Sermons

Catching up on sermon blogging again. One sermon for The Baptism of Jesus and one non-lectionary sermon on the subject of persistent prayer.

The Baptism of Jesus

Persistent Prayer

Suggest-a-hymn / song

Just a bit of a fun experiment since I've got until Monday to come up with something!

I'm leading a short lunch-time prayer service next week at one of the Anglican Churches in our 'Prayers for Christian Unity week'. The theme of the day will be 'pray always'.

I usually try to include two songs or hymns since singing is such a part of Methodist tradition, but they will be sung without any instrumental accompaniment. Past experience suggests that once I've plucked up my courage to start the song (I'm a servicable, but not fantastic, choral singer) that there are enough good singers to carry the tune.

But I need songs that are easy to sing unaccompanied and which I can be sure everyone from all Christian denominations will know.

I've chosen 'Abba Father' for the first song. Anyone out there have any other suggestions? Well known, easy to sing, possibly a vague reference to prayer.

Answers on a postcard - er, blog reply - please!

The United States and the United Kingdom - two nations divided by different hymn tunes! :-)

Who Said Communication is Easy?

After the UK Methodists Bloggers Meeting, I arrived home to find another wonderful cartoon by Dave Walker showing the heady and united world of Anglican blogging:

So, I'm thinking to myself: 'Wonderful Husband draws great cartoons. Maybe he can do a cartoon for the Methodist Bloggers!'

And then the following conversation ensued (or I thought it did anyway):

PBG: Could you draw a cartoon depicting Methodist Bloggers?

WH: Sure, what would it look like?

PBG: Here's a funny cartoon Dave Walker did, but Methodists don't wear long robes.

WH: Well, how would we identify Methodist bloggers then?

PBG: I think maybe they might have a hymn book in one hand and a computer in another.

WH: OK, I'll work on it.

Here we have the outcome:


PBG: What's this, then?

WH: You said you wanted hymn books connected by wires.

Who Said Communication is Easy?

In Praise of the Covenant Service

Wow! Who would have thunk it? A really positive article in The Guardian entitled In Praise of…….the covenant service. That starts the week off right for me. :-)

From the article (bolding is mine):

The heart of the occasion is a passage that includes the words: "Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will; put me to doing, put me to suffering; let me be employed for you, or laid aside for you, exalted for you, or brought low for you." It should not be misinterpreted as a sort of fatalism, for many Methodists have held eminent positions, espoused radical politics, and gone to prison for opposing injustice and war. Its nobility is the recognition of the accretion of great good through small deeds.

For the Record

Methodist Preacher has stated that he's ’tried hard to reason with me but to no avail’.

As he's deleted my posts, this could certainly leave the impression that I've been truly foul.

Therefore, this post is simply to note that I have the text of the conversation that he's deleted and that I will be saving it in the event of being charged with unbecoming conduct or language.

Chickens

Well, at least something made me laugh today: Why did the Chicken Cross the Road?. I think my favourites are:

GEORGE W. BUSH : We don't really care why the chicken crossed the road. We just want to know if the chicken is on our side of the road, or not. The chicken is either against us, or for us. There is no middle ground here.

and

DR SEUSS : Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross it with a toad? Yes, the chicken crossed the road, but why it crossed I've not been told.

I shall not make the obvious sarcastic addition.

Crabbit Old Woman

A few days ago I came across a blog post (I think it was a blog post; I can't actually remember) about the poem entitled Crabbit Old Woman which was apparently read on 'Women's Hour' not too long ago.

This poem also resonates with me and it expresses my feelings about why the church can't simply ignore older people or consider them to be of finite worth. I hope that as Christians we will always try to find the 'me' in everyone (see last line of the poem).

What do you see, what do you see?

Are you thinking, when you look at me- A

crabbit old woman, not very wise,

Uncertain of habit, with far-away eyes,

Who dribbles her food and makes no reply

When you say in a loud voice, I do wish you'd try.

Who seems not to notice the things that you do

And forever is loosing a stocking or shoe.

Who, unresisting or not; lets you do as you will

With bathing and feeding the long day is fill.

Is that what you're thinking, Is that what you see?

Then open your eyes, nurse, you're looking at me.

I'll tell you who I am as I sit here so still!

As I rise at your bidding, as I eat at your will.

I'm a small child of 10 with a father and mother,

Brothers and sisters, who loved one another-

A young girl of 16 with wings on her feet,

Dreaming that soon now a lover she'll meet,

A bride soon at 20- my heart gives a leap,

Remembering the vows that I promised to keep.

At 25 now I have young of my own

Who need me to build a secure happy home;

A woman of 30, my young now grow fast,

Bound to each other with ties that should last;

At 40, my young sons have grown and are gone,

But my man's beside me to see I don't mourn;

At 50 once more babies play around my knee,

Again we know children, my loved one and me.

Dark days are upon me, my husband is dead,

I look at the future, I shudder with dread,

For my young are all rearing young of their own.

And I think of the years and the love that I've known;

I'm an old woman now and nature is cruel-

Tis her jest to make old age look like a fool.

The body is crumbled, grace and vigor depart,

There is now a stone where I once had a heart,

But inside this old carcass, a young girl still dwells,

And now and again my battered heart swells,

I remember the joy, I remember the pain,

And I'm loving and living life over again.

I think of the years all too few- gone too fast.

And accept the stark fact that nothing can last-

So open your eyes, nurse, open and see,

Not a crabbit old woman, look closer- See Me.

Putting One's Hope in the The Word Made Flesh

Below is an excerpt from a Letter to the Editor from this week's edition of The Church Times entitled 'Putting One's Hope in The Word Made Flesh' written by Jeremy Craddock of Huntingdon.

I'm posting this excerpt mainly because it resonated with me, but I think that there are also connections to two entirely separate conversations I've been having in the blogosphere about: 1) The Fall; 2) The place of 'death and dying' in Christian theology. To me, there seem to be shades of WH Vanstone's theology in this letter.

'Mr. H' wrote a letter the previous week articulating the age-old objection to faith that 'bad things happen every day'.

Mr. H says that, in addition to all our good qualities, God also made cruelty, cancer, and tsunamis. But suppose that God did not design the world directly and in detail. If he did, then there would be no freedom of choice, and he would be some kind of monster. Suppose instead that he made the world make itself. If that were so, then he would be suffering as creatures preyed on one another, and species died out to make room for others.

Now suppose that God's act as creator is really that he sustains the world that makes itself, moment by moment, at a cost to himself. That is, he stands by creatures who suffer from cruelty, cancer, and tsunamis. Indeed, he suffers with them; but we might want - accepting that human words fail to describe the unknowable God - to say that he suffers with his creation because he observes its suffering at first hand.

But the idea of incarnation goes a stage further. Of course Jesus was fully human. Be the incarnation suggests that, in Jesus, God knew by experience, not just observation, what it was to be rejected, and hunted down; and by experience, to know the ultimate horror of being God-forsaken. The reason I can't cope with a love such as that is not just that I want to think of Jesus as no more than a godly man; it is that I can't bear it.

Christian Ministers and Real Life Experience

As someone who is still a new minister, I'm musing today on the concept of the vocation of Christian ministry and 'real life experience'. Somewhere else, there was some comment on whether or not ministers have 'real life experience' and whether or not this was a good or necessary thing.

Up until becoming a minister, my life experience was probably what I'd call 'age appropriate'. I was doing the same things as many people in their late 40s were doing. We married late and didn't have children, so I wasn't seeing them off to university, but we were both working at jobs where we had some years of experience and we were trying to pay off our mortgage, etc., etc.

Now that I'm a minister, I've had a different set of experiences. I've sat with a dead body. I've visited someone a day before their death. I regularly visit nursing homes where it's difficult to communicate with people because of the illnesses they have (either physical or mental incapacity). People show me their surgery scars, their leg-ulcers and tell me about their incontinence. Many people share the hurts of their lives, their worries, their disappointments, their anger and their rage. Somehow, these 'negative' feelings tend to outweigh the 'positive' ones in quantity, but I'd like to think that it's because people feel safe telling me this sort of thing; still, it's not always easy to listen to large quantities of peoples' problems.

My short experience as a minister has made me even more aware of the fagility of human life and the love and grace of God.

I'm genuinely at a loss to believe that what I've experienced so far as a minister is not 'Real Life'. In fact, I suspect it's more 'Real Life' than my previous experience.

Common Worship 'Times and Seasons'

For those who have not seen it, there are free, downloadable files available giving texts from Common Worship Times and Seasons which I have found useful, even as a non-Anglican.

The website doesn't yet contain all the text of Times and Seasons but it seems to have more than the last time I looked and is now running through to Pentecost in the Church calendar.

The same URL also offers downloads from Common Worship itself (again, not absolutely everything), Common Worship Daily Prayer and New Patterns for Worship.

Kenya: Urgent Prayer Call

Olive Morgan has posted an Urgent Prayer Call for Kenya.

Continue to pray for the entire nation.

Fear of the Other

I'm linking to two posts at other blogs on the general subject of 'fear of the other'.

There is something that is very easy and very wrong about scapegoatting those who are different from us. Richard's post about the deported Ghanaian woman who is terminally ill is making me sick to my stomach at the moment. Writing to our MPs seems an excellent suggestion.

Richard Hall's post on: Deporting the Dying

Doorman-Priest's post on: A Little Matter of Islamophobia

Thoughts on Extempore (Extemporaneous) Worship

I hope fellow Methoblogger, Richard Hall, of Connexions won't be embarrassed if I say that he presided at a very fine extempore (that's 'extemporaneous' if you're American) service of communion at the Methodist Bloggers' Meet.

Richard commented at the time that he used to like written liturgy but that he's grown into an appreciation of Methodism's tradition of extempore praying.

I joked during the 24 hours that all of us were together at the bloggers' meet about how I miss my Lutheran liturgical background. This experience of liturgy was fuelled by participating in post Vatican II Roman Catholic liturgy where I saw the fixed form and shape of the written liturgy expressed in a very 'local' way that was meaningful to the congregation. I guess I learned then that written liturgy can be done 'freely' and 'meaningfuly' and that added a whole new dimension to something that I already loved.

Although I have oodles less experience in Methodism and as a minister than Richard, I too am beginning to appreciate the extempore tradition. And, in my opinion, anyone who had participated in the 'bloggers' communion' on Saturday could not have failed to apprecaiate the riches of this tradition.

What's my sometimes gripe with the extempore tradition? I've often seen it done badly. Badly in a way that suggests that someone in back in 1850 didn't quite understand the shape of worship and they started some bad practice and this bad practice has been passed down for four or five generations. Prayers that didn't know whether they were confessions or intercessions or thanksgivings which sometimes resulted in lots of confession and prayers of intercession for ill people in the congregation and not much else. Prayers that don't reflect the entirety of salvation history but which are very locally focussed (totally inappropriate for a 'great prayer of thanksgiving' before communion, for example).

What we had yesterday wasn't anything like that and I've seen other good examples of extempore worship in my time as well as the bad examples. Extempore worship can be wonderful when the worship leader(s) understand the shape and function of different aspects of the liturgy. I'll get to Richard's stage with a lot more practice; there are a few elements of the liturgy I could do extempore now - probably most of the prayers outside of the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving - but I reckon that extempore liturgy takes a lot of experience as well as knowledge. I'm definitely not confident enough to do an extempore sermon yet! (I heard a story the other day of a very experienced minister who forgot the entire service at home and had to do the whole thing extempore. Yikes!)

Catching Up on Sermon Blog

I've been catching up on posting my sermons. Links to the last three are given below:

Advent 4: When We Cannot Save Ourselves

Covenant Prayer Sunday: Covenant. New School

Epiphany: Epiphany Story

UK Methodist Bloggers' Meeting

I arrived home from the UK Methodist Bloggers’ Meeting to find that I had no internet connection (or should that be 'connexion'?). Ironic, innint?

We covered a number of topics but, for me, the most important thing about the meeting was actually meeting a number of people face-to-face. I already knew Dave of of ‘42’ fame from theology college, but I'd never met any of the other bloggers. I think meeting people face-to-face can be really important. It's how we remember that we are dealing with real people and not just with 'them out there'.

During the course of the meeting, we talked about whether we were 'Methodist bloggers' or 'bloggers who happen to be Methodist.' I think I prefer the latter category. There are a number of thoughts I have on this:

1) Whilst I certainly do not want to bring the Methodist Church into disrepute, I also do not want to blog 'officially' for the Methodist Church (not that I could do anyway). My disclaimer makes that clear.

2) Whilst I see blogging as a recreational activity, I am also aware that it's a public thing. Someone I know refers to this as 'my journal'; it's not my journal as there are things I'd not write here because of it being public space.

Anyway, I think that 'a good time was had by all'.

Differing Gifts

Thinking about The Holy Spirit, I loved the following idea from this post over at Ship of Fools:

There is 'hot' ecstasy and there is 'cool' ecstasy. Often those who are into 'cool' despise what they see as the hysterical, over-emotional expressions of the 'hot' and those who are into 'hot' despise what they see as the insipidness and tepidness of the 'cool'. It's sad. Why should we need to judge other people in these ways?

There is universal truth about the Christian life in that statement. How many times have I heard one side or the other denigrating the practice that wasn't theirs? For me, one of the good things about Methodism is that by and large the 'hot' and the 'cool' people do manage to see Christ in each other and to hold each other as brothers and sisters. Each of us has our own gifts; this is biblical truth.

The Methodist Church - Suppressing the Holy Spirit???

Over at The Methodist Preacher, the author asks the question on this post:

I wonder if "spirituality" is being promoted as a counterpoint to the work of the Pentecostal groups in drawing our attention to this person of the Trinity, often ignored or even suppressed by the mainstream denominations?

The blog site suggests that the Methodist Church section on spirituality contains

Lots of semi-pagan or "new age" ideas about prayer, but absolutely nothing about the person, character and activity of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity.

I'm posting the question here because I think that someone in a position to answer this question might see it: Is the Methodist Church intending to promote semi-pagan Spirituality? Is the Methodist Church ignoring or suppressing the Holy Spirit?

(For the record, I don't personally believe that Methodism is doing these things.)

Guilt and Repentance

This topic has been running around in my head for awhile since there was a discussion about 'guilt' - several weeks gone now - on a Christian discussion group. I want to tie it in with some concepts from a sermon that I did for the Second Sunday in Advent on the topic of 'repentance'. I don't actually imagine that most people read my sermons so I wanted to briefly address the concepts of guilt and repentance in a shorter post here.

As might have been predicted on the discussion group, some people expressed the idea that 'what the world needs now is more people feeling guilty; too many people don't feel guilty about anything any more.' Now, that may or may not be true, but I think it's important to emphasise that the sole function of 'guilt' is to get us to move on quickly to doing what is right.

Guilt should function to say: 'What you did is wrong' or 'You should be doing X or Y.' That's it. Basta. End of story. Move along, no more to see here.

For many people the worst possible thing that can happen with guilt is that they remain in guilt and wallow in guilt. And I'm afraid that there are many people in this world who will encourage that wallowing. As if feeling guilty were A Good Thing for it's own sake. It's not.

My evangelical friends would now tell you - and they would be right - that Christ died to take away the guilt of our sins. What that means in the everyday world is that, according to God, being wrong can be forgiven and being wrong will be forgiven.

But I firmly believe that the bible - both Old and New Testament - makes it perfectly clear that God's main concern is that we move on from our guilt and repentance to do what is right.

In my sermon for the Second Sunday of Advent, I used a quotation from the American Christian author and theologian, Frederick Buechner(1):

To repent is to come to your senses. It is not so much something you do as something that happens. True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying, 'I'm sorry,' than to the future and saying 'Wow'.

As a Church and as people, we'll do a lot better to find God's 'wow' for justice, for inclusion, for peace and for compassion than we will sitting around wallowing in guilt. Seeking God's 'Wow' is also a much better alternative to the blame-game.

May 2008 be a year of 'Wow' for all of us.

----
(1) Buechner, Frederick, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC; HarperOne, 1993, New York p. 79.

Methodism: Dissing is Futile, Vision is Everything

I've been an amateur practitioner of Ignatian Spirituality since my undergraduate years at a Jesuit University in the 1970s. I don't claim to be an expert, by any means, although I've made some study of Ignatian Spirituality for my own devotional purposes.

The thing that I really like about Ignatian spirituality is that it actually provides fairly simple, common-sense guidelines for spiritual discernment. How do I find God in ordinary situations? How do I know that it's God talking and not The Enemy?

The principle is simple although the practice of the principle most certainly is not. Using Protestant Evangelical language: a committed, saved Christian who is genuinely trying to seek the will of God will find energy and motivation when he seeks to do the will of God. The Enemy will not normally tempt a committed Christian by trying to get him to perform blatently sinful acts. The Enemy will tempt a committed Christian by presenting him with apparently 'Godly' options. Jesus' temptation in the desert fits this model well.

One way that I suspect that The Methodist Church in Great Britian may be falling into the temptation of The Enemy (define her / him as you will; I believe) is our constant talking ourselves down. As an organisation, we have very effectively communicated the message to both our members and to the general public that we are dying, that we are useless, that we are ineffective and that we have nothing to offer. In other words, we have been very, very, VERY effective in 'dissing' ourselves. Everyone is now 'on message' with this, including the secular media.

I believe, in fact, that Methodism has a great deal to offer the world. By history and tradition our rendition of the Gospel is a very powerful 'vision statement': The Kingdom of God. A Kingdom that is: 1) now and 2) not yet. 1) A 'now' kingdom that we are called to work for in our discipleship in this life; 2) A future, eschatological, 'supernaturally'-initiated Kingdom that will come when God decides and by his mighty hand mediated by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This is a vision that I can get excited about; I don't understand why we are not holding this vision before the Church at every opportunity.

The human mind does not work well in negatives. We will not inspire anyone - members or others - by constantly talking ourselves down. If we keep saying that we are useless, then this will become a self-fulfilling prophecy just like the little boy whose parents tell him he will never amount to anything. Hold before the Methodist people an image of a dying, gospel-less denomination and we will become that dead thing.

I genuinely believe that by and large Methodists and Methodism know what the Gospel is. My challenge to us is to hold this vision of the The Kingdom of God constantly before each other and before ourselves. Whenever we are tempted to say 'We are useless because our numbers are declining', I hope we can hold Christ and the vision of the Gospel before each other to encourage one another. I hope we can stop repeating our narratives of discouragement.

This is not a call to complacency. It is, in fact, a call to action and a call to stop using our energy to discourage ourselves and one another but rather to encourage each other and to work for the Kingdom. Who knows what God's purposes are? This may be a time when we are being called to patience and perserverence so that God may do things we cannot even imagine in the future.

Merry Christmas

I may do a 'summing up the year' thing after Christmas, but right now things are a bit hectic.

Wishing you and yours a Merry Christmas.