me - one day at the appeal John came forward.   He had hardly been to church before and he was of Central/East European extraction.  His dialect meant his wishes did not become clear very quickly.  He duly failed to get baptised mainly because we only later understood that was what he's intended.  Perhaps, we thought, that was just as well as he had no change of clothes.  (On the other hand we did have a Church store of clothes for people who need them, albeit rarely after their baptism).

On the day he was baptised the store became useful because he brought a complete change of clothes except one thing: a change of trousers . . .  There are several baptising by immersion techniques but none I know that leaves the person's trousers dry.

John's mysteries were many.  It was a mystery how he exited a car park by driving through a barrier, something more commonly found in riotous young car thieves than an elderly gentleman.  Lest the reader misunderstands, he did stop on hitting the barrier, inspected the inconvenience laying on his car bonnet, and revved up the engine to send it flying.  Quite a way to head home from a church service.

We never worked out what country he came from.  We never found out any family members he knew.  He died after being well cared for in a nice nursing home, but I scarcely knew of any outside visitors he had as it was out in the country.  We heard of his death when he was several weeks deceased.

But he followed Jesus.  He remains possibly the most enthusiastic baptismal candidate I have ever known, one of the oldest, and certainly the most mysterious. At one point I remember thinking of angels.  Every once in a while beings cross my path who are indeed mysterious as to their origins and destination and you just wonder - was that an angel?

Surely an angel would drive a car better though?  Angels don't ask for baptism do they?  (I suppose their boss did).  I think I'll just remember John and smile.

Days to Remember: 2. A Year Ago Today

"Grandpa is no longer with us."

With those words my daughter passed on the news that made this, for me, a memorial day. Who would have thought, when I was growing up, that I would hear the announcement of my Dad's death on a telephone speaker in my car?  Life moves on, and yet it doesn't.  That announcement boils down to the same bereavement whether it is reported on a car telephone or, as in former years, sent by telegraph or by a horse-riding messenger.

"Grandpa is no longer with us"

It also represents a brilliant commonality in the story of humankind.  It is hard not to be scathingly critical of militant atheists as they reduce death to evolution, to be sadly sympathetic toward religionists who have no true grounds for hope and to be brightly hopeful in the comfort that the Christian message brings by which death is a defeated enemy.  Yet for all of us alike death means someone is no longer with us.  If my Dad and I had been militant atheists our conversations in the past year would similarly have been nil.

"Grandpa is no longer with us"

The great privilege of the Christian, however, is that when people are taken from us we have those who mourn with us.  This is something more spiritual and profound than social sympathy and it is birthed in the nature of God and the influence of the Holy Spirit.  No Christian who is part of a Church faces death alone.  It is the joy of Church that there are always people who remain with us.

"Grandpa is no longer with us"

It stands out as an exact contrast to the end of the Gospel.  Never, ever, will that simple phrase be true of the Lord Jesus who ended up saying, "and Lo I am with you always, even to the end of the age"   My Dad was great.  My Saviour is greater still and by far.