Ministry Team Letters July – December 2009
Dear Friends,
I am sitting here in the first half of November feeling a strong resistance to writing anything about Christmas. I know you will be reading this in the December issue of the magazine, but it is still early in the month (or even late in November) when the magazine is read by most people, in other words at the beginning of the season of Advent. The festival of the Nativity of our Lord, the Christ–mass, begins on the evening of December 24. I was saddened to see one major local business in full Christmas dress in the middle of October – and was also a bit indignant over their slogan: ‘A million reasons to Believe this Christmas.’ There is One in Whom to believe this Christmas (and always), and He is not much concerned with the sale of stuffed Father Christmasses and boxes of crackers (though it should be said He is surely concerned with the livelihoods of those who make their living from such things, and certainly enjoys feasting and merry-making.) Right, that’s my anti-Christmas-in-late-autumn grump over.
Another reason for not writing about Christmas now is that this year’s looks set to be a remarkable one for St Mary’s, as we help to host the annual lunch for people in this district who would otherwise be on their own on Christmas Day, and as we celebrate communion that morning with our brothers and sisters from the Baptist Church. I think we will have a lot to report on after Christmas this year. (If you know of anyone you think might like to be invited to the lunch, it is not too late – please contact Mary Jepp on 411734. We are not looking for more volunteers – wonderfully, we already have enough.)
So instead of writing something for Christmas, I am going to do a bit of shameless name-dropping, and talk about my time in September with the Archbishop of Canterbury in Japan. The Japanese Anglican Church (Nippon Sei Ko Kai) has been celebrating the 150th anniversary of mission this year, and the Archbishop went there to help them celebrate. I was touched and surprised to be invited to join in, at their expense, the two days of the Archbishop’s visit that were spent in Nagasaki, where I was priest of the local Anglican church for ten years, and where Anglican mission began in Japan in 1859.
Ostensibly I was there to act as interpreter and guide, but there were others in the entourage who could have done that job as well or better; so it was a huge privilege to be part of those events. For the Japanese Church, it was a big occasion, the first visit by a serving Archbishop of Canterbury and a great assurance to a small and often struggling church that they matter. However, for the Archbishop it looked like very hard work. In the course of a week, while coping with jet-lag, he visited four cities, delivered seven addresses, took part in eight acts of public worship, spoke to the press, met countless people, and was subjected to ordeal by banquet repeatedly. Everyone wanted a bit of his time (and of course a photo with him), and most of what was going on was being conducted in a language he does not speak. The schedule of visits to this memorial or that institution or the other group of people seemed relentless. If I have ever been tempted to think of this kind of visit as a bit of a jaunt, I do so no longer. The visits are deeply valued by those who receive them, but they come at a real cost to the Archbishop.
In the midst of this hectic scene, a few things stood out for me. One was the personally moving experience simply of seeing the Archbishop in the church where I used to serve (and where Yoko and I were married). In the final minutes of the Archbishop’s time in Nagasaki, I was able to introduce him to Nobuo Nishimoto, the treasurer of Holy Trinity Nagasaki, and to interpret while Mr Nishimoto told the Archbishop of how he escaped being killed by the atomic bomb only because he disobeyed the foreman at the factory where he worked as a school-boy labourer and went home to rest. The factory was destroyed and everyone in it killed. His own brother was badly injured and died a few days later.
Here are some words from the Archbishop’s address at the park in Nagasaki, which marks the centre of the atomic bombing.
To work for a world free from nuclear arms is to work for the sake of…moral and human dignity. It is tempting to think that the task is too difficult. [The Archbishop then talks about a book, ‘The Bells of Nagasaki’, written by Takashi Nagai, ‘that great sage and saint of Nagasaki,’ who was a Christian doctor whose wife was killed in the atomic blast. Despite his own injuries, he organised the first medical relief teams in the city. Later, he became ill with radiation poisoning and spent many years bed-ridden writing a series of books about Nagasaki, peace and faith before dying in 1951.]
His book ends, unforgettably, with the sound of the cathedral bells ringing for the Angelus – the call to prayer that is heard three times each day in the bells of Catholic (and some Anglican) churches. It commemorates the moment when the angel tells the Virgin Mary that she is chosen to be the mother of the Saviour. And it commemorates Mary's response – her choice to accept that calling.
Human freedom can start a process that transfigures the whole world. Mary’s acceptance is the beginning of God’s action in renewing the creation through Jesus. You could almost say that it sets up a ‘chain reaction’ through the human race. And even now our free actions of turning to God and doing his will have effects greater than we can see or understand – though we see a little of how such processes work when we look at the lives of Christian men and women who say yes to God’s call in the most terrible and demanding situations – just as Takashi Nagai said yes, and helped to bring hope and meaning back to so many lives.
Freedom matters… Our prayer must be that this creative impetus will break through the chains we have fastened on ourselves, so that we can live in the certainty that there will never be a repetition of the terrible fate visited on this city, and that we shall discover by God’s grace and guidance how to live together without the threat of mass killing.
‘Choose life’, says God to his people in the Bible. May his own free love set us free to make that choice.
May we all choose life, this Christmas and always – or perhaps simply come to see that the Lord of Life has in great humility and love already chosen us.
With love,
David
Dear Friends,
I have felt inspired – if that is the right word – to return to the theme of music in church life which I touched on last month. Since writing that short piece, I have found myself wondering just why it is that Christians in particular have such a strong urge to express their faith in worship at least partly through the medium of music. Most religious rites, of almost any faith one can think of, involve some form of chanting or intoning, but the Church of Jesus Christ has made worship almost (but not quite) synonymous with music.
I mentioned that when I write about music I do so with absolutely no qualification whatsoever save that of finding it indispensible, and I do recognise that for whatever reason there are some whom music does not touch or move at all, although this is rare. Some years ago I had a very curious experience that demonstrated – to me at least – the power of music to change us. Yoko and I had booked to see the musical Les Misérables in London, but on the day I had one of my very rare migraines. We went to see the show anyway, and I enjoyed it through the fog of pain that anyone who suffers from migraines will know. However, whenever the music became particularly stirring, the pain instantly and completely vanished. As soon as the music subsided to a quieter mode, the pain returned. This happened several times in the course of the evening, and was quite unmistakeable – it was the music, and nothing else, that was causing the pain to lift briefly.
This is perhaps an unusual example, but the power of music to move and sway us is undeniable. For this reason, various branches of the church have at many points in history regarded some kinds of music as definitely undesirable, ‘pagan’. Many years ago – in much happier times – I visited Zimbabwe, and was surprised and saddened to learn how the first white missionaries had banished drums, essential to most African singing, from the church. It is only in recent years that they have found their way into much African worship. I will never forget the vibrant sound of the cathedral choir in Harare, singing with drums in a church building that looks in many respects very European.
Some years ago I heard a recording of the late Pope John Paul II addressing a youth rally in his wonderful Polish-accented English. ‘It is good to pray,’ he said, and there was a polite response of applause from the crowd. ‘But,’ he went on, ‘it is better to sing!’ Cheers and whistles. ‘Or rather, to pray singing.’ Reflective quiet. The Pope may have been thinking of a famous remark of St. Augustine: ‘Those who sing pray twice.’ I do not think I am alone in finding it hard to pray at times, especially on my own. I have found that – if I am sure no-one can hear me – singing a hymn, even alone and badly, makes the prayer much easier.
All this leads me to the tentative conclusion that music offered in the praise of God is in fact a gift from God – that there is something that God has planted in us that draws us to approach Him with sung hosannas and alleluias and with trumpets and drums and great organs and flutes and choirs and voices sweet or otherwise and cymbals and banjos and you name it. ‘Christians have a song in their hearts,’ begins the preface to a well-known hymn book (Mission Praise?) which I can’t remember or find at the moment. The song is always in the end one of joy, because God is always in the end our fountain of endless life-giving joy, but the song can sustain us also in times of great trial and grief. According to St Mark, after Jesus had celebrated the Last Supper with his disciples, they all sang a hymn before going out to the Mount of Olives and to Jesus’s betrayal and death. Our music is not there to put us in a trance – although it may entrance us – or to be an escape from reality, but to draw us deeper into the heart of the living God, who laid the cornerstone of the earth while the morning stars sang together and all the angels shouted for joy. May we too ever sing for joy – well or badly, it matters not, though we are always grateful when it is done well. I believe God then sings with us.
With love,
David
Dear Friends,
A friend who is a Buddhist priest in Japan once said to me, ‘You can’t really imagine Christianity without music, can you?’ I don’t think I had realised until that moment quite how much music matters to the practice of the Christian religion, in a way that is possibly not true of other faiths. There are churches that have no instrumental music – the Orthodox and the Free Presbyterians of Scotland to name two extremes – but I have never heard of Christian groups or communities that do not at least sing.
It is one of the greatest regrets of my life that I have never developed whatever latent musical skills I might once have possessed. Yet I cannot imagine my life without music. I sometimes indulge in that mental game of trying to pick my own Desert Island discs, but it is impossible – there are too many pieces of music that I love for me to choose just eight. (One that is always there, however, is Spem in alium by Thomas Tallis. This is an astonishing choral work in forty parts, as opposed to the usual four. If you have never heard it, make sure you do – it will ravish your heart.)
We are very fortunate at St Mary’s to have a strong musical tradition. This year our splendid Bryceson organ is 150 years old, and this is a good moment to thank God for the musical riches we enjoy at St Mary’s, through the organ itself, the choir, the weekly and yearly round of worship, and through special musical events and concerts. It is also a good moment to record our gratitude to all who help us draw closer to God through music, and to Ken Diffey, Colin Thirlwall, and to the choir in particular.
Musical tastes vary – it is one of the challenges of my job as vicar to receive and try to reconcile the various and often vigorous opinions about what makes for good music for worship (and, of course, I do have opinions and prejudices of my own). But I am willing to bet none of us would be happier with no music of any kind in our church life. As we are instructed in Psalm 150:
Praise him with the sounding of the trumpet,
Praise him with the harp and lyre,
Praise him with tambourine and dancing,
Praise him with the strings and flute,
Praise him with the clash of cymbals,
Praise him with resounding cymbals.
Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord.
With love, David
Dear Friends,
September...and the children are going back to school. Can you remember what it felt like going back after the long summer break? Can you remember what it felt like starting in a new school, especially on the first day, when you hardly knew a soul? I don’t expect that I am the only one who experiences collywobbles at the thought of walking into anywhere new for the first time, and sometimes it is even harder to come back to somewhere you know, if you have been away for a long time. Questions race through our minds, ‘Will they ask where I have been?’ ‘Will they welcome me?’ ‘Will they turn their backs on me?’ And then when we finally manage to get through the door, and the ice is broken, we can hardly remember what all the fuss was about.
The same is true for people who have drifted away from church. The reasons why they have drifted away are inconsequential. The fact is that there are many people who have, and chances are that each of us can name several. It may be hard to believe that many of these people, who once regularly attended church may be reluctant, nervous to come back to church.
Those of us who regularly attend can hardly comprehend what all the fuss is about. I know for myself that this was true... After we moved to Bury near Ramsey I had a period of time when, I wanted to go to church but just didn’t, just couldn’t. I knew when the services in our local church were but couldn’t muster up the courage to walk up the hill and in the door. It was only when a friend invited us, the family, to attend the Easter service that I managed to get back on track (and I doubt that I would be here today if the invitation had not been made).
September 27 is Back to Church Sunday. This is the Sunday which has been designated as the day when we are asked to personally invite someone we know who know longer attends church to come back to church, for just one service, with no strings attached. The initiative is based on research that says that three million people, that is six per cent of the adult population, would come back to church if they received a personal invitation.
Research by the Diocese of Lichfield in 2008 following Back to Church Sunday suggested that 6,000 people came back to church on that day and that, six months later, between 700 and 900 (12-15 per cent) had become regular members Now I think those figures are pretty impressive. It’s amazing to think what a difference to someone’s life and also to our church community your invitations could make.
Now, if by chance you don’t feel able to offer the invitation on September 27, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t invite someone back on another Sunday.
So.…who are you going to invite Back to Church?
Yours in Christ, Mary Jepp
Dear Friends,
I am writing this on 17 July. Exactly forty years ago, the crew of Apollo 11 were one day into their flight to the moon. On July 20 (US time), Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon’s surface. No-one who was alive at the time, and old enough to take it in, can ever forget what those days were like. Unlike most historical events, there is nothing to which that achievement can usefully be compared. Added to which, it was a truly momentous episode in the human story which did not involve bloodshed or calamity, and it was shared in by a very large proportion of humankind as it took place. It is not surprising that some of us find this fortieth anniversary very moving.
I was eight years old at the time, and am grateful that I was alive then and can remember it. I remember some of the excitement over the earlier Apollo missions, particularly Apollo 8, which took the crew into lunar orbit only a few miles above the surface. I remember all the tension of the launches, and the accompanying NASA jargon which fed almost instantly into children’s entertainment and into our speech – ‘T minus 5 and counting. All systems go,’ and all that. I remember – a unique event in my childhood – my father taking me (not my sisters, who were assumed not to be interested) to see ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’, which came out in 1968, and talking with him about what the moon might be like. Above all, I remember the moment just before 4.00 am on July 21st when my parents woke me to watch the blurred and incomprehensible image of Armstrong descending the ladder and taking his one small step onto the moon’s surface. The next day I asked my father how important he thought the Apollo mission was. He replied that it was probably a bit more important than Columbus’s voyage to the New World.
That was, I think, a very good parental response to an eight-year-old’s impossible question, but in truth we are still trying to discover the meaning of what took place forty years ago. The story is told that in 1989, at the time of the bicentennial of the French Revolution, a journalist asked Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Premier, what he thought had been the historical significance of that event. Deng smiled and said, ‘Oh, it’s much too soon to tell.’ That is certainly true of the achievements of the Apollo programme. An entirely new perspective of life has been given to us. It has been said that possibly the greatest result of all that enterprise was this:
This is not the moon, but the earth seen from space. Thanks to those who risked their lives – and in the case of the crew of Apollo 1, gave them – we can now see ourselves with something akin to the vision God might have of us: small, vulnerable, beautiful, essentially one, and extraordinarily precious. On the return journey from the moon, the crew of Apollo 11 gave a radio broadcast from their spacecraft. Buzz Aldrin – who had privately taken communion shortly after landing on the moon – read some verses from Psalm 8.
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
The ancient Hebrew writer of this Psalm appears to have been able to see with his imagination what we can now see with our own eyes, or at least with the borrowed eyes of astronauts – the seeming insignificance of human life, and indeed of the earth itself, set against the immeasurable vastness and grandeur of the universe. Why indeed should our infinitesimal lives matter in all this? But in fact that seeming insignificance only increases the wonder of our existence, and of all life, and, despite our breathtaking fragility, the extreme unlikelihood of our being here; nevertheless here we are, and most of us find it impossible to see that fact as unimportant. In his broadcast, Aldrin did not read the next verse of the psalm:
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honour.
For me, the Apollo programme showed human beings doing something crowned with glory and honour, and showed too how our very smallness puts us in the centre of God’s attention. Yes, I know the programme was conceived in the depths of the Cold War to triumph over the Soviet Union, and yes, no doubt all that money could have been spent on something else. But God has always chosen to work through the imperfect motives and ambiguous desires of human beings’ best endeavours. Perhaps generations to come will find that unfolding vision of our fragile, exquisite earth a real source of inspiration in the creation of a better world.
With love
David
Dear Friends,
It is now a year since Mary Jepp came to St Mary’s as our Curate, and a few days since she was ordained priest. During the past year, we have all become aware of just how fortunate we are to have Mary with us, and now is a suitable moment to thank God for all the gifts he has given her, and to thank her for what she has given to us all.
All journeys to ordination are noteworthy in their own way – as are all the other journeys people make towards a vocation or a career or a way of living – but for Mary to be now a priest in the Church of England is something especially remarkable. Mary can tell you much more about this, but when as a girl she was being raised in the Catholic Church in Canada, the likelihood of her being where she now is would have seemed nil. This, I think, reveals something about the way God works in all our lives. We may not find our own lives particularly astonishing – but God has done a truly astonishing thing in us, creating us as an expression of His life, and choosing us as the most direct revelation of Himself. The very special journey that Mary has taken, and the very special life she now assumes as a priest, are emblems of God’s calling of each one of us towards an ever deeper identification with Him.
Here are some of the words that were read by the Bishop at the ordination service:
With all God’s people, priests are to tell the story of God’s love. They are to baptize new disciples in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and to walk with them in the way of Christ, nurturing them in the faith. They are to unfold the Scriptures, to preach the word in season and out of season, and to declare the mighty acts of God. They are to preside at the Lord's table and lead his people in worship, offering with them a spiritual sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. They are to bless the people in God’s name. They are to resist evil, support the weak, defend the poor, and intercede for all in need. They are to minister to the sick and prepare the dying for their death. Guided by the Spirit, they are to discern and foster the gifts of all God’s people, that the whole Church may be built up in unity and faith.
At face value, these words of commission seem to imply that a priest is a special kind of person, of whom almost superhuman efforts will be required. Actually, priesthood is not about being superhuman but truly human, and it is not for a special kind of person but for someone who represents us as we are. The clue is in the first words of that paragraph above: ‘with all God’s people.’ Although for the sake of good order the church entrusts certain specific tasks to priests, everything a priest does is done with and on behalf of the whole Christian family. The priest may preside over the rites of baptism or of the Eucharist, for example, but it is the church, the whole body, that baptises or celebrates the Eucharist. We are not let off the hook by having priests to do it all for us! We all preach God’s word by what we do and say, we all are called to resist evil, support the weak, defend the poor, and intercede for all in need. A priest is there to remind us all of our common calling to be Christ-ians, that is to be fully human beings made in the image of God.
Mary, we look forward with joy to what you will reveal to us of God’s life through your priesthood. It will be through your ‘Mary-ness’, to coin a phrase, that we see more clearly how together we are all called to be priests to God’s world.
With love
David