Needled

For those of us not disposed to being punctured by the medical profession the headlines that this year's flu vaccination is largely useless comes as a great relief.  We can forever say, "Well I don't think getting that is really worthwhile.  For example, in 2014/15 . . . ."

This may not be wise of course.

One of our main hospitals in North London has a building, formerly a smallpox and vaccination hospital, called the Jenner Building.  I often enter the hospital I visit most by the Jenner entrance/exit.

As a passing point of observation it doesn't have a Phipps Building.

The Jenner Building is so called in honour of Edward Jenner whose observational medical brilliance uncovered the way mild cowpox protected milkmaids from the far more serious smallpox.

This all brings me to James Phipps. Most of us will never have heard of him but the possibility is that, humanly speaking, we owe him our life. At the turn of the nineteenth century James, from a small Gloucestershire town, allowed a Doctor Edward Jenner to give him a disease (cowpox [vaccinia]) followed six weeks later by the deadly disease smallpox. Jenner's place in history was assured when, as he'd suspected, vaccination ('cowpoxination' never caught on!) prevented young James getting smallpox. A medical breakthrough was confirmed that still shapes much medicine today.

How often in history have ordinary people been the true glory of greater people?  It seems somewhat unfair really.  Yet it lies very close to the heart of Christian faith as John the Baptist famously introduced his Lord: I am not the Christ but I have been sent before him.  He who has the bride is the bridegroom; but the friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom's voice. This, my joy, therefore is made full.  He must increase, but I must decrease.

Even the absence of a Phipps Entrance tells me something I need to remember.

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 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? 

A Son's Tribute - Last Gasp

We chose this hymn for my Dad's service.

On my Birth Certificate he described his occupation as evangelist.

It fell to me of course to describe his occupation on his Death Certificate.  Evangelist, I said to the Registrar.

She looked at his age in his mid-eighties.  "That's retired?", she suggested.

I hesitated.  He had been in hospital only once in his life really, those last weeks.  He had told the doctor that he was not afraid to die because he was a Christian and trusting in the Lord, one of the nurses who passed his Bible over to him to read each day had been given it to read for themselves.  Perhaps he was an evangelist still.

 

Then again, I thought, this is a Death Certificate.  He may have been evangelising until his final breath but there was a final breath.  There are no evangelists in the presence of Jesus.  Only retired ones.  Evangelist (retired) then.

A Son's Tribute - Enduring

As my Dad lay in hospital for the last month of his life the only book he had with him was his Bible.  He was very sensible.  It was the Word that would outlast him in the most emphatic of ways - for ever.  So at his Thanksgiving Service we read . . .

 

¹Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God.

² Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned: for she hath received of the Lord's hand double for all her sins.

³ The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.

⁴ Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain:

⁵ And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.

⁶ The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass, and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field:

⁷ The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: because the spirit of the Lord bloweth upon it: surely the people is grass.

⁸ The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever.

 

This Old Testament reading appears, at casual reading, to be a strange combination of comfort and brutal truth.  After all, what real comfort is their that God has forgiven us (2) when we are all on the way out anyway (7)?  All that lasts is the echoing voice of the Divine (8).

 

It all hinges on what the Word of the Lord actually says.

 

If the enduring Word of the Lord had said, "Good Riddance" we could hardly blame him.  But the Word that outlasts our little earthly life-slot speaks instead of eternal salvation.  We also read . . .

 

¹And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

² And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

³ And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.

 

The Word that lasts is the Word that brings the greatest comfort of all.

 

 

 

 

 

A Son's Tribute - In Heavenly Love Abiding

This hymn has figured in our family's life events over the years and my Dad's Thanksgiving Service begins with it.

 

It is tempting to think of this as an old person's hymn -

 

In heavenly love abiding,
No change my heart shall fear;
And safe is such confiding,
For nothing changes here.
The storm may roar without me,
My heart may low be laid;
But God is round about me,
And can I be dismayed?

 

When Anna Waring wrote it she was, in fact, 27 years old.

 

What awful circumstances had led her to write this poetry of devotion?  What hurts and harms had given her such depth of consciousness about God's providential love?  None actually.  Or at least as far as we can know from her story.  She learned what she learned not by the University of Experience but by the glory of Scripture.

 

Our family - and not least my Dad who spent but four weeks in hospital (his last four weeks) - has not been visited by the unending tragedies that afflict some.  To get depth we must get it from our knowledge of God.  Yet in this way, my Dad was able to enter on his last days as if a veteran of hospitalisation, for although he was unfamiliar with the environment he was very familiar with the abiding love of God.  And he found that there.

Bedlam

Is there time to write a blog today?  Has anyone time to read it?  The last working/full shopping day before Christmas weekend.  It's bedlam!

But then Christmas always is bedlam [a place, scene, or state of uproar and confusion].  The roads are bedlam, the shops are bedlam, the church is bedlam and the home is bedlam!

Though in a way the problem is that they are not bedlam.  The word's association with chaotic situations derives from the Bethlem Hospital in London which was, in fact, a lunatic asylum of such grandeur that it became a tourist attraction.  Unfortunately it was not an attraction for those confined within and their miserable environment was both the voyeuristic draw and the derivation of the name for chaos as bedlam. 

Originally it began as Christian foundation and the Order that ran it was named, of course, after the place and the event that the other sort of late-December bedlam ostensibly celebrates but more often buries beneath its confusion.

Thus the answer to Christmas bedlam is, well, Bedlam.  Caught neatly, I think, in the folk carol Joly Wat that feels more like the first Bedlam where the Prince of Peace was found.

Whan Wat to Bedlem cumen was,

He swet, he had gone faster than a pace;

He found Jesu in a simpell place,

Betwen an ox but and an asse.

Ut hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy.

‘Jesu, I offer to thee here my pipe,

My skirt, my tar-box, and my scrip;

Home to my felowes now will I skip,

And also look unto my shepe.’

Ut hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy.

Salvation?

This week Gary Reinbach died in hospital. He was in his early 20s and for half of his short life he had been an alcoholic.

The only surgery that would likely have saved him from a severe case of liver cirrhosis was a liver transplant. But Gary didn't qualify. The NHS rules require several months proven freedom from alcohol before a donor liver is transplanted - so that the new liver doesn't simply open the door for more binge drinking and a wasted gift.

His mother Madelaine told the Evening Standard: "I'm not saying you should give a transplant to someone who is in and out of hospital all the time and keeps damaging themselves, but just for people like Gary, who made a mistake and never got a second chance. These rules are really unfair."

I know nothing of Gary's faith or lack of it and, unlike the NHS, I am not his judge. I do know that if on his death bed Gary had turned to Jesus, as a thief once did upon a cross, his woeful history and doubtful prognosis would not have prevented the Saviour giving him eternal life.