Christians Who Know Best

Those of us who are perhaps more liberal than others theologically find that we become a source of reassurance to other Christians who have been exposed to a particular behaviour on the part of other Christians. I call myself liberal but only insofar as I am not harshly dogmatic. I know my Scripture and take a perspective in my faith that regards that the works and desires of the Lord are constantly unfolding. 

There are those, however, who take a different stand-point. I cannot say that they are wrong, and would never presume to think that they are - but I do wonder about how these levels of certainty are born when found in some of my bothers and sister in faith. 

I am fairly certain about a good many things, but by no means all things. My head and heart is but one place that God speaks and I am not the best listener. I try and I fail, and as a priest, I often worry. Yet, and it happens quite often, that people cross my path or the path of those in my 'care' who walk with absolute convicted certainty. They KNOW God's will, they KNOW God's plan and they KNOW what the right and wrong of that is. And because they KNOW it (as distinct from 'think' it, 'believe' it or maybe even 'suspect' it), will have a clear plan for the world. I am sure it is great if you have that certainty - but so many people do not.

I can't pretend to fully understand the mind of my beloved wife and adored children - what chance do I have with my other best-friend, the God of the Universe and Everything?

The problem with those who are certain of all this stuff is when they meet someone who is less certain and indeed less equipped to fight the advancing conviction that seeks to compel them on. Experience has taught me that people like that come away feeling like they are somehow deficient or indeed insufficient. The spiritual disposition of many Christians is one of willing uncertainty. They probably think that they don't 'do' it right, but proceed in faith and let God do what God does. Some give up and we lose them from our churches forever. 

I speak to many people whose opening gambit is of the order of "where am I going wrong?" or else "how do I do it right?", or else "how do I become a better xyz?". Then I have those who tell me that after a conversation with one who KNOWS, they feel like a failure and very much like giving up. I reach for Psalm 139 very frequently, or else speak of the road to Emmaus. I hope it helps. 

This post serves two purposes really. To the 'certain' Christians I would gently ask you to consider whether you have ever had doubts, how they felt, and whether certainty (often a blind form of that certainty) would have helped you. If you have had no doubts at all, then frankly you trump Jesus himself who did. Then to those Christians who feel that they fall short, or worse have been made to feel that they fall short by other Christians (wittingly or otherwise) - God is bigger than any Christian I have ever met - and I am fairly certain that God can cope with your foibles. To quote Michael Ramsay (badly), if you want to love God - great. If you can only manage to want to want to love God, then God delights in that too. 

Let's face it, if God can love me and put me in a collar, he has both a sense of humour, and the ability to deal with whatever you feel you have in shorter measure. Rejoice and do nothing else but know. 

1                 O Lord, you have searched me out and known me;  
you know my sitting down and my rising up;
     you discern my thoughts from afar. you know my sitting down and my rising up;     you discern my thoughts from afar. 

2                 You mark out my journeys and my resting place
and are acquainted with all my ways. 

3                 For there is not a word on my tongue,   but you, O Lord, know it altogether. 

4                 You encompass me behind and before
and lay your hand upon me 

5                 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,
so high that I cannot attain it. 

6                 Where can I go then from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence? 

7                 If I climb up to heaven, you are there;
if I make the grave my bed, you are there also. 

8                 If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 

9                 Even there your hand shall lead me,
your right hand hold me fast. 

10               If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will cover me
and the light around me turn to night,’ 

11               Even darkness is no darkness with you;     the night is as clear as the day;
darkness and light to you are both alike.  

12               For you yourself created my inmost parts;
you knit me together in my mother's womb. 

13               I thank you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made;   marvellous are your works, my soul knows well. 

14               My frame was not hidden from you,
when I was made in secret     and woven in the depths of the earth. 

15               Your eyes beheld my form, as yet unfinished;
already in your book were all my members written, 

16               As day by day they were fashioned   when as yet there was none of them. 

17               How deep are your counsels to me, O God!
How great is the sum of them! 

18               If I count them, they are more in number than the sand,
and at the end, I am still in your presence.   

19               O that you would slay the wicked, O God,   that the bloodthirsty might depart from me! 

20               They speak against you with wicked intent;
your enemies take up your name for evil. 

21               Do I not oppose those, O Lord, who oppose you?
Do I not abhor those who rise up against you? 

22               I hate them with a perfect hatred;
they have become my own enemies also.  

23               Search me out, O God, and know my heart;  try me and examine my thoughts. 

24               See if there is any way of wickedness in me  and lead me in the way everlasting.

The 'Hit and Miss' of Funeral Ministry

What I am about to describe is common but by no means universal, and before I do write, would like to comment that as a priest, I am considerably blessed by the reciprocal and open relationships I share with many of the Funeral Directors with whom I work.

The simple fact is that I have done lots of funerals services and value its ministry considerably (as do the families I have served). It has also given me a significant insight to the world of Funeral Directors and pressures that they face in meeting the acute needs of their clients. 

In an ideal world, a client would seek out a FD, and as part of the transaction of arranging the funeral, may disclose a need in faith. That is, more often than not, a denominational identity ("mum is/we are Catholics/CofE/Methodist, and so on). Once known, the understanding is that the FD would contact the nearest minister of that denomination within whose pastoral boundaries the deceased lived and commission their services to lead the funeral. That means that if mum was a Catholic she will be given her send-off by the RC priest in the area; by the local Vicar is she was Church of England (also the default if their faith is known but not the denomination); or by a anti-faith activist if mum claimed humanism among her character traits. 

I have sympathy for the FDs here. Before them sits a grieving family and they are keen to meet their needs for their sake and indeed for the sake of the business for whom they work. They may fail to reach the Catholic priest or the local Vicar in the moment that they sit with the family, so what do they do? Do they wait? Do they inconvenience the family by delaying a service date for their dear departed mum?

Very often, and for quite understandable reasons, they ring the friendly ash-cash collar-for-hire who is their pet minister and often has no "parish" so is easily and immediately contactable. The date is booked, their pet minister will look after the the family, job done. 

If your job is within the realm of "getting the job done" by the tick-list - then this would be fine. Then imagine that dear departed mum was the pillar of local parish church. In that situation, often the family will know and will be specific about the priest, not the denomination, and the job is arranged. More and more often though, people's faith habits become eclipsed and so they may know that mum was a CofE person but not a lot more. The FD tries to ring the Vicar who is, for sake of argument, running his parish and not able to take the call at that moment, and so it is that the ash-cash-collar is commissioned, the date booked and everyone is happy. Mum gets a 'vicar' of some sort, the family leave happy. 

Except that the ash-cash-collar is a, for sake of illustration, a Methodist or other. You may imagine that it makes no difference, but to a lifelong Anglican who had a chance throughout their life to change denomination, it does make a difference. A big difference. The service is done, it's nice, boxes are ticked. But there may be another factor. In many cases, the deceased wasn't a current congregant often through infirmity and may have moved into a care-home many years before the present Vicar arrived. The direct connection can be, and often is, fractured so that the death itself isn't known at parish level. 

What happens to the rightful pastoral needs of the family in this instance? Where is the follow-up? The amount of times I have visited the Crem to see a Church of England person being given their once-only send-off by, for example, a Methodist minister - you'd be astounded. And I doubt that the pastoral needs of the family are met because to ash-cash-collars, this is big business (a figure of 40k per annum was mentioned in a chat I had with someone yesterday). The funeral is not the end of the process - it is often the beginning. The follow-up is of the highest importance and is quite often therefore non-existent for a significant number of families who took the minister who answered their mobile first. As I have sympathies for the FD who have a job to do, so I have greater sympathy for a family whose mother simply got the wrong funeral, perhaps in a theological language that they would never have understood or subscribed to, in the presence of a man or woman who wouldn't have ministered to them in the first place. 

I can't pretend to know what the answer is, but it is a big issue certainly in the minds of many Anglicans (whose opinions I hear most) who have simply given up trying to minister to their dispersed flock because they barely get a look in through the friendly arrangements put in place before they themselves moved into the parish. 

I sat with all the Christians ministers in my area yesterday for lunch. I mentioned a name to them of a chap who does much in the town in this ministry - and not one of us knew his name or who he was, including the person who shared his denomination. She hasn't done many funerals at all - and now I think she knows why. I doubt, too, that those who claim her denomination in the area are immortal, either. 

You May Well Laugh, But ....

Courtesy of the always humorous somegreybloke

Time

Despite my tender years (did I mention that I am almost still quite young?), I can remember coming home from school on foot. I would return home and, if allowed, to watch a little television whose channels were changed by the pressing of an actual button (implying the physical removal off my dainty butt from the draylon sofa). As this happened, my dinner was likely being cooked on a hob or in an oven in a pan or similar. Afterwards, my siblings and I would war over the task of washing up the detritus of said meal in a bowl of sudsy water, tepid, full of food waste and other muck. If we were still alive, we may have been allowed to put the computer on - an activity that required the portable telly to be brought in, the keyboard plugged into cassette player, then to wait five full minutes while Jet Set Willy loaded. Those of my generation will remember how many hours of life were devoted to watching the flicking horizontal coloured lines on the telly as the game loaded. 

Life was good then, back in the late 80s! Then progress went and happened. To make life easier and altogether more convenient, several things happened. After school (well, college by then) I could flick through the four channels with a plastic Mars Bar and not leave the comfort of the fitted covers. As I pondered the adventures of the TV heroes of the day, dinner would warm up in a split second in the microwave. After I bolted it down my gullet, I would sling the pots in the dishwasher and get on with my evening. That transaction might take as little as ten minutes before I was back before the Goggle Box. So much time saved! 

And so it continued. Now, as a man in my very early forties, I can arrive home, sit down in my comfy chair, and with my gadget of choice order my dinner with a credit card, eat it from paper boxes which I can dump in another box. I can watch anything I like whenever I want, because I can capture and hoard television and instead of losing time writing to friends, can snatch moments of meaning from the telephone that is also my camera. Indeed, a character from a recent Bond film commented that he could do more damage to the world from his bed with a laptop in his pyjamas than ever before - and he is right. So many ways to save time, corners cuts, shortcuts taken. Instant, on-demand, in control, now, not later, buy-now-pay-before-you-die, 24/7! Frankly, if I extrapolate the time-saving attained simply delivered by a dishwasher in the 80s to the modern world, I must have another three or four hours a day to do what I want. 

But I don't. And neither do you. Indeed, we are so pressed for time, we need even more time-saving inventions to allow us to cope. We can carve out 8 minutes by not boiling our rice in a pan of water but in a blister pack in the microwave. We don't even have to go out to socialize - you can find a spouse on line if you know where to look. We don't even need to go to the next room to speak to our nearest and dearest - we can text them! This hard-won innovative freedom never arrived. In fact, we have so little time that we cannot cope. It has meant that we are so on-demand that we demand everything on our terms - now. Love is on demand, and pizza too. 

Little wonder faith is seemingly dying in our age. When my own punters get twitchy when they are forced to give God a minute over an hour, because of the myriad things that demand their sparse time, then I wonder if the world is melting in a mess of busy-ness whose end I cannot predict. I wonder too if this isn't a silent war that Christians should be fighting - to save people from task and duty! Indeed, it seems that so many of us in our religious ivory towers gnash our teeth wondering where everyone gets to half the time and why people don't or can't do more. Maybe faith is found in less. Maybe God is to be found in the gaps that we can create for people, not in the religious task that we seem content to impose at the expense of all else. 

As Jesus passed along the South Embankment, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew emailing a programme patch to a client (from their iPads)—for they were IT consultants. And Jesus said to them, ‘Follow me and I will make you Facetime for Disciples.’But they never left their tablets or followed him - they were busy and the client was waiting. As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were on their Boris Bikes. Immediately he called them, but they were plugged into their iPhones having a chat with one another so didn't hear; and they left their saviour Jesus by the boats with the homeless men, and went about their business oblivious.

A Very British Death

Let's face it, it is the one inevitable fact of living a life. No, it is one of two - we are born of woman and we will die. 

It all started (or appeared to start) in the summer of 1997. I don't think anyone will forget the reactions of those who were there. I speak of what Paul Sheppy refers to as The Diana Fest - the phenomenon of extreme displays of emotion at the funeral of a famous person. For me, that woman in the crowd's visceral shriek as the coffin of the Princess of Wales emerged from the cathedral will remain the symbol of that whole experience. 

For those who don't remember, the death of Diana Princess of Wales was a tragic and still unexplained event where the mother to our future King was killed in a Paris under-pass in the company of the man she was regarded to be in a relationship with following her divorce from the Prince of Wales. Conspiracy theories grew (largely, it is said, because of the single-minded efforts of Mohammed Al-Fayed - the father of the man in the limousine with Diana and the other person who died that day). What was more notable was the extreme outpouring of emotion. The flowers, the tributes, the public memorialising, the hagiographies, the weeping and the almost complete public involvement in the collective grief of a nation was as unusual as it was strange to many. She went from being a much-loved but slightly diminishing public figure to a latter-day saint, a sort of flawed human deity (if you know what I mean). In the very simplest of terms, the reaction was excessive and representative of other factors - then unknown - that went far beyond grief for a person from the news stories.

It didn't stop there. This apparent atypical response to death and those who have died moved to the Wiltshire town of Wootten Bassett where it just so happened that servicemen and women who had been killed in action were repatriated via the nearby military airbase. What started as a simple act of remembrance by other veterans became a national focus where a sort of funeral tourism started to emerge. The soldiers were unknown to the people in the crowd personally, but their deaths and the public nature of their delivery to the next world was a source of yet more significant public outbursts of emotion. Indeed, I have heard it said that that apparent carnival that it seemed to become became a source of some difficulty to the original veterans for whom that was their mark of comradeship in their shared dance with the ultimate sacrifice. 

This last ten days has been characterised not by the death of another public figure, but by the reaction to it. Those reactions ranged from a dewy-eyed hagiography to the other extreme where even the ordained were reduced to name-calling and outbursts that seem inconsistent with the mandate to forgiveness. In either case, the reactions were often extreme and almost always public. I still find it hard to imagine why people from an apparently civilised nation such as ours would regard it as anything but poor taste to have parties to celebrate the death of an elected public servant, but parties there were. Threats of demonstration at the funeral were also made. I make these comments as one who didn't support that lady's politics though in all truth was barely old enough to have a view on them. 

I have heard it said that the civilisation of a country is measured by how it deals with its dead. This seems to make sense to me as one who finds this atypical reaction strange. I write this as one who has lead many dozens of funerals for people whose emotional outpourings were more often than not more measured than those we see in the context of public deaths. I am unsure why this might be, but wonder if it is simply that spend so much of our time, effort and money fighting death and its advancement (let's call it ageing), that when we are forced to confront it, we cannot cope. Multiply that many thousands of times over and we start to see this strange response to the inevitable, and one that moves grief from the act of giving to one of an act of receiving. When we grieve for someone who has died, and as in passion of any sort, we hand over ourselves to that emotion. What I see is people claiming a stake for themselves, thereby creating a sort of strange contest in the level and intensity of outburst. 

It is easy to sit and state the problem, but harder to come up with a solution. This very day I sat with a lovely family and prepared one of their own for her imminent death. I encouraged them to talk about what was about to happen, to celebrate with their loved-one while she still may have been able to hear them. In simple terms, we spend so much time pretending that death is an apparition and can be dodged, that we don't see it coming. On our parish website I placed a simple and probably flawed page that attends to the need to prepare for our own death - with the implicit demand that families talk about it, plan for it, acknowledge its inevitability. To some that may seem morbid, but I sense that those families who did indeed have a chance to prepare found peace soonest. 

Today, with the funeral of a little old lady who was given her job by us, we see yet another stage in the ongoing phenomenon that appears to be as uniquely British as it is celebrity-based as it is strange and discomforting.  

The Sermon Given by Bp Richard at the Funeral of Lady Thatcher

The text can be found here

The Value of Doing Easter in full

I am not a ridiculously pious man, despite my calling and present ministry. Indeed, some often claim surprise when they discover that do indeed have a spiritual side - a matter for concern perhaps, but not one that I lose sleep about just now. The fact is, I am a fairly normal type - maybe just not your typical rictus God-botherer.

Over the last few years I have been learning about something which, when expressed out loud as in the form of a blog post, seems obvious. Despite the impression of me that you may have formed if you read this thing often enough, I do not come from a heavily liturgical tradition of church. Indeed, my child-hood parish was a fairly straight-forward estate brick wigwam, blessed with a choir that could only sing in unison. I was not born into a bells-and-smells tradition - no: I chose it having tried other things first. 

As I have grown as a Christian, I have discovered the simple truth about Passiontide, Holy Week and Easter: the more I put in the more I get out. In simple terms, for me it is an all-or-nothing thing. 

As the Vicar, one of the things that I am required to do is to lay out the liturgical flow for the year. That I enjoy it and have something of a gift for it is besides the point (I am a crap preacher, so being good at something else is good). I sat in the immediate wake of a happy Christmas and made choices - not for me, but for the good people of Whitton, not least among whom are the worshippers at this here edifice. I pondered last year at the feed-back that I received after the first such sweeps of ceremonial formed by my vicarly hand, and it was good. It observed the very thing that I myself feel when I seek the Lord - that the more you put in the more you get out. This seems to be the plimsoll line for ritualist Christians. 

And so I drafted the list of services between Palm Sunday and Easter. Upon emailing it, I could sense the gasps, but it was my sense that it was my job to take my people on a journey with Christ. Yes, it needed flavour above and beyond the purpose presented in the Story, so we had Healing on one day, Meditation on another and longer prayers on another. It struck me last year that different people come to different things, so Good Friday was an epic Whitton marathon (for me and the three others who did all of it) of more than nine hours of worship. Each was well-attended and often by very distinctive groups of people. However, it was also having an effect on me - this year I have done more than I have been party to or have lead in previous years and in simple terms - the effect of the entire story on me was yet greater than it had previously been. The more I did, personally, the more I felt connected. 

My abiding memory of this year was being sat in the hall next to my wife watching The Passion of the Christ after a day of liturgising. She was weeping as the film ended and others were holding one another in consolation. For me, Easter 2013 will be characterised by people 'getting it', maybe for the first time. As I look back on the last ten days, I think perhaps more is more. How could anyone ever fully appreciate the joy and cost of Easter in just one visit?