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!

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. 

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 . . .

Polycarp

Today much of the Church remembers one of the best attested early Christian martyrs.  Polycarp reminds us of the principle our Lord laid down to his Church at Smyrna in the Bible (Revelation 2): Be faithful to the point of death and I will give you a crown of life.

Natural Wastage

There's nothing like a Church committee as a setting for making bizarre new theology.

The Daily Telegraph carried a report on the General Synod at which a member was quoted as follows:

“The perfect storm we can see arriving fast on the horizon is the ageing congregations,” he said. “The average age is 61 now, with many congregations above that.  … 2020 apparently is when our congregations start falling through the floor because of natural wastage, that is people dying."

The Salvation Army coined the term 'promoted to glory' for its members passing through death to life everlasting (a vertical contradiction of falling through the floor).  The Apostle Paul liked the phrase fallen asleep in Jesus.  John Bunyan in Pilgrim's Progress famously described arriving in a Celestial City:

Now, while they were thus drawing towards the gate, behold a company of the heavenly host came out to meet them: to whom it was said by the other two shining ones,

"These are the men that have loved our Lord when they were in the world, and that have left all for his holy name; and he hath sent us to fetch them, and we have brought them thus far on their desired journey, that they may go in and look their Redeemer in the face with joy." Then the heavenly host gave a great shout, saying, “Blessed are they that are called to the marriage-supper of the Lamb.” Rev. 19:9.

There came out also at this time to meet them several of the King’s trumpeters, clothed in white and shining raiment, who, with melodious noises and loud, made even the heavens to echo with their sound. These trumpeters saluted Christian and his fellow with ten thousand welcomes from the world; and this they did with shouting and sound of trumpet.

This done, they compassed them round on every side; some went before, some behind, and some on the right hand, and some on the left, ... And now were these two men, as it were, in heaven, before they came to it, being swallowed up with the sight of angels, and with hearing of their melodious notes. Here also they had the city itself in view; and they thought they heard all the bells therein to ring, to welcome them thereto. But, above all, the warm and joyful thoughts that they had about their own dwelling there with such company, and that for ever and ever; oh, by what tongue or pen can their glorious joy be expressed!

Alternatively, you can call it natural wastage . . . 

Christians would be wiser to value older people and reach them with the Good News of eternity in glory with Jesus than, "Hey, join us and soon become our natural wastage".

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.

Formidable

Our oldest Church member died recently.  The word most of us could agree well-described her was the word formidable.

You don't get to live to 102 years old without having some determination, and Evelyn had plenty of that.  And then some.  Even at a century old she was still, well, formidable.

Which brings me to Melville Beveridge Cox.

On the face of it he was decidedly not formidable.  He set out as a preacher in New England in 1822 before contracting tuberculosis.  You don't usually live to 100 after having TB.  He gave up preaching .

He moved and began working in a bookstore.  He edited a weekly Christian magazine.  He married.  That might be calculated to turn a sickly man into something a little stronger.  He and Ellen had a baby daughter, but not long after her birth both Ellen and the baby died of cholera.

The weakly widower volunteered for missionary work in South America.  This was refused but instead he was assigned to Liberia, the African state being formed from freed slaves.  There were doubts that this not-at-all formidable man would last long in Africa.

He began as quickly as he could with a church and two mission stations further up the river.  By now he had malaria, and 15 weeks into Africa he was dead.

This story of hopeless weakness is formidable too, however.  His story had so inspired other, stronger people that even as he died five further missionaries were en route to take up and expand his work.

In truth, all human formidability is to be found in God alone.

Hearing

I owe this story to an elderly lady who told this tale about - an elderly lady!

The vicar dropped by to visit the lady who had been taken ill.  Because of her age and the seriousness of the illness it seemed time to prepare for the End.

"Vicar," said she, "You will take my Funeral Service when I pass away, won't you?"

"Well yes, of course, when that time comes."

"You'll do it, won't you?  Not the young curate?"

The vicar was a little alarmed.  He had thought the young curate was quite competent and  liked.  "Yes, I'll do it.  But may I ask why you insist on it being me rather than my colleague?  He's very caring."

"Oh, I do believe he's very kind.  But in the services I can never hear a word he says."