Tenth Sunday after Trinity

Date:16th August 2009

Preacher: Revd Hilary Barber

Some Quiet Reflection

Holidays provide a chance to slow down, to rest, to recreate, and for some quiet reflection.

We have just had a few weeks at our gite in the Dordoyne, in South West France. The weather was mixed, with some hot sun, and some storms and heavy rain. The last week was slightly marred by illness, both for Rosie and Seth, and for one of our neighbours who was hospitalised. We have been lucky not to have illness on holiday for number of years, but such is life.

Whilst I was away, I did make time to read a book called Praying For England, which comprised of a series of reflections by different priests, all in different contexts, edited by Samuel Wells and Sarah Coakley. Each Priest told the story of an event or occasion that reflected something of being a priest in the Church of England, and of the role and importance of the Church, and of the parochial system within our land. Grace Davie, Chair of Sociology of Religion at Exeter University put the Church of England into a European context, and chose France as one of her main examples. The book finishes with a chapter by Archbishop Rowan.

Stephen Cherry in the first Chapter recalled how when he was Vicar of Loughborough, at the time of the Soham murders, a 14 year old child was murdered, and his body cut up in pieces, and scattered across the town, to be found by police following a massive search. The effect on Stephen as the parish priest, the family of the child, the town itself, and the role of the Church and the worshipping community was huge.

Peter Wilcox gave a very thought provoking reflection on God and football. He was able to make some important connections about worship, liturgy, and how football can transform peoples’ lives and communities. He was able to show how many people had rejected the church and found a new way of experiencing community, singing together in unison, worshipping football stars, and through sponsorship, engaging with local communities, sometimes world wide, some of which exist in poverty and places of war and disease.

Sam Wells gave a powerful account of Godly Play, which he used in an Urban Priority Area, where literacy was not high, and experiencing God rather than knowledge, meant everything. Here the service had to slightly change, and using visual aids and learning a story telling narrative style of preaching, people began to seriously deepen their own faith, and to renew that of the whole congregation.

Edmund Newey recalled the whole funeral ministry that the Church of England provides for the nation. How as priests, we are called to engage often with people we have never met, at a time of high emotion in their lives, and to try and help them say goodbuy to someone they have loved, and to help them make sense of life and death for themselves. There is something very special and unique about having an established Church that has a network of parishes that cover the whole land, providing pastoral care before, during, and after the event. My father, whom some of you have met, has always been a bicycling priest, and so David Scott’s poem as Vicar of Howarth, speaks powerfully to me:

I prop it up, steady it,

pull my trousers out of my socks,

and knock to enter into

a death, or any other

of life’s routine shocks.

‘Bring it in.’ I carry it like an awkward animal and

introduce it to the shoes and shopping,

where it waits.

The talk ranges

from the now, to the past, and to the weather

mostly skirting eternity.

I carry it out into the new air,

where it takes the strain

in the pedals. We weave between ducks

and day- outers, until it hits the garage

almost horizontal, like a laid hedge,

among bits of hose, tired footballs,

the rusty sledge. It sleeps where it falls.

Jessica Martin is an Ordained priest and Fellow at Trinity College Cambridge. I found this chapter one of the most moving, as she recounted how she tries to live out her priesthood amidst personal tragedy. Her daughter in her mid twenties sleeps rough in many doorways in Cambridge, where I grew up, and lives on heroin. Sometimes she is really ill, and goes some extreme lengths to get her fix, drug rehab has failed to make any impact, and the suffering of parent and child, is slow, public, and very painful. So often when a priest arrives in church, we all too easily forget their own cross which they bring with them to the altar.

Andrew Shanks, Canon Theologian at Manchester Cathedral, reflected on an uncomfortable past for the Church of England as an institution. How we have abused and manipulated power and control over others. How we have ignored injustice and oppression to avoid the wrath of being unpopular with the public, with the political party of the day, and with the media. The Church of England will never again wield power in the way it has historically, and no wonder many of the people we claim to represent and to serve have abandoned us – to football, to atheism, secularisation, to their own source of will power and wisdom.

Grace Davie, looked at how the Christian Church has shaped Europe, comparing France with the Church of England. Remember France like England is littered with eccesiastical buildings, yet has rejected the notion of any public religiosity. Faith communities are welcome to practise only in private. There is certainly no unelected representatives of faith communities within the government. Yet the reality is that large numbers of the population still value their church buildings, and will use them by choice, and not through duty or obligation. Our French neighbours eldest daughter got married last year. We have no knowledge of them holding any kind of faith or of attendance at the local church. Yet, following the legal ceremony at the Marie, they went to Church for a religious ceremony.

Here in England, we still find that our democracy is based on Christian values and principals. The Monarch remains the Head of the Church, 26 bishops are unelected and sit in the House of Lords, public worship is very much at the heart of our national identity – personally I will never forget the extraordinary world wide coverage given to the public funeral of Princess Diana, and of the English public outpouring of religiosity and faith, of thousands of people who clearly do not belong in any participative way to the church, but who still have faith and a deep longing to know God, and to be known by him.

Rowan Williams in his Epilogue speaks about the role of the Church as being the door that connects heaven and earth. Priests are called to hold that door open for everyone, for those we like and find easy to love, and for those we intently dislike and who cause us sleepless nights, and whom society rejects because of their disorder and maladjustment.

Finally Rowan reminds us that the only reason we have priests at all, is to remind us all as the people of God, that God wants all of us to become priest like, and to share in the priesthood of all believers.

For myself, my own priesthood has to be tied up in the offering of worship, and of promoting God’s biase towards the poor and the oppressed. The Daily Office provides a structure and routine for being in touch with God: at the beginning of each day, in the middle of the day, and in the evening. When the Office is said, the priest brings to God not only him or her self, but the issues, the people, the challenges that they are carrying, to God on behalf of the whole Church. That door between the unending outpouring of hymnody and prayer by the saints and angels, is held agar, for heaven and earth to meet with each other. This is focused more acutely in the Eucharist, when Word and sacrament are celebrated, and as the bread is broken, so Christ’s broken body becomes the agent for healing and salvation.

My work outside that of the liturgy, in the private, public and third sectors has to be about being an agent for God, a reminder to the outside world of God’s concern, love, and biase towards the poor and oppressed. Seeking fresh opportunities to represent God and his Church in places where otherwise God’s presence would not be recognised and manifested. This is not to suggest that the laity cannot perform a similar task, but that the priest undoubtedly reminds the whole community of their call to become more Christ like, more priest like in their speaking, their listening, their decision making.

Some how worship and work almost become one and un separable. The worship of heaven becomes caught up in the messiness of local authorities, the advent of new academies, the fear of the future for HBOS and Lloyds, fear of unemployment, of those who seek prostitution to make ends meet, for paedophiles and those who seek to bring attention to themselves, God is there both in the light and the darkness, in the neat and tidy, and the awfulness and despair. The role of the priest is to hold God’s created order together, and offer what God has given back to him in awe and wonder, and seeking forgiveness for our human failure.

I finish again with David Scott:

I sit at the door of the church

and see who comes in and who goes out.

They don’t hand anything in

like they used to, animals or grain.

I don’t have to receive anything

to put on the altar, or pass anything

to my assistant to be slaughted

and the blood drained and flung.

I am grateful for that, not

having been brought up to it.

Instead they get books and papers

snippets of news, and the magazine.

Somebody else does all that.

I have no ephod to divine the truth,

no incense to burn, no curtain,

to close behind me. I have only the agony

of knowing that I have little,

and the slow job of resisting

any attempt to make it more, because

in my mind’s eye I have the eye of the needle,

and how easy it is for even

licked thread to miss getting through.

Amen.