Witchert

Last Sunday our fellowship of churches had its annual exchange Sunday and it was my happy assignment to head out into the countryside on a beautiful spring morning to take the service at Haddenham.

As a good Baptist I try not to take too much notice of buildings rather than people but at Haddenham that is difficult because it is the only place I will ever get the opportunity to take a service in a chapel constructed out of witchert, a limestone soil mixed with sand and straw.

 

I'm sure there is some profound comment I could make about that but one has eluded me.  Perhaps more would have come to mind if I'd been to the Methodist Chapel nearby, also made out of witchert.  It had previously shared a side wall with a public house.  The pub burned down.  A new one was built freestanding.  Soon after the side wall of the Methodist Chapel fell down.

Or, as the Bible doesn't quite say, the foolish man built his house against a pub . . .

 

A Son's Tribute - Caravans

Although this picture comes from a generation earlier, it depicts the kind of setting in which my Dad began Christian ministry as a Wickliffe Preacher.  Three young men, a caravan plastered with big texts and a drive from village to village and including market towns and occasionally urban centres with missions to teach the children about the Gospel.

Today's children see many more words than these.  Why, as I write this they are busy tweeting them to one another, looking at them on endless websites and generally being bombarded by the messengers of the global village.

 

We smile at the change.

 

The quality of the media is vastly different but the message carried is vastly inferior.  Windows 8 has introduced no new input that improves on THIS IS A FAITHFUL SAYING THAT CHRIST JESUS CAME INTO THE WORLD TO SAVE SINNERS.

 

Sure, we can save documents, blogs, digital images, spreadsheets and the like.  But is there a new, improved way to save sinners?

 

One way to look at this in the 21st century is to say that we no longer interpret behaviours as sin.  That is to miss the point.  Sin is not the human way of looking at human behaviour, it is the revealed divine way.  Like the arrested bloke's, "Get yer 'ands off me. I ain't done nuthin' wrong." this self-described innocence needs some higher corroboration.  The Bible makes it clear enough that we cannot change the way God looks at our sin.  The Gospel declares that God has.  He has sent a saving Messiah - Christ Jesus came to save.

 

Throughout his life my dad lived with people gently observing him as pleasantly quaint and earnestly unnecessary.   It is the evangelist's lot.  But they were wrong.  He was witnessing to the only solution to the only long term problem we humans face.

 

 

 



Pipes

On Monday I went to the funeral of a lady who had been involved with our church many years ago.  The service was in a little village chapel.  The chapel was in a little village lane (we were directed to park in something between a car park and a farmyard).  The chapel looked like a house (as all good old-fashioned non-conformist chapels do).  There was ice on the roads and as it didn't, from the outside, look like a building that had benefited from heavy investment I feared there might be ice on the pews. (It was pleasantly warm in fact). 

We walked in.  The entrance was sufficiently narrow to make me grateful I'd lost weight recently, not a funeral director's favourite kind of entrance.  But on this occasion I was congregation not platform participant and as I finished squeezing into the pew, designed for that earlier generation that was rather less than my 6 foot plus, my eyes were transfixed by the pile of metal material in the corner of the room.

My initial thought was that a local farmer may be using that corner to store old pipework.  Pipes stood behind the single keyboard organ as if they had been thrown there.  Some were straight others at various angles, there were gaps where pipes seemed to be missing, some looked kind of rusty.  Perhaps an old space satellite had landed in the village punching a hole in the chapel roof which was now repaired.  However, in the end, I was forced to conclude this pile of pipes had really been the organ, uncased, disused and left in miserable decay in the corner of the chapel.

An older lady stood up.  Well she stood more than stood up on account of not being young enough or tall enough to do the 'up'.  She had a music bag!  And then the horror dawned.  She was making her way to the pile of pipes!!  I braced myself.  Here I was, with a grieving family and some thoughtful and kind members of my church sitting beside me and I was about to hear the most pitiable example of what passes for church music played on an instrument that the local museum would laughingly refuse to consider as a free gift.

Christine climbed and sat on the organ stool.  She spread out her music. She began to play.  A J. S. Bach prelude floated from the corner.  There were no missing notes.  There were no missed timings.  There seemed, after all, no missing pipes.  Simply masterful music beautifully played by a more-than-able musician on an instrument that my ears told my eyes was not as ugly as my eyes had imagined.

Some chorales and hymns later I was remembering not only a lady I had often visited but (thanks to Christine) also the words of the Lord Jesus,

Stop judging by the way things look, but judge by what is really right.