Things I did learn this week

1) That despite what St Paul says, you really can not please all of the people all of the time.

2) That churches in the same parish have very different cultures, you might as well be in another part of the country.

3) That kids who look old enough to be down the pub rather than at your Light and Hope Alternative Hallowe'en party, really do want to play hide and seek in a 'glowing-in-the-dark' church and play 'apple-bobbing.'

4) That I seriously love kids church and get to engage with God whilst singing fab, upbeat, joy-filled kids' worship songs. Give me that rather than the traditional stuff any day of the week.

5) That I am always going to be a restless priest and resist the idea that this piece of white plastic gives me authority. I understand authority you earn or authority that is yours as you stand in the authority of Christ. Do I need to do some more thinking about the institution in which I live out my faith?

6) Give me preaching over leading any day of the week - all that stand up, sit down stuff just plays havoc with my lack of spatial awareness and poor choreography skills.

7) That candle-tapers carry on smoking long after you think that you have blown them out, and need to be extinguished carefully.

8) That members of the youth group, who ask you to put your finger on a light in the corner of the church upon which they have balanced a range of objects, are looking to electrocute the curate!

9) That every now and then I am going to need to drive for absolutely no reason at all, to no particular destination at all, along a dual carriage-way as fast as my conscience will allow me, simply to scream and pray very loudly.

10) There are a lot more things that I am going to learn.

I want to be surprised - looking in the mirror

I was in New York in May of this year when all the end-time predictions were occurring. I suppose they are always occurring but I was approached by people on the street and their flyers announcing Harold Camping's predictions that I only had 13 days left to go before the world would end and God's judgement would come down upon us– Oh well, I thought, at least I will be back home by then, somehow because I was unconvinced I jumped quickly to thinking that it might only happen in New York. I would be safe.

Do not think by this that I am about to help you to work out what judgement will look like or when it will occur – there are a huge number of opinions on that and many different pictures painted throughout the bible. Wjat I can offer you is that as Christians, we do profess that it will occur – in our creed we say that He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.

I can also offer you my realisation that in thinking I am safe, I am beginning my thinking on this topic in just about the unhealthiest way possible and perhaps you are doing the same.

I can also explore with you Jesus' words about the sheep and the goats in Matthew 25:31-46 in the hope that God helps us all to leave this place this morning more the sheep who follow the shepherd than the goats who roam wild.

***

In this passage, Matthew paints a picture of Jesus the shepherd-King, enthroned on high but, like a humble keeper of sheep, busy separating his sheep from his goats, the goats with their thinner frames and less suitable coats would have needed to have been taken out of the fields at night as it grew cold.

...So we have this separation that has become very alive in the popular imagination – the sheep and the goats – the sheep on Christ's right and the goats on his left –

the righteous and the cursed

the found and the lost

the saved and the condemned

the heaven-bound and the hell-bound.

What are we to do with this?

Matthew has already given us other parables of separation, most notably the wheat separated from the weeds at harvest time (chp 13).

What I think is important about these other parables is that they give us every reason to leave judgement to Jesus alone. We are not to attempt to pull up the weeds from the wheat because in pulling up the weeds, we would pull out and kill off the wheat too – we fail so often to be good judges of character, don't we? It is only God who can look on the heart. Judgement belongs to Christ alone and so it is not up to us to consider ourselves yet quite the sheep Jesus hopes us to be. Neither do we get to decide who the goats are among us either.

Do you ever people watch? Have you ever sat in a restaurant or a park and just watched people and wondered about them- what do you see?

There is a verse in Matthew – about Jesus looking at the crowd and having compassion on them. Matthew tells us that Jesus saw a harassed and helpless people. He saw sheep without a shepherd. Because when Jesus people-watches he really sees people. We see people eating and shopping, going about their buisness and getting off to work but he sees people in all their struggles and heartaches and lost-ness. Jesus sees sheep without a shepherd and he prays that God will send workers out into the crowd. In Matthew's gospel therefore it is interesting we are both the sheep who are lost and then the sheep who are found but the marker of our being found is not an over-confidence that we are safe, it is not in our considering ourselves sheep surrounded by goats, our feeling safe over here because we are not over- there – safe in England rather than New York even, as was the case for me. Our mark, even our branding, if you like, is that our lives are so characterised by love, that we resemble in our hearts the shepherd who cares for us.

If we understand this passage correctly we are surprised to learn that we are sheep. I like to think that it is as if we just for a moment catch a sight of our fleeces in a mirror and see that we have been sealed, marked, branded by Christ, we have the stamp of his Holy Spirit upon our flesh and we are 'wow-ed' at the sight of ourselves.

We have something very much in common with the goats because like them we are surprised by Christ's verdict. You see what both the sheep and the goats are both surprised to learn is that 'what you did or did not do to one of the least, you did to the Son of Man (25:40, 45).

Judgement is a surprise.

Inheriting the kingdom of God is similarly as much of a surprise.

Both sides - sheep and goats - were unaware that when they were choosing to help or ignore other people, they were choosing to help or ignore Jesus himself.

Imagine how we will feel on that day we are judged – how passionately we want to belong to that flock of sheep and be shown re-runs of our lives where we chose

to help and serve

and not ignore and walk past.

Where God shows mercy to us all, this God of love in whom we trust, is in in his offering to both the sheep and the goats this passage for our guidance. (It would seem that both sheep and goats know Jesus, they both call him Lord). We can all read and learn from this picture that those of us with goat-like tendencies or perhaps even those of us who have not yet turned around to see the branding of the Holy Spirit on our fleeces might wake up before it is too late and do something about it!

We are presented with this vision of our future destiny so that we might begin to pray that the Holy Spirit would so inhabit our lives in greater and greater measure that we can begin more fully to demonstrate transformed lives that go on to transform the lives of others because we live out of the strength that we have been given by Christ our shepherd – out of his leading.

Our prayer this morning is that we might see ourselves already branded, sealed by the Holy Spirit, chosen in Christ and in realising that this is true begin to act accordingly. Peter's second letter reveals that 'God's divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life.' We just need to remember that the gift is already ours, pray for the release of that power into our lives and continue to ask for its release by earnestly desiring the Holy Spirit, praying for the Spirit's power continually as we face new situations and new people... as we are given opportunities to see not only ourselves as the treasured sheep of a shepherd-king but to see the very Lord of our lives in the people around us whom he asks us to serve.

Who are we to see goats when we are asked instead to see Christ in the very least and the lost?

So...

• May we continually be surprised to find that we have served Christ when we have served one another.

• May we meditate less on our own eternal safety and pray more for the eternal safety of others.

• Might we learn from this passage that ours is an inheritance with which our fleeces are branded, we belong to the shepherd King but with coats that can grow wild and woolly we must demonstrate our identity through our actions and that begins with loving one another and leaving Judgement to the shepherd-king.   

Should Christians participate in Hallowe'en?

Gaping....

It's really strange to never arrive.

Taking stock of my life as we all tend to do from time to time, I wonder at this incomplete feeling. I wonder for how long I will live with it. In some ways, no, in many, on discovering the gospel and particular verses, I came to see that this ache that is sometimes too much to bear and often strangely enough hardly discernible at all, is fitting. Now it's here, last week it was not so much. 

Psalm 119:19a describes "I am a stranger on earth"and in Hebrews 11 they "admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth" (verse 13). Peter also describes his Christian readers as "aliens and strangers in the world."

What I have discovered of late, moreover, is that this feeling is often exacerbated by those we imagine 'get us.' In other words, there is the dangerous temptation of being led to think that when you finally connect with a bunch of people who feel rather like you do about God and the world, life and how to live it, this feeling will subside a little.

You will arrive.

You do not.

Moreover, I am learning some very tough lessons from 'the wounding I receive in the house of my friends.' I know I have dwelt before on this topic - it might be that I will just stay here for a little while. It could be that I will look back on this blog-post in a few weeks and wonder what I was doing, thinking all this stuff. This is always the danger. When it's better, you look back and judge yourself low at that point or over-sensitive and wonder why and how you could have gone to that place. 

In some ways recording it helps reveal it so that when you go there again, you have strategies, you have stories, you have a history to recover - it passed, it faded, it did get better, it will get better again.  

I do not definitively know what triggers the feeling - but I am beginning to work it out - it is these things: 

a mismatch between expectations and reality

a longing whose fulfilment is only just out of reach

a vision frustrated which will not stop gnawing

words internally articulated  that can never be said

a longing for a transformation that creeps in by the centimetre

I know what completion feels like because I have experienced it. I am so far from it in this particular episode of my life that sometimes it feels excruciating. I expected to find a little more of it - I was perhaps even wondering if it was unfolding but today and maybe just today it has vanished out of sight. 

There was completion when I was 21, and a man on a dance floor, somewhere in Loughborough, asked me to dance. As I said 'no,' I saw my future married life unfold in front of my eyes. I wouldn't dance with him because I was in a relationship and I promised at that moment to never be distracted again. 

I  experienced completion a year or so after my second daughter was born. Eyes no longer strayed to rest on pregnant bumps and snuggled, baby-carrier lumps. I knew my family was finished and that I would not want to have any more children. 

I have experienced it, nearly... in times of worship. There is a communitas, a togetherness, a connection that occurs so manifestly both with the people around you and the God you worship that it hovers within touching distance, it can be tasted. 

In this life that I am leading, though, I have days when I feel painfully bereft, I am so unfinished, incomplete and unfulfilled.  I think I remember this though - it all seems connected to church life. I remember aching a little after holiday club - working out eventually that being in the presence of God and with other Christians worshipping felt so fulfilling that turning that volume down again, taking the pan off the boil and changing the thermostat to something more cool was leaving a vacuum, a painful gap, a dangerous omission. When the week was finished and the people left, I ached. 

I remember it when labouring towards ordination, hearing Paul's words about 'groaning inwardly as we wait,' but it didn't go - it hasn't gone. I was not delivered. 

...so what do I do?

I have not got a clue...I continue to wait, press on, persevere, cling, breathe, hang ...

write.... 

The bible in the life of the Church (The authority of Scripture)

As you will know many of the difficulties and debates in the Anglican Communion occur around the the degree of authority that we give to scripture. It is not ours to give, so the phrasing of that sentence feels wrong from the start. At Indaba I approached the subject of God from a Barthian perspective.

Revelation begins with God's self-revelation through Scripture, the life of Jesus Christ and the witness of the Holy Spirit.

Faith, for me, is rather simple and to be Anglican is to follow this understanding of God - to preach our way through the lectionary, to be united in prayer to the God who has revealed himself in Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit and his word. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Our expression of this faith is reformed. The five marks of mission help us to join in with the missionary God revealed in the Scriptures.

To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom
To teach, baptise and nurture new believers 
To respond to human need by loving service 
To seek to transform unjust structures of society 
To strive to safeguard the integrity of creation and sustain and renew the life of the earth
(Bonds of Affection-1984 ACC-6 p49, Mission in a Broken World-1990 ACC-8 p101)



The Anglican Communion is having us ask big questions - What is Church? What is Mission? What is worship? It is not having us ask - who is God? This has been revealed, not fully ... yet ... we are in the 'inbetween times' but nevertheless God communicates through his word, the life of his Son and the Holy Spirit.

A survey has been produced so that the attention to and regard people have for scripture might be assessed... to some extent (ach! Surveys!)

Why not give it a go?

HERE