Kings Church Chinley

I’ve just got my new spectacles and I’m feeling rather sick. No, not because of the price (yes, they cost a lot of lolly!) but because they are varifocals. I was very excited to begin with but now I’m not so sure. ‘Point your nose at what you want to look at’ the girl in Specsavers said, ‘but start off at home for short periods. It will take you a couple of weeks to get used to them’. If you’ve never had varifocals, let me try to explain what they’re like to use. It’s rather like trying to read the life insurance small print on a tiny yacht in a force ten gale round the Cape of Good Hope. The page in front of you becomes a wave as you read the line. But I will persevere. In fact that was what I was preaching about last Sunday. We glimpsed three snapshots of Peter’s journey as Jesus’ disciple and looked at the ups and downs he experienced. It was a family service and Hazel used puppets to portray different Peters. The point was that all the experiences he had made him exactly the person God needed. He started off very excitedly, persevered even through really tough times and conquored at the end. My life with Jesus has been a bit like that (but no where near as life-threatening!) and I can honestly say I’ve never regretted one minute of trying to walk where Jesus walked.
I’ve just started a book called, The Tangible Kingdom by Hugh Walter and Matt Smay. It’s about their stories of people for whom traditional church no longer holds any pleasure or meaning but they still want to persevere and be followers of Jesus. I’ve read the introduction and it looks really really good. I’ll persevere and let you know what it’s like. Hopefully I will get used to my specs and the nausea will wear off. If you get hold of a copy send me a comment and let me know what you think.

I asked an elderly woman recently why she came to church. She looked at me in a very strange way – as if my question were a waste of my breath and her time in responding. ‘To meet my friends of course’ she replied. She smiled wanly and walked away to chat to some people nearby. God did not seem to be involved at all and there was no mention of praise, worship, adoration, mission etc. It made me feel uncomfortable because I started to think that I was missing some of the purpose of church.

A while ago I mentioned some of the characters from my childhood. There was Harry Hastings the one-eyed greengrocer and lots of women in black and several one-legged men. There was another person who has come to mind of late – Miss Blair. As a 7 year-old boy, Miss Blair was very strange. I think her first name was Rosey, but everyone called her Miss Blair. She had a blue rinse and wore a lot of face powder giving her a ghostly impression. She wore bright red lipstick over large lips and a black mole on her cheek. She had a habit of putting her face very close to mine, which was very scary, but looking back she probably had poor eyesight. Miss Blair was the sole carer for her brother, Ernie. He was a very tall man who wore thick lenses in his glasses and struggled to speak. Mum said he was starved of oxygen when he was a baby, which is why he had trouble walking, but mum said lots of things just to stop me from asking questions. Miss Blair was devoted to her Ernie and they went everywhere together. She was a very sweet old lady and immaculately turned out. They pulled down the prefab that they lived in and they were moved to Peckham where they didn’t know anyone.

Eventually a group of youths came across Miss Blair and Ernie and pestered them. First for food (I remember seeing her in Rye Lane when we were shopping) and she told my mum that they made her buy pork chops and she had to feed them all. Later I heard it was money they took from her. A short time later the shock of constant harassment and the theft of the little money they had killed Ernie and Miss Blair followed soon after. We didn’t go to her funeral; we didn’t do funerals in our house.

Whilst Church can’t just be a social club, it must be about being social. If Miss Blair and Ernie had been in a loving community of Christian people who looked out for one another, the youths would have been dealt with and both Miss Blair and Ernie would have lived a lot longer. We not only find God in Church we find God in people; it’s where God comes to life.

I’ve been to two church services now where the ministers leading have started a prayer time and begun it with the same phrase, ‘in this time of silence…’ Both times I have had to laugh to myself (reverently of course!). On the first occasion and unbeknown to the minister there were lots of children at the back of the church who, in stage whispers, were asking for biscuits and making a joyful noise. The other time was this morning at the Palm Sunday service. The minister, who I am sure realised that what he was saying was funny, asked us in the silence to think of others around the world. The children were downstairs singing ‘Hosanna in the highest’ at the top of their voices which we could all hear with the utmost clarity.

Now, please understand me, I have a lot of respect for both these men of God and I’m one of those contemplative people who loves silence and I think we could listen to the voice of God in the silence more than we do. But, these ’silences’ got me thinking that maybe God is working outside the church and outside of our silences. Maybe He’s working in the noise, laughter and stage whispers of the world outside church walls. If our churches do not wake up to a noisy God, they may never wake up again.

As Easter is the special event for the Christian Church, I thought we could follow Jesus’ last week through the eyes of Mark. Some days have more reading than others, so feel free to be selective (Tuesday causes the pages to flutter!)

Palm Sunday

Mark 11:1-11

Monday

Mark 11: 12-19

Tuesday (A very busy day!)

Mark 11:20-25 (This picks up from Monday and completes the story. The fig
tree is supposed to be like the Temple).
Mark 11:27-33
Mark 12:1-12
Mark 12:13-17
Mark 12:18-27
Mark 12:28-34
Mark 12:35-44
Mark 13:1-4
Mark 13:5-37

Wednesday

Mark 14:1-11

Thursday

Mark 14:12-16
Mark 14:17-25
Mark 14:26-52
Mark 14:53-65

Friday

Mark 15:1-21
Mark 15:22-32
Mark 15:33
Mark 15:34-41
Mark 15:42-47

If you use the Message it will take a long time to try to work out where the story starts and stops, but it may be worth the effort.

Did the earthquake wake you up? Most of my friends slept through it and I don’t know why. I was in a hotel room in Manchester at the time and I was having a nightmare at the time. The bed was walking, the walls threatened to fall on me and for ten seconds the wardrobe was inhabited by a very large, and hairy monster intent on escape. Everything was shaking and I was very scared, unable to control a mobile room. At 00.56hrs my wife phoned me asking whether I had felt the tremors, thinking they were the rumblings of a bomb. Very casually I said, ‘It’s not a bomb, it’s just an earthquake. Go back to sleep’.

This shaking thing got me thinking. I came across this quote in a book:
People cry out to God when the ground under their feet is shaking – only to find it is God who is shaking it.

My feeling is that God often does the shaking (and no, I’m not suggesting that God caused the earthquake). He jumps up and down and makes the ground beneath our feet rumble and gives us a fright. For a few seconds we take notice and when our fright is over – albeit temporarily, we casually say, ‘it’s just an earthquake. I’ll go back to sleep’. Well, no damage was done this time and I am grateful for that but I think when God does send us signs asking us to look to Him we would be foolish to go back to sleep.

I walked past a church the other day and a sign outside read, ‘Come and worship God here’. It struck me what an odd thing it would be for many people to think about ‘worshipping’ and even stranger to worship God.

As odd as it may seem, college doesn’t help. For three days per week I am immersed in a world of theology studying things like Docetism, Ebionitism and soteriology. I study great men of history such as Polycarp and Schleiermacher and yet I have this problem. I feel a long way from God. A part of the problem is that theology students study things pertaining to God, and very rarely God himself. God takes a back seat.

Recently at one of our church evenings, we were talking about the problem of truth and how elusive it seems. Someone said this: ‘it’s quite simple really. All you need do is love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love the people you meet as you would want to be loved yourself’. There was a stunned silence. Tumbleweed blew across the living room and we carried on talking as if nothing had been said. This simple ‘truth’ was so simple that God himself must have invented it. I think what she said was stunningly accurate. ‘And what’s the problem?’ I hear you say. The problem is that it means thinking about someone other than ourselves. It means putting God first and others second. We come last. That’s why a sign outside a church inviting us to worship someone else no longer makes any sense and might just as well be written in Sanskrit. That’s why studying about God is no substitute for a relationship with him. Putting God first makes more sense than a world full of Mensa graduates. Shame we can’t see it.

How is the New Year’s resolution going? I am told that it is best to have just one thing to concentrate on and really go for it rather than several smaller things which are easy to overlook and ignore. As my waistline is quite dominant, it is becoming difficult to overlook it, so I only have one resolution (if I do lose some weight, I’ll let you know).

The trouble with New Year’s resolutions is that it’s not always easy to draw a line in the sand and start again. Very often things from the previous year loom large and overshadow any new start we might want to make. Events seem to stick to us like an unwanted sweet wrapper and flap around in a mocking manner.

Some friends of mine have problems from 2007, which won’t leave them alone. It’s like a black hole that threatens to gobble them up and drag them back. They have no control over what is going to happen – that depends on many other people – and having no control adds more stress to those in the eye of the storm.

Just recently I’ve been reminded of the disciples who were caught in a storm whilst crossing the Sea of Galilee. They had no control either. Their strategy was to hang on in there and wait. Dark clouds hung all around them and a swirling black sea ready to swallow them at any moment. My reading of the Gospels is that it seemed that Jesus left them in the storm for a while and that it was up to them to reach out to the Son of God for help. It’s as if he was the last resort, not the first. Yet he was the Lord over the sea – a place where evil was believed to lurk and the abyss sharpened its teeth waiting to consume hapless sailors. If anyone was going to get them out of trouble it was Jesus.

If Jesus can calm the physical waves of a raging sea, then he can illuminate the darkness of whatever is lurking in 2007 and calm that storm too. This may be difficult to convince anybody of and many may be sceptical. All I can suggest is that like the sailors, what other course of action is there? Where else can we go for help? When all else fails and there is nothing else left to do, most people cry out to God. Why not give God a try, after all, there is nothing to lose and everything to gain.

The problem with Christmas (if indeed there is any such problem) is that it is so closely linked with Easter, that it’s hard to talk about one without the other. The problem as I see it is the fact that God sends his son to die for us. This actually means that God himself dies for us on a cross. It’s hard to make sense of it. But then I am coming to understand that it doesn’t have to make too much sense. After all, how are we to understand God who comes to earth as a baby and lands in a primitive culture with absolutely nothing and yet speaks to the world about the riches of heaven?

God comes in a whisper and lands in a cow’s feeding trough yet shouts so loudly that his voice is heard more than 2000 years later. And what does he shout? I suggest he shouts so much that it takes us a whole life-time to try to comprehend this small act and even then we are left thinking that many more life-times wouldn’t be enough to understand this baby God.

At this time of year I am struck by the fact that Christmas is God’s whisper. I think I can hear him say, ‘my weakness is my strength’ and I immediately think of the shepherds coming to marvel at God. Why the shepherds? Because they have nothing to offer this king. No gold, no frankincense and no myrrh. They are the outcasts who can’t get to the temple to get rid of their sin and who are permanently alienated. All they can offer him is who they are and their choice to be at his side. That is something that no one but God himself will put any value on. The older I get, the more I realise that all I want is to have God put a value on me. God has a habit of valuing what others don’t. I still can’t make sense of my God, but I do know that it’s good to be a shepherd at Christmas.

Sorry I missed October, but it was difficult getting to the Internet. When I could, I ran out of inspiration; when I was inspired the Internet was nowhere to be seen. Still, good thing then that I did two in September. October wasn’t without its problems. I want to go back in time to one Friday night/Saturday morning and wait for the miscreant who scratched his name in the boot of my lovely car. Please don’t hear what I’m not saying (thank you Martyn for allowing me to use your little phrase – cheque’s in the post). I don’t want to punish him, just to ask him why and perhaps give him a second chance not to do it. No hope of going back in time though, I’ve just got to find £250 for a new paint job!

My sabbatical in October did make me realise just how much time I spend on the computer, especially on Facebook. I have suddenly got loads of ‘friends’, some I haven’t seen for years but all of a sudden it’s like we have been best buddies since the cradle, visiting each other’s houses and going out for meals etc etc. In fact something very spooky happened in October. A friend of mine (not a virtual one) contacted me on Facebook and we had an electronic chat. When she contacted me, her photograph came up. It was the one that always comes up so no surprises there then. But the next day she contacted me again and she had changed her photograph. OK, no great epiphany, but when I looked back over the other messages she had sent me, all her photos had changed. It was as if a big hand had gone back in time and changed the past. It was like the Isabel whose face I was looking at now had always looked that way…and she hadn’t.
That got me thinking. Is that what God is like? Not bent on retribution but on forgiveness, waiting for me to say sorry and change my ways? If so then the heavenly picture you see of me – forgiven and accepted – has always been that way and my foul deeds (of which there are many) are as if they never happened. Hmm, quite a relief and quite a gift. It’s good to know that God doesn’t lurk in the present waiting for me to make mistakes only to shout at me, but dwells throughout time and space ready to put things right for me.
Thanks be to God! (If you’re an Anglican)
Amen! (If you’re a Baptist)
Thank Gawd for that (If you’re my mum).