Love your enemies 2

22nd day of Lent

MARCH 22nd 2017

PRAY FOR THE MEN OF VIOLENCE 2

Today a man died. He was a man of violence. He was an extremist. He took four people with him and injured 40 more. 

Extremists seek to pull people with them away from a central, everyday, normality.

Extremists don't want us to hold together.

So as we open up our church on Saturday we want to, in a very small and normal and un-extreme way, to help people hold together. 

And we believe that a man of peace who suffered at the hands of violent extremists - they who believed death was the answer - is the one who calls us to hold out a light to others.

Yesterday was a day for prayer for Northern Ireland. Today is a day of prayer for London. Every day is a day of prayer. For it is the normal, holding-together, response of un-extreme Christians and Muslims. Prayer for those whose lives were so marred and devastated by terrorism. Prayer for peacemakers. 

Love your enemies

21st day of Lent

MARCH 21st 2017

PRAY FOR THE MEN OF VIOLENCE

Today a man died. He was a man of violence. He was a man of peace. He died with blood on his hands. He died as a friend of enemies. He was Martin McGuinness. One half of the 'Chuckle Brothers' - the other half was the implacable defender of Ulster, Ian Paisley. 

It is a day for prayer. Prayer for those whose lives were so marred and devastated by terrorism. Prayer also for a changed Northern Ireland. Prayer for peacemakers. Footsteps to peace have taken years of painstaking effort. And today it is still fragile. There are still walls, called 'peace lines' in Derry /Londonderry and Belfast. There are still huge suspicions between both sides. Yet, the sight of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuiness sharing power, sitting besides each other, chuckling, is surely one of the most extraordinary fruits of peacemaking. These photographs come from the Antrim coast in Northern Ireland, which we visited last year. They are from Portrush, where the Giant's Causeway is a truly magnificent and mysterious landscape. A most beautiful country. A place and people who deserve peace as much as we do. May Martin McGuinness rest in the peace of God and the forgiveness of God. And may those harmed and marred by violence find peace too.

Springing up to Eternal Life

             ST PHOTINA'S DAY

MARCH 20th 2017

 

THE WELL OF LIFE

Today is St Photina's Day. Who, you might ask, is St Photina? Little known in the Western church, she is said to be, according to the Orthodox church, the woman who met Jesus at the well in John 4.

If you ever read the stories of Jesus in the Gospels, you might often be left wondering about what happened next?

When Jesus arrived at Photina's well, he was thirsty. He asked her for a drink. And out of that request came a most profound life-changing experience. 'Come and meet the man who told me everything I had ever done,' she tells all her neighbours and relatives. 

What happened next? She becomes a courageous teller of her story. 

Her story-telling courage led her to leave her home town (modern Nablus, in the West Bank) and all the way to Carthage, in Tunisia. There she came to the notice of the Roman authorities. She was eventually taken prisoner and taken to Rome, where, in AD64, she was martyred for her faith by Nero. Her way of life - which sprang from that encounter with a thirsty Jesus at the well - led to her death. Her death was by being thrown into a well.

The picture above is an Eastern orthodox icon. The cross-shaped well reflects the costliness of her life bound with the costly life-giving death of Jesus. 

I wonder, how many other unnamed women and men of the bible have stories that are known by our wise brothers and sisters from the Eastern church? Perhaps you would like to look for them!!

Giving and gaining

FIFTEENTH DAY OF LENT: 

WEDNESDAY 

MARCH 15th 2017 

WHAT WE GIVE WE GAIN
In the Hot Potato suppers we have been looking at Archbishop Justin Welby's Lent book, 'Dethroning Mammon'.
The book looks at the way in which the forces of acquisitiveness and dehumanising systems (which is partly to do with the power of money) can control us and shape our thinking. What we can measure, we value. What we have, we consider ours.

Today we got to the chapter that begins to overturn attitudes to do with giving: he suggests that giving is gaining.

His biblical template for giving when it seems irrational, makes no sense at all, is Nicodemus; he who came to Jesus in the darkness to ask him hard questions, is the one who looks after Jesus' body at his death. Not only that, he lavishes great riches by caring for his body with 100lbs of spices. He had nothing to gain. It was, however, the most beautiful of acts which he and Joseph of Arimathea did for Jesus when all seemed lost that Good Friday evening.

But Welby says this is precisely the kind of giving - irrational, beautiful and with nothing to gain - that turns Mammon on its head. Giving is never about 'what is in it for me?', which is a process of 'exchange and equivalence'. Giving is about pure generosity and abundance. I leave you with this quote: 

‘What we gain when we give comes in many forms. First of all, when we give, we recognise, both implicitly and explicitly, that life is not a process of exchange and equivalence, but of abundance and generosity. Exchange and equivalence is a zero-sum approach, the notion that what I give I lose to your gain. It implies a closed system. Abundance and generosity implies an open system, one in which the creative power of God is ever active, so what we give we gain. Mammon wants us to believe the books always have to balance out in the end – that whatever you have I can’t have, and vice versa… Mammon is good at arithmetic, and balancing the books, but very bad at divine economics... in divine economics, where there is abundance and generosity, there is no zero-sum approach.’

Forty thousand sunrises

FOURTEENTH DAY OF LENT: 

TUESDAY MARCH 14th 2017 

COURAGE FROM THE PAST

In January 1907 - 110 years ago - a little church was planted in Rathbone Road.
It was the Mission Church of St Hilda. 

It was the initiative of the new bishop of Birmingham, Charles Gore. He was a pioneer prelate. He had visited the area a few months before and had noticed huge changes even in January 1907. So many homes had been built. Bearwood was spilling up the hill towards Warley Woods. Edwardian terraces were now being planned in Barclay Road. And from that site in Rathbone Road, it was clear that the building out from Birmingham was only going to continue. A church was needed to serve the people. 

It is easy to forget: our church once did not exist.

It was planted in Warley Woods by people of vision.

The Smethwick News Telephone - what a wonderful name for a newspaper - reported Bishop Gore's text in their Saturday edition of February 2nd 1907. The reporter summed up his sermon thus: 'He knew case after case where congregations and churches had grown up out of a tiny mission church and he hoped they would grow up into a great and rich congregation - rich, not in numbers, but in spiritual gifts, and zeal and readiness to help themselves.'

We would do well to attend to his prophetic words. We are still here 110 years on. He preached on a text which urged that we would go, like Paul, out to people to tell them that forgiveness of sins is for them and that they have a place 'among those who are sanctified by faith in Jesus'.

The sun rises. The sun sets. Faithfulness continues day after day. The sun has risen and set 40,220 times since then (give or take the odd leap year). Something to thank God for (and leap up and down a bit). Our PCC tonight began with a skipping competition as the Brownies in the next door room in the hall had a skip-a-thon for charity. I wonder what Bishop Gore would have thought had he been there to witness the latest members of St Hilda's prayerfully set priorities for the mission of our church for 2017-18? Would he have joined in the skipping?

Going, going,,,

THIRTEENTH DAY OF LENT: 

MONDAY MARCH 13th 2017 

DAY OF HISTORY
We are on the way out of the EU. Mrs May will trigger Article 50 in the next week or two and so the negotiations will begin nine months after that historic referendum. Nine months: some pregnancy. 

And at the same time, Scotland may well vote to split the UK before Brexit happens in 2019 - and this has come as a complete surprise, a reverse elopement. Nicola Sturgeon wants a divorce with the rest of the UK in order to grow a new relationship with Europe.

We live in extraordinary times. We also live in the worst of times.

Sitting on our sofas watching the news, we are confronted with what happens when politics does not work at all. From our political difficulties, our thoughts and minds are pulled away from the plushness of the Houses of Parliament across thousands of arid miles to the drought-hit, war-torn, provinces of South Sudan and Somalia. 

These are places where politics by another means - war - is disrupting the lives of millions of people. Three million have fled the warlords in South Sudan, leaving slaughtered family members behind. Many who have made it into Uganda are women and children, courageous women who have left behind the bodies of their slaughtered husbands and sons. Many more millions are besieged in cities and towns in Somalia. Cholera stalks the lands. But simple supplies of clean water and grain are saving lives. 

And then, we are taken to the Netherlands, where a nation divided votes in a couple of days time. It has a choice between a poisonous politics of backward-looking hatred and something more hopeful yet somehow with less momentum. 

Where is the hope? Where is a sign of another narrative?

A group of young people from 70 nations stood with their flags in front of Buckingham Palace today to signal the start of the Commonwealth Games' torch run across 140,000 miles linking every competing country. Sporting rivalry can bring hope. Young people can show us a better way.

Sister Moon

TWELFTH DAY OF LENT: 

SUNDAY MARCH 12th 2017 

SPEAKING WORDS OF WISDOM
This evening the moon was full and beautiful over Warley Woods. Here in this image it seems to be caught in the upper branches of the tall beech trees at the top of Barclay Road. Sister Moon is what St Francis called it, in his Canticle of the Creatures:

Most High, all powerful, good Lord,
Yours are the praises, the glory, the honor,
and all blessing.

To You alone, Most High, do they belong,
and no man is worthy to mention Your name.

Be praised, my Lord, through all your creatures,
especially through my lord Brother Sun,
who brings the day; and you give light through him.
And he is beautiful and radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

Praise be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon
and the stars, in heaven you formed them
clear and precious and beautiful.

In the light of the moon things can seem simpler and radiant. As a child I used to love to run in the moonlight, for it felt like I'd become more fleet of foot. Somehow it was liberating. It felt like I was flying, even. When something is beyond our control - like the moon and the sun - it is easier to have an attitude of letting go and letting be.

I have been thinking about the song of that name. Paul McCartney wrote 'Let it be' in the days running up to the break-up of The Beatles in 1970. It was the title of their last album and was released a month after he decided to go solo. In the song he tells of his mother, Mary, coming to him speaking the wisdom of 'letting things be'. He tells the story that his mother, who had died 10 years earlier when he was just 14, came to him clearly in a dream when he was in a state of great anxiety about the future. The dream brought him a state of tremendous peace. John Lennon reportedly hated the song. He thought it had Christian undertones. McCartney said fans could read what they wanted into the lyrics - many thinking that 'mother Mary' is Mary mother of Jesus.

When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me
Speaking words of wisdom
Let it be.

And in my hour of darkness
She is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom
Let it be.

Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be.
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.

In the moonlight, perhaps you could whisper prayers of wisdom. Ask the God of all things to have control. Let it be, let it be, let it be.