What is the measure of a friend?

Finally I have bowed to the increasing pressure of friends and circumstance and joined Facebook.

'

Having done so I am faced with the question of friendship ... people are being recommended to me as friends ... worse still, I am being recommended to others. It seems impolite to refuse someone who wants to be a friend ... but do I want to be friends with everyone on the planet who has a tangential connection to two other people I once knew? Is this friendship? Are these people for whom I would lay down my life ... would they reciprocate?

'

I want to value the friends I have (on Facebook and in real life) but like love, I wonder do we debase the meaning of friendship by using it so lightly.

I am reminded of Emily Dickinson

"My friends are my estate.
Forgive me then the avarice to hoard them.
They tell me those who were poor early have different views of gold.
I don't know how that is.
God is not so wary as we,
else He would give us no friends,
lest we forget Him."



Mmmm.

Remember Remember

I think Remembrance Sunday should always be a time for celebrating Communion For while this is a day when we should remember the sacrifices made in the past and things that make our present freedoms possible, it is also when we should remember the Day that is coming when the kin-dom of Shalom shall soak up every tear.

Tomorrow is surely a day when we remember not just the conflicts of the past but recall the peace of the future that is ours. It might even be a day when we dare to start acting in the knowledge that such peace is among us already. Christ has died, Christ is risen and Christ will come again.

Vanity Vanity

A Welsh guy on the run from police has sent a picture of himself to the South Wales Evening Post because apparently he disliked the mugshot they had printed of him as part of a public appeal to track him down.

Matthew Maynard is the man of the moment, helping the Police with their enquires but from a distance! The cheeky bit is the fact that he sent the newspaper a replacement photo of himself standing in front of a police van.

He might live to regret this I fear

and in case you're wondering the one on the right is his preferred photo.

What price vanity eh?

I don't beleive it ... Carol Singers!

Yes folks it happened here last night ... I came home from a church meeting at about 10:30 and as my wife had an early flight this morning I decided to get ready for a relatively early night ... whereupon at 10:47 pm the door bell rang, the knocker was knocked, and fearing some pastoral emergency I rushed down stairs to be greeted by two young women serenading me with Silent Night. I told them that it was not a silent night and that their approximation at carol singing was exactly the reason why but if they would remove themselves from my doorstep I would indeed retire for said nocturnal season free of external cacophony. (Well it was words to that effect).

But really carol singing, at that time of night and Guy Fawkes hardly turned to a crisp.
Its enough to make you go 'bah humbug'.

On which tangential note

my copy of the Atheist's Guide to Christmas has just arrived.

Always good to know what other folks are thinking

Youth of today ... church of today

So I had just finished my preach on Haggai on Sunday evening (John Bell says that prophet sounds very Scottish ... think about it) focusing on getting our worship of God at the core of our lives and then I moved to the communion table ... to celebrate Eucharist ... just began the liturgy whereupon about 15 young people, (11-14?) burst into church seemingly full of the 'joys' of Hallow e'en. What to do now?

There is no pastor's remote control for such events (and I am glad of that) but what to do?

It had been a busy morning, a wet night and Cardiff City were playing at home with a five o'clock kick off, so attendance was a little low on Sunday evening ... the late comers effectively doubled our numbers. Imagine if it could be sustained I thought: 100% growth to nonchurched teenagers ... a new youth centre established ... we would be a feature in Transform Magazine!

Except that's not how it panned out. I was impressed with our welcome stewards ... they didn't panic ... they were indeed welcoming ... they invited the young people to come in (with or without bikes) ... many of them did ... and in fairness the boys were fairly respectful of what was going on (I was adding my welcome from the table, explaining what was happening and hastily editing the usual religious speak out of the liturgy). I took a certain 'theological risk' by letting them know that it was not my table or the church's table, I had no right to say who could come or not (some in church may not agree) it was the table of Jesus so if they wanted to participate they could. But it was the girls who were for messing about ... by which I don't mean surpressed giggles adn embarrassed shuffling of feet, it was deliberate disruption of the remainder of the service ... shouting ... mickey taking ... running around the balcony.

Now don't get me wrong ... there was no malicious damage ... no threatening behaviour ... just a lot of high spirits and disruptive messing about. What to do? We want to be welcoming and inclusive ... we want to be a missionary people who reach young people just like these for Christ ... you could pray for years before 15 young people would darken the door of a church today. I am not so dedicated a liturgist to think that the Communion must be preserved at all costs ... indeed in many ways it is the most effective symbolism we have for mission and it may have been that for some a connection there was made. I am also conscious that they may have been the Spirit's gift to us ... breaking our comfortable familiarity as surely as bread was lying broken on the table ... they may have been the gift we failed to unwrap or accept ... but in such a scenario ... when disruption is seemingly the only intent what is the right response?

The temptation of course is to focus on the ones causing disruption ... asking for some respect / (ie compliance with our norms), but surely the danger there is that we miss the one or two quieter people who were perhaps genuinely intrigued by what was going on. What to do? As they said in the 90s what would Jesus do?

What would you have done?

Just say No???

Welcome to November: although the greeting sounds a little strange to me. November doesn’t seem like a welcoming time of year. The ruby reds and burnished golds of early autumn have mostly gone, taking with them beauty of October’s ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness.’ But the seasons of Advent and Christmas still seem a little far away. What lies between them is this new but unpromising month of November.

I think the poet Thomas Hood summed it up well in verse I remember from my childhood.

No sun - no moon!

No morn - no noon!

No dawn - no dusk -

No proper time of day

No sky - no earthly view -

No distance looking blue -

No warmth, no cheerfulness,
no healthful ease,

No comfortable feel in any member

No shade, no shine,

no butterflies, no bees,

No fruits, no flowers,

no leaves, no birds,

November!

It’s not the whole of the poem, just the first and last stanzas, (I love the version recorded by the Art of Noise) but the verses in between offers up a similarly desolate view of the next 30 days.

.

But Christians need not worry about the gloom of the coming month. With God there is always the possibility of what George MacLeod once called the ‘Glory the Grey.’ There are wonders from God to be found, not only in the rage of thunderstorms or the splendour of sunsets, but in the most ordinary of moments, the most nondescript of days, glories in the greyest of times. I can’t help but wonder if it was in November that St Augustine once wrote:
.
How many common things are trodden under foot

which if examined carefully,

might awaken our astonishment.
.
So mind how you go this month,
For who can tell what glories might slip past us,
what moments of astonishment lie left asleep beneath us
if all we know of November is ‘no!’

Great fun with a woman... who is not my wife!

Yesterday's preach in the morning was slightly different: We were using the Tearfund material on Water, and the text was John 4, the woman at the well. I considered doing a narrative sermon based on the woman but as I reflected on this I felt it was not right for me (not least cos I'm a bloke) so I decided to tell the story from the perspective of the woman's 6th 'husband.'

Having taken the precaution of warning my own good wife as to what was coming up I proceeded to tell a story of how I had got rid of my first wife and taken up with Betty, having met her myself one hot afternoon down by the well, from where she offered me a drink but we settled on so much more. So imagine how I felt when she told me she'd met another bloke at the same well, the sort of mood i was in when I went off to meet this man who told her all she'd ever done. Anyway we went on from there reviewing her and his encounters with Jesus, linking his dreams of Jesus Kingdom of Shalom with the unfinished business of social justice today.

We ended with the thorny question of personal reconciliation too: as having introduced his sons to Jesus when he stayed in the village, the boys then want to go and bring the Christ to their mother, my ex wife ... and they want to bring Betty along.
What would Jesus do!

You can't preach this kind of stuff every week, it would loose the impact but as a piece of Lectio for me it was personally very revealing and I hope helpful for the congregation. Certainly I got more feedback than usual.

DISCIPLINE OR DISAPPOINTMENT

I did enjoy reading Christian George's book God.ol.ogy, although I must admit it was often more because of the authors he quotes than what he writes himself.

I am not familiar with James Rohn, (I think he is some kind of motivational business guru in America) but I did like this comment quoted by George:

We must all suffer one of two things:

the pain of discipline

or the pain of regret or disappointment

SOAP OPERA GOSPEL

I was doing a year nine assembly in a local High School last week. When I had finished my talky bIt, much to the surprise of staff and me alike there were no announcements, reprimands or congratulations to impart, which left us with 4 minutes to fill before the bell. The RE teacher filled the gap by announcing that he and I were going to do a quick soap opera serialisation of the bible, or at least part of it. (he turned to me and whispered but 'we'll have to end on a cliff hanger moment and then next term we'll carry on.'

.

A very hurried discussion led to him kicking off the background biography on David, shepherd boy, giant killer, poet, musician and King, all round good egg for God. Then one day something happened that would change his life forever ... and I'll hand you over to Rev Gardiner.

.

There were two minutes left on the clock but I managed to spin out the roof top voyeurism until the critical moment where David did the necessary calculations, (three streets over, second house on the left) and dispatched a servant to get her. So the class time bell rang just as Bathsheba announced 'but I can't, I won't, I'm married.. get your hands off me...'

.

Sorry year nine but you'll have to wait until after half term!

.

The students didn't want to leave, (ok I know the alternative was double maths) but it did make me think again about the power of narrative and how I tell our message week by week.

Glory, Glory

Jim at Living Wittily has reduced his blog output to a sentence a day, I enjoy reading his longer posts but already the 'one liners' are shaping up to be great provocations to thought. Coincidentally, yesterday in the pulpit a singular line returned to me unexpectedly from my reading the evening before. I think I even abandoned the script to use the phrase twice. It seemed an appropriate turn of phrase given the lectionary reading in Mark, where James and John ask Jesus for the best of seats in glory.

It comes from Christian George in his book God.ol.ogy.

He says:

Glory shines,

but it also bleeds.