Great (Hymn/Anthem!) One Liners: 10. Zadok and Nathan

After a short blog break I can't resist cheating for my next Great Hymn One-Liner.

It is not a hymn!  So it really is a cheat.

And it's not great!  So it's a total cheat.

But it is worth a blog for more than one reason.  So what is it?  It's a line from the Anthem sung at the fundamental moment in the Coronation of the Monarch in Westminster Abbey.  The words are 

Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet anointed Solomon King . . .

It references Solomon's coronation, recorded in 1 Kings Chapter 1.  It references it, but it takes plenty of liberties because it ignores Benaiah and a whole bunch of others - the Cherethites and the Pelethites. 

Its use in English coronations goes back into antiquity, but the setting now used for hundreds of years is the setting by Handel.  What makes this a great one liner in my opinion (though not just mine) is that Handel has taken just about the most boring line imaginable and somehow elevated it to the position of highest drama.

By a clever and long introduction that seems repetitious but changes in all kinds of subtle ways the composer prepares us for a dramatic line. A pause and the choirs come in at full volume.  What they are singing is lost in the fact that they are singing and the setting they are singing in.  

It is the triumph of music over meaning and is therefore perhaps as great a lesson in musical worship as any of the great one liners we have looked at.

(To see the whole series click on the hymnline tag)

World Cup Churches 5. England

It's World Cup year - taking place in November/December in Qatar instead of the Northern Hemisphere summer as it has always previously done.  Heading round the 32 qualifying countries I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is a exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

Moving into World Cup Group B we are on familiar territory with England.  

How can I choose a church in a place where I have visited and perhaps even taken some part in hundreds?  I found it surprisingly easy because one church epitomises more about England and churches than any other I know.

Westminster Abbey was an obvious kind of choice.  

But this is not Westminster Abbey - though it is consciously almost exactly the same as one end of the Abbey.

At least it is obviously a Church of England building.

But this is not a Church of England building.  Or a Roman Catholic one.  Nor has it ever been - although in another way it has been several Church of England buildings . . .

Welcome to Christ the King Church, Bloomsbury, London, a building so monumental that any first time passer-by will inevitably look at it - though it is far harder to see inside.  It is/was/is a Catholic Apostolic Church (building).

English church life has never been simple and full of quirks - but this is a church that almost defies description in that regard.

Although it is my choice of English church it does owe a great deal to Scotland - more specifically to Edward Irving.  He was a Church of Scotland Minister who developed what might now be called Pentecostal theology.  Irving was part of a great 19th century revival.  As a Church of Scotland minister in London he was thrown out of his church.  In a long story which I tell in one sentence his story inspired followers who brought the Catholic Apostolic Church into being.  As you can see from the picture (you could also hear it from the organ at a recital or see it in the ceiling vaulting) his followers were not poor.

After various splits the tradition lives on in derived denominations in America and Germany in particular.  But the original thinking was based on the Apostles, Angels (as per the Book of Revelation), of the End-Time church preparing for the Return of Christ.  It represented one of the countless Christian movements birthed in England - and indeed in London.

As such no provision for succession was made and eventually the church died out through lack of key leaders.

The building is set in the middle of London University - by far and away the largest university in the UK.  The Church of England University Chaplaincy eventually took over the use of the building for its work.  Many former London University graduates will remember the building (without probably ever realising it was not, in fact, an Anglican church).  

Then the Chaplaincy moved out.

All of us in church life in England know that the Church of England is a fantasmagorical mix of Catholicism that is almost too Catholic for the Pope and Evangelicalism that is indistinguishable from an independent Charismatic Congregation, or a sturdy Bible Teaching Centre.

Forward in Faith, representing Catholic Anglicans looking to stem non-traditionalism  (including feminine leaders) has its home - you've guessed it - here.  In the shut-off end where the altar is, they hold mass on weekdays.  It is a building that epitomises the grandeur of a Catholic-minded liturgical incense-fest.

On Sundays Euston Church meets here.  Euston Church is an Evangelical Anglican mission aimed at the international students, dynamic, biblical, young.

If you've read all that, you are now bewildered.  You are asking of this monumental building, "Yes but what is it then?".

And the answer is, it's English.

Unknown

These moving Bible words are found on the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, just inside Westminster Abbey,

THEY BURIED HIM AMONG THE KINGS BECAUSE HE
HAD DONE GOOD TOWARD GOD AND TOWARD HIS HOUSE

It was the first such tomb in the world, though many nations have since followed suit. The soldier's corpse within was chosen by a series of randomisations to make sure he was absolutely unknown. The Tomb says so much about the impersonality of War and its random destructiveness of young and other lives.

It is an extraordinary place, and deeply moving.

Strangely, it is also one of the most astonishing misuses of the Bible to be found anywhere. For the text is adapted from the Chronicler's statement at the end of the life of a priest named Jehoiada who was responsible for God's temple in the days of King Joash. Sure, he was buried among the kings but once you get past that observation the text is vexingly inappropriate. For a start, he was not unknown.

Not only that, he was a man who spent his life in Temple service (while Joash went around killing people as a soldier-king). Jehoiada was the very opposite of a soldier.

Perhaps the weirdest thing of all is that Jehoiada lived to 130 years old - in the words of the text he died 'full of years' - which is the exact opposite of what makes the young soldier in that Abbey tomb a reason for poignant remembrance.

Indeed, the more I think about it the more I struggle to imagine a more inappropriate epitaph. It is as if someone selected words from the Bible in as random a way as they selected the corpse to bury. Which is sad because the Bible has plenty of poignant and meaningful things to say for such a place and for such a day as today when we remember the waste of human life.

For example, how about the following which combines both the meaning of the tomb and the meaning of the Abbey:

Gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.
But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting.

Brexit and the folk on Thorney Island

Brexit has preoccupied another week of UK news, and it has taken (briefly) the horror of the New Zealand terrorist attack to dislodge it.  Brexit has proved and is proving a very thorny issue for the House of Commons.  Just round the corner is a street that perhaps makes that point:

Perhaps a Lord Thorney was a nobleman, or a mayor of Westminster or the owner of a big house in the street.  But no, this street is named after the island once nearby - Thorney Island.

The island was formed by the Tyburn River dividing as it entered the River Thames. It was surrounded by mud, almost fully flooded when the rivers overfilled and it was populated, we assume, by much wild, thorny vegetation.

Its inhospitable, isolated setting explains why it was chosen by the monks of the first millennium for their house and abbey.  The abbey was unsurprisingly called Thorney Abbey.  In relation to the East Minster in London, this abbey became known as West Minster and, as you know, the name has stuck.  A king added a Palace and then a Parliament arrived.

The monks, to put it mildly, would be surprised to find the Westminster of today.  Perhaps, though, they would not be surprised to find that all the collected wisdom of the 650 (actually 642 thanks to Sinn Fein abstentionists and the ever present spectre of death) souls who famously occupy the spot amounts to nothing much more than the thorns they cut down long ago.  The journey from prayer to palace to parliament to pandemonium is an invitation to complete the cycle back to prayer.

Rest Home to Royalty

A day of days in our nation!

While crowds risk their lives in the political turmoil of the Arab World in this undeservedly blessed land we crowd to see a glorious celebration of human love at the centre of our national life.  We have every reason to give thanks to God as we observed the elevation of Kate Middleton to the heart of the Royal Family.

And in it all one Scripture Reading.  It was beautifully read and a majestically suitable passage for a marriage.  And a great deal else.  For just yesterday afternoon I was reading that same Scripture from Romans 12 and from my point of view it had made a journey at least as dramatic as Kate Middleton!

The setting I read it in had been a little different: the hearers were in single figures, one was in not the transcept exactly but in her bed with the door open next door, their average age at or around 90 years and more, and walking frames replaced State Coaches while a CD recording replaced the Westminster Abbey Sub-Organist, choirs, fanfare trumpeters and the English Chamber Orchestra.  Yet to these elderly saints in the rest home as we shared Communion the apostle's words were still rich and replete with meaning and significance.

I won't forget today anyway, but if I were to do so Romans 12 would always remind me of God's timeless word, a victory of faith over fashion.

Franklin

Approaching the Royal Wedding fixes our thoughts on Westminster Abbey and marriage.  A marriage with an extraordinary end is commemorated there and today is important in the story.

Among the very many monuments in what is our National Shrine is a monument to Sir John Franklin - 'This monument was erected by Jane, his widow, who after long waiting and sending many in search of him, herself departed to seek and find him in the realms of light.'

Today is his birthday and his birth is a lot easier to understand than his death.  For sure his remains are not in the Abbey.  Indeed they are somewhere quite unknown and very, very cold.

Born on April 16, 1786, John went to sea at age 15 with Admiral Nelson. He survived the Battle of Copenhagen then returned to England only to leave again, this time on a voyage to chart Australia. He next joined the Battle of Trafalgar, and later the attack on New Orleans.

He fell in love with Arctic exploration, and when the ships were forced to return to England, he joined another expedition to chart the northern coasts of Canada.

One of his crew wrote of him, "We have church morning and evening on Sunday. The men say they would rather have him than half the parsons of England."

In 1845 he sailed from England to look for the Northwest Passage and to explore the Arctic. Two letters came from him, then news ceased. Years passed.  His beloved wife Jane spent a fortune searching for him. Finally a boat was found frozen in the north complete with two of the crew's skeletons  - and Sir John Franklin's Bible.

Psalm 139.9,10 was underlined: If I. . . dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. 

A hand that reaches further even than the hand of a loving wife.