Normal service will soon be resumed, dear reader!...

It has been some weeks since I have been a regular blogger. I have never intended - let alone achieved any ambition - to be a blogger of particular note or distinction. I did, however, have an intention for this year to make this blog a place in which I reported and reflected upon my work and life. Latterly this has happened little.
Some of this has been intensity of work - subsequent to a period focussed in the parish, not least around our recent repair work and the associated public appeal for funds, etc, I have been catching up on lots of stuff for my Area Team work. Another factor, though, has been a time of testing and diagnosis for the low energy levels, 'brain fog', sight difficulties and dizziness that have been a feature of my life for the last five years, but increasingly restricting, of late.
I am glad to be able to report, now, that initial concerns that I might be dealing with a degenerative illness of the nervous system have proven unfounded. Similarly, though attention turned to a suspicion of a lesion on my pituitary gland during the last month, this has also now been discounted, on the evidence of a detailed MRI scan and other tests.
I am very pleased that something altogether less alarming has been diagnosed, namely that I am quite deficient in vitamin B12. This, it is now believed, could be the root cause of my great fatigues, my dizziness and 'brain fog'. It will have to act for now, too, as my best excuse as to why finding the reserves of time and imagination for blogging has not been achieved.

I shall be starting into an initial course of 6 vitamin B12 injections in three weeks' time or so; thereafter, future boosters will be needed quarterly. Time will tell if energy and concentration levels start to improve. And who knows, I might even get back to blogging!?!

Another film meme...

I have been tagged by Sam, who is away at Pleshey at the moment and (I am guessing) unable to watch movies, but I have had my rest day today (having worked on Monday this week) and have done that rare thing - gone to the cinema to watch a movie AND watched one on DVD, so it seems timely to take on the meme!...

1. One movie that made you laugh
Blazing Saddles

2. One movie that made you cry
Raining Stones

3. One movie you loved when you were a child
Superman

4. One movie you’ve seen more than once
The Battleship Potemkin

5. One movie you loved, but were embarrassed to admit it
DON'T DO APOLOGIES ABOUT MOVIES!

6. One movie you hated
CAN'T THINK OF ONE!

7. One movie that scared you
Suspiria

8. One movie that bored you
Forest Gump

9. One movie that made you happy
Smoke

10. One movie that made you miserable
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

11. One movie you weren’t brave enough to see
Texas Chainsaw Massacre

12. One movie character you’ve fallen in love with
Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction

13. The last movie you saw
Alphaville

14. The next movie you hope to see
The Prestige

• Now, I tag Erin, Chris, Dave, Alice & Peter

News from Rawreth....

Blog silence as of late has been occasioned by a busy time in the parish around our fundraising - and the tensions it has surfaced - a short period away from work made necessary by the sheer nervous-depletion caused by all of the above, and the last week head-down trying to catch up on work for the Area and the Bishop....

But heh! today has been a turning of the corner! After just a month of appeal, I have been able to announce to the regular congregation today that we can now close the appeal, as all our monies to reach our £21000 repair-bill target are now either in or promised! A recent grant from the local Rosca Trust and a very generous gift from the ASDA Community Foundation have added to the extraordinarily-generous giving of residents of the parish and beyond. We could not have anticipated this a month ago, so all I can say is "Thanks be to God!"...

We followed up our Pentecost Eucharist at St Nicholas this morning with a trip to Cambridge, where a group of us were graciously hosted by James Gardom, the Dean of Pembroke College, our Patron. Perfect weather, gorgeous surroundings, afternoon tea, a tour, a stroll, a special service in college chapel with a fab choir, and rounding off with Formal Hall and good wine! Hard to beat!

So, know that God is the giver of good gifts today!...

Sermon for Easter 5

SERMON @ MASS @ ST NICHOLAS RAWRETH

SUNDAY 20 APRIL 2008

EASTER 5 – YEAR A

1 Peter 2:2-10

So, to recap. Over the past three weeks, drawing out the teaching of the 1^st Letter of Peter, Margaret and I have preached about what it means to live in the light and strength of our Baptism into the Resurrection Life of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

We have reflected that we are on a journey, and our shared Baptism is our passport. We have heard together that we are ambassadors, representing and ultimately directed by our citizenship of the Kingdom of God, the Rule of God which is breaking into all our cultures and rules to transform them for his purposes of shaping a new creation. And we have started to learn that we follow the Good Shepherd, who has already opened up a new and living way for us…

Today, we have two new sets of picture language to draw upon – baby’s milk and stones! And tempting as it is to deal with both – and perhaps to major on cornerstones in the week in which the cornerstone of our church building’s east wall has been temporarily-removed (!) – I am going to resist, in order to tackle just the image of babyhood and milk.

So, to start with baby’s milk, and draw a thread to our existing picture of passport, a little historical reminiscing, if I may… I seem to recall, when I was younger, that it was the norm for children of UK-citizen parents to simply be added to one of their parents’ passports should the need arise for them to travel across a border. I had little call on this, as I did not have the opportunity to travel overseas until I was approaching adult age myself, but I recall it to have been the case. More recently, though, when my own son Callum was born, one of the very first things we sorted out for him was his own passport. It had to be arranged at some speed, as we were off travelling in Canada with him at age 14 weeks! There was this photograph of a squidgy little baby, days old, appended to a stand-alone passport of his very own.

How does it work in the life of the Christian? Do we get our identity in the Kingdom of God courtesy of our parents? Do we ride as a ‘named extra’ on their papers, coattailing on their credentials? Or do we, like in recent times with our national passport, get this identity from day one, from the moment of new birth in Baptism? The answer, Peter’s letter reminds us, is this latter.

Peter reminds his readers and hearers that we are to remember ourselves as being “like newborn infants”, and that we are to “grow into salvation”.

Now, there are all kinds of thoughts and reflections which will flow from this realisation. First, there will be an ownership of our own journey of holiness and into God’s salvation. We will, as St Paul says in “work out our salvation with fear and trembling”. We will not assume that, just because we were born into a family or culture or nation that claims the name and identity of ‘Christian’, then the working out of our own salvation is not a task for us. We will not even dare assume that just because we do certain things – including going to church! – that we are automatically right with God and grown-up in the Resurrection life of God. One of my favourite Christian singer-songwriters of the 1970s, Keith Green, used to famously announce at his concerts that “Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian, any more than going to McDonalds makes you a hamburger!”

Next, we will have a proper regard for the whole question of Christian maturity. We will come to understand that we are all in a process of learning and growing. We will avoid either spiritual laziness or spiritual arrogance. We will understand – little by little – how many matters of consequence are beyond us, and that we need to have deference to the understanding, wisdom, kindness, leadership, and simple holiness of others who are our elder brethren and sisters in the faith. (By the way, this may or may not have any relation to their chronological age! When the Bible talks about time, it consistently, in the Greek, draws a series of distinctions between chronos, clock-time, and kairos, time in God’s revelatory and transformative purposes. A subject to be pursued in another sermon, I anticipate…)

For now, the writer of this letter to these early Christians – and, I have said I believe, to us, too – reminds us to “long for the pure, spiritual milk”, to remember ourselves as passport holders, but not necessarily yet because we are grown. We are like babies, all of us, potentially. Indeed, Peter even allows for the possibility that we can be issued with the passport, through baptism, and yet never even realise that we are to start feeding! “If indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good”, he caveats. At the risk of getting too far into the whole breast versus bottle thing about milk for babies, the picture he gives here is of a baby who has never known even the first taste of the good, tasty life-giving milk that flows from the breast of Mother God.

It does raise the questions for us, though. What fare have we been raised on? Has it been the good, substantial breastmilk of immersion in study of the scriptures, in the practice of prayer, in the fellowship of Christians and in the encounter with God where we are really fed, the Holy Communion, where we eat bread and wine, the Body and Blood of Jesus himself? Or have we got stuck on sickly formula, a thin diet of once-a-week or once-a-month church, of a notion that worship should be easy, or bland, or undemanding, a place and time to retreat from the complexities of the world? Have we gotten so used to doing things in just such a way, that we have forgotten that God will have in store a million and more exciting, transforming ways waiting to be discovered and tried? All those varied plates of food we have not yet dared try, or for which our narrow palettes have not yet been prepared?

When St Paul, writing at an earlier time to the Christians in Corinth - a bunch who considered themselves real sophisticates, the folk who had made it, dare I say the south-Essex-folk of their own time (?!?) – he says this to puncture their religious bubble (and this is a passage we had earlier in the year, too, when I preached about divisions in church life):

“Brothers, I could not address you as spiritual but as worldly – mere infants in Christ. I gave you milk, not solid food, for you were not yet ready for it. Indeed, you are still not ready. You are still worldly. For since there is jealousy and quarrelling among you, are you not worldly? Are you not acting like mere men?” (1 Corinthians 3:1-3)

And so Paul addresses the same matter as Peter, and draws a key conclusion for our learning, and growing-up, for today. That this identity we have as Christians is never just a matter for us as individuals. That each of us should attend carefully to our own spiritual maturity is plainly the case with all that Peter is teaching. And I have reminded you of it. But it is also the case that, as church, as fellowships of Christian disciples together, we can have, or neglect, a corporate spiritual health and maturity. We can be like nursing class, or toddler-group, or pre-school, primary school, secondary or college. On a day when we have a church annual meeting and reflect on our life together over a year just past, we can ask ourselves the question: have we grown up any? Have we moved on from milk to meat? Or are we still half-hearted on the breast or the bottle, refusing, quite, to grow up?

To ask a question like that is unlikely to be an entirely comfortable experience. But it is a necessary one. God’s longing for us is not merely for us to be passport-holding babies but – both as individuals and as his people in a particular fellowship – to be something rather more awesome and wonderful. The end of the passage for today reminds us what God’s people are called and destined to be. Just hear the power and challenge of these words, and let them shape us all afresh today, my brothers and sisters! We are called to be:

“…a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, in order that [we] may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called [us] out of darkness into his marvellous light. OInce [we] were not a people, but now [we] are God’s people; once [we] had not received mercy, but now [we] have received mercy.” (vv. 9-10)

May we learn and grow into this vision of God’s mercy-shaped people! +AMEN

Sermon for Easter 4

PKT150408/1 - Day One, and the tarpaulins come back off...


PKT160408/1 - Day Two, and the apex cross is removed...


PKT170408/1 - ...Day Three and the wall starts coming down!... I expect a draughty worship time on Sunday?!?...

Another blessing and offering from Margaret, posted just ahead of my follow-on in tomorrow's morning worship!...

..and some photographs of the beginnings of our building repair works this week!...

This letter of Peter is very short, but contains deep teaching and encouragement of the most practical kind; it deals with some of the hardest facts of life (such as fear of death, social inequalities, injustice, family relationships) all in Christian assurance. The writer is realistic but never cynical; he lived in the real world. Not the only world but the world in which you and I are living now, today. This real world is determined by God’s acts. The world in which Jesus lived and worked, taught and died. The world in which he rose again, as we celebrated at Easter. The world in which we live.

Last week Paul talked about dual identity: we are citizens of this world but also of God’s world. God is forming a new people through Christ and all believers Jews and gentiles are God’s “chosen”.

When you are baptised you are baptised in water and the spirit. The Holy Spirit is with every Christian believer, not just then but now as well. “God with us”. Our loyalty now is to God and as citizens of heaven. The Kingdom of heaven is here and now as well as eternal. It is the here and now as well as the promise for the future.

As citizens of the world, the world of Rawreth, Rayleigh and Wickford, the writer exhorts us to be good citizens, to obey the laws of the state and treat each other with respect; not to be a danger or threat to the society in which we live and its structures for good order.

Peter talks about servants obeying their masters – you will know that many Christians were not only marginalised but also slaves at that time. By submitting to their masters, serving them willingly for Christ’s sake, such slaves were expressing their freedom (almost a contradiction in terms for slaves) as followers of Christ.

One commentator suggests also that this image of slave and master can be seen as a parallel for us and the civil state in which we live, that is we are the slaves and the state is the master who might be just or unjust.

In either case we have a duty as citizens to obey the superior state authority. Today on our country we have democracy, some of us might be cynical but we have a vote in elections! In the time of the writer of Peter the Roman Emperor ruled and his word was law. This non-Christian world, then and now, would prefer to ignore God.

Because we are God’s people, we are characterised by holiness, for God says “you shall be holy for I am holy”. This is the measure which God uses, the God who gave us our new Identity. As his people, Christians called by God will be different from their fellows, not this-worldly but remaining in exile awaiting the one who is to appear in glory. Our conformity to the civil world is underpinned with our ultimate loyalty to God who can be relied upon, who is trustworthy. Whilst we give honour to our civil powers, it is God who is – in the old language, to be feared – in other words to be reverenced.

Most of you are familiar with the words of the Gospel writer Matthew (Chapter 5.16) “Let your light so shine before men , that they may see your good works and glorify your Father which is in heaven.” from the Book of Common Prayer Communion Service . As Christians we are called upon to live by Christ’s example; in this way we might win others to Christ.

As one writer puts it: we are encouraged to walk the tightrope of being radically different from our surrounding culture because of our Christian identity (ID) but at the same time affirming the best values of that culture for the sake of acceptance and witness. As those called by God we must disarm our critics by living godly lives. We can do this only in God’s strength. Any worthy living we do is grounded in the will of God, God acting creatively in our lives.

The displaced Christians to whom this letter was addressed were marginalised people, people who suffered verbal abuse and socio-economic discrimination. Because we as Christians are “strangers and aliens” in this world (to use Paul’s words of last week) we shall be misunderstood. In the days when this letter was written the Roman historian Tacitus wrote “Christians are loathed because of their abominations”. The world is hostile to us and we, like our predecessors, will be the object of misunderstanding, scorn and hatred, accused of subversion and will be called upon to endure suffering.

If this suffering is justly due, caused by self - in that case there is no credit due to the sufferer. But if suffering follows from our doing good, if it is unjustly caused, then you have God’s approval. Those dishonoured by this-worldly culture (as Jesus himself was) will be honoured by inclusion in the household of God. Such suffering is in the pattern of Jesus Christ, in imitation of the suffering of Jesus. Again a reference to Isaiah’s suffering servant – remembered from our Easter readings.

Jesus Christ is the one who suffered and died for our salvation. He entrusted himself to the just judge, he bore our sins on the cross so that free from sins WE might live for righteousness; by his wounds we have been healed. HE who was sinless died for our sins, suffering our deserved punishment, that we might live.

But we are not called to replicate his suffering and death, no martyrdom, but to imitate the manner of his endurance. He died once for all that we might live – his death and our salvation.

Even if we suffer for nothing that we have done wrong, for no good reason, we must not revile our persecutors but bless them and trust in God. Eg Korean Pastor whose two sons were killed by communist insurgents, who pleaded for and saved the life of their killer, adopted him as his son and brought him to Christ, blessing God for the opportunity to do so.

Closer to home and of less significance but something to which we can all relate is the man whom Fiona and I met, who instead of giving rude signs when he was cut up or taken advantage of on the road would bless the wrongdoer. A very Christ-like thing to do – not hard but effective, blessing the other. I like to imagine Christians today driving about blessing all those motorists at whom we might otherwise swear!

We are still in the Easter Season and will be until Pentecost, that is the celebration of the coming of the Holy Spirit to the first disciples. Historically Baptism has been an Easter celebration and Pentecost is the empowering of the disciples in the power of the spirit sent by God to sustain them following Christ’s Ascension.

The church comprises those people who have “stared death down” as they passed through the waters of baptism, the waters of new life in Christ. We are to die to sin (death to our old ID) and live in righteousness; by God’s grace we are to shed our sinful life : almost like a caterpillar shedding its skin and turning into a butterfly. We are to be transformed by God. This is to be our identity as Christians in this world, our dual identity in which we are authorised as ambassadors for Christ in the world.

This period in the church calendar is a challenge to us the church – that’s you and me together - to show how we reflect the presence of the risen Christ in our communities of faith, looking outwards to the world as a focus for sharing our faith, the good news of Jesus Christ. And our public faithfulness, our witness to Christ, is a signal of the new order in the world, of life and hope in Christ.

And the letter’s concluding words in today reading resonate with the Gospel reading, Jesus the Good Shepherd and guardian of our souls.

AMEN

EMERGENCY PUBLIC APPEAL FOR FUNDS AT ST NICHOLAS RAWRETH

PKT020408/1 - the east wall...


PKT020408/2 - ...and the wobbly cross atop the weakened section of wall...

PKT020408/3 - we have opened up and peered in, and the news is not so good!...

The east wall of St Nicholas, the parish church building for Rawreth, is in need of substantial and urgent repairs. The Victorian-built wall – rebuilt in the 1950s following a blitz-bomb accidentally dropped on it during the Second World War – is now in need of further strengthening. (Latterly, plaster has started falling from the wall into the altar sanctuary area, causing a public danger.)

The top section of the wall will need to be taken down, and rebuilt following the careful insertion of steel bars for additional strength, which will be further strapped to the joists of the chancel roof, to ensure against further slippage for – we hope! – the next century or so! All original materials will be reused for facing the work wherever possible, to retain the integrity of the beauty of this heritage building.

The Parochial Church Council has resolved to instruct this repair work to get underway immediately. Therefore, workmen will be onsite from Monday 14 April 2008.

This work will cost a sum of £21000. The regular church account holds, at present, a total of £3500. We are, therefore, a long way short of our capacity to manage this work without the generous assistance of others!

The PCC trusts that there are many people who care about both the preservation of this historic community building and about its availability for ministry for the future to all who make use of it. It is therefore launching a major public appeal for funds to meet this challenge.

Over the coming days and weeks, word about this challenge will appear in articles in the Echo newspapers, through discussions and appeals on BBC Essex radio, through door-drops of fliers, and through a number of other means. Opportunities will be made available to give to this appeal through making donations directly to the parish priest at Rawreth Rectory, through St Nicholas church school office, and through collection points and events to be held at the entrances of both ASDA and MAKRO stores in the parish.

We do ask that all who can give to this will do so, and do so as generously as they are able. This is a big task and challenge, but one which we feel sure the wider community will want to rise to achieve.

Any questions or clarifications about any of this should be sought from The Revd Paul Trathen, the parish priest. He can be contacted on 01268 766766 or via paul.trathen@btopenworld.com.

Many thanks. Go well and God bless.

Becoming a priest...a bit more about embodied spirituality...

In my last post about this, I stated my firm conviction that the ordained minister is called primarily to personhood. However, I do, as part of that, believe that there is a special role for the clergy here in being “representative and not vicarial”, to cite Maurice, the central mover of the Christian Socialist Movement of the 19th Century [cited in Melinsky, p.110]. It seems to me, crucially, that the representative of Our Lord cannot be a tyrant, cannot always stand at the centre of attention, for Our Lord did not. Our Lord approached people, often when they least expected it but nonetheless at the precise moment that met their need (e.g. Zacchaeus the tax collector); He allowed, indeed encouraged, others to come to Him, with questions or needs (e.g. the rich young ruler). Oftentimes, He sided openly with the poor, the dispossessed, the outsider, against the vested interests of establishment persons and values (e.g. challenging the Pharisees before the woman taken in adultery, or overturning the traders’ tables at the Temple in Jerusalem).

Moody argues that:

[St] Paul’s example of apostolic leadership suggests that the ordained minister is often most useful to the life of a congregation when he or she is prepared to stay on the edge of it. The periphery is the place where hidden tensions become visible and growth is made possible.

[Moody, p.82]

My theology is one which, to cite Greenwood, “generally speaks of a God who engages vulnerably with the world”; it is my contention that this God “is known in vulnerability and ambiguity as much as in certainty and clarity” [Greenwood, p.61]. The Church, therefore, should “as part of creation [...] reflect God’s being in humility, contingency and the rejection of the way of domination” [Greenwood, p.87].[i]

Standing alongside communities is the place where I see my priestly ministry taking place. There is, as George Herbert was aware, an “inevitable tension between the parson’s high sense of calling, his own capacity to fulfil it, and the space created for it by the expectations and understanding of the role among his parishioners”. I gladly accept Moody’s advice that “Practical wisdom and humility is needed in negotiating between these different strands” [Moody, p.45]. (And I am able to acknowledge that I have needed, and mismanaged, some of this kind of wisdom and humility during this past year in an Incumbent role, pastoring a parish.)

I bring to my vocation to ordination within the priestly ministry of the Church of England, inevitably, an individual account of myself, my strengths and my weaknesses, my achievements and my failings. Whilst my principal thesis, therefore, has been that the ordained clergyperson must learn to humbly be a servant of God and of His people, and must delight in being made anew and afresh by each new encounter, I would wish to identify those features of my character and of my training to date in which I believe God has been forming me for particular emphases of priestly ministry.

Firstly, I am a teacher. By instinct, by training, by enthusiasm, I am a teacher. My wish is that this gift may be used within my priestly ministry. Secondly, I am a scholar. My deep love of learning underpins the continuing enthusiasm I have for teaching others and seeing learning happening elsewhere. I find my study and my prayer to be deeply interdependent; I would agree with the Community of the Resurrection writers when they state their view that:

Study cannot be separated from the prayer and worship of a parish. If part of the priest’s identity lies in nurturing the desire for God and helping others to know the working of God, then study and learning must live in a unity with worship and prayer. The ‘law of believing’ (lex credendi) and the ‘law of praying’ (lex orandi) are not two utterly unconnected items which have been stuffed into the same ‘jiffy’ bag.

[Allan, et al., p.105]

My area of expertise is as a tutor and scholar of communications and cultural studies. In my work with students at Degree level, as well as with A Level students, I have become increasingly knowledgeable about, and sensitive to, the modes of contemporary ‘sense-making’. We live in what many scholars describe as a post-modern culture, a culture which is globalising and at the same time fragmenting. Ever-growing numbers of people are not people of the book - as Christians have traditionally been - but are people of the screen; modern mass communications call for, and offer, new ways of speaking about the things of our Christian faith. People’s working patterns are not the settled ‘job for life’ model of their parents and grandparents; similarly, gender roles are not so unilateral as they stood during earlier parts of this century. As a scholar and teacher in these areas I do feel a place for meaningful and powerful ministry. I wish to reach out to others, standing alongside them and speaking to them in ways that make sense because, as George Herbert said:

‘...people, by what they understand, are best led to what they understand not’

[Melinsky, p.99][ii]

To conclude, I would see my priestly ministry in the Church of England as being a person, dependent on God, standing alongside a community. I see the distinctive tasks and responsibilities within the areas of corporate worship, the preaching of the gospel, teaching and pastoral care as means through which the Lord will use my servanthood, along with others’. It will need to be a modern ministry - or perhaps a post-modern one - in the sense that it will seek to speak and act in a way that is relevant and which communicates to the cultures I find myself in.

A final citation will help, I feel, to catch something of the holism which I believe should mark my priestly ministry:

Many clergy today are facing the vulnerability involved in being a priest who attempts to move from operating in a distant role, towards the relationships involved in being a human being, a friend, a spouse, a parent, a community member, and a voter.

[Greenwood, p.147]

As many of these roles, and others, as come to define me, will ultimately come to make me as the priest in the royal priesthood He wants me to be.

---

[i] Greenwood, here, notes an area of keen agreement between Metropolitan John Zizioulas of the Orthodox tradition and Professor Jürgen Moltmann of the Reformed tradition.

[ii] George Herbert’s own words are cited by Melinsky, here. Melinsky does not give a precise source reference for the citation.