Sunday 17 March 2024

If a kernel of wheat dies (John 12:20-33)

The first thing always strikes me about this passage is: these Greeks have come to Jesus. Or to be exact they’ve come to Philip, who’s gone to Andrew, and together they’ve gone to Jesus.

Who then ignores the Greeks completely and just goes off on this tangent.

Is this because the Greeks have actually served their purpose? Jesus has gone out to the Children of Israel. Some have responded, some haven’t. And occasionally he’s met a Gentile - a non-Jew - and dealt with them – the Centurion whose servant he heals, or the Syro-Phoenician woman.

But this time there’s a delegation come to see him. Isaiah 60 says “all nations will come to your light”. And maybe Jesus sees this as the sign that his mission on earth is coming to an end – and the greater mission is come. And so immediately he’s talking about his death, and about how when you plant a seed, that seed “dies” in the ground, but many seeds will come from the resulting plant.

And so he knows he will be lifted up on the cross. But when he is, that means the Spirit can be poured out on all the disciples – from then until now – to share the Good News throughout the world. The seed will be sown – and many seeds will be produced. That first generation of Jesus’s disciples showed the recklessness that only those who know the most important thing on earth- and want to share it – can show.

And in being lifted up, Jesus also draws all people to himself. The word “lifted up” also means “exalted”. And it’s in Jesus’s crucifixion that he’s shown in glory. It’s in his death that he drives out the evil Prince of this world.

Being a gloomy soul, I like to spend a lot of time in churchyards. Apart from anything else, wearing my big archdruidical cloak, you can terrify the unwary around sundown. And it’s not the big old tombs to important people that move me. They've maybe had their reward. It’s the graves of young children. It’s the military graves, people dying in their 20s and 30s and 40s to protect our country. The young women lost before they achieve their dreams. And I think of all that sadness, their lost potential for love and achievement, not living to see dreams  come to fulfilment or their children grow. I think of all those young people lost in the AIDS pandemic, of my friend Sally, so full of life and interest in everyone else that she drove us up the wall quite frequently -  taken so suddenly in the Covid pandemic.

And then I consider the Son of God, crucified for me, just in his early 30s. The grief of his mother. The dashed dreams of his disciples. All the teaching and preaching he could have done – all the love he would have shared given another 40 or 50 years of ministry.

In all our broken dreams and lost potential, and all our sadnesses, and in every might-have-been that never will be – God is with us.

And yet because a seed has been sown, it will grow to new life. At the point of death, beyond the point of hope, in the grave, God is with us there too. Calling us all to him. Calling us to share in the glorious land beyond all our dreams, where we are truly ourselves and can worship the King face to face and know as we are known and love as we are loved.

And it’s only through a cross that we can be saved, and only through the grave that we can be raised, and only when a seed dies that it will grow to new and abundant life.

So we trust in the one who was exalted on a cross and follow the one who gave up his life, that we might all share in it.

Sunday 10 March 2024

The Complete Church Generation X Detector

I feel I should share this with you. This was revealed to me today, as in a dream.

If you refer to the Book of Judges, and you say that the best judge was a woman.

And you say that her name was Deborah.

And then say that it never suited her.

Anyone who nods and smiles quietly, is Generation X.

If they look baffled, they're Boomers.

And if they say she should have been happy with the name her father gave her, they're evangelicals.

Tuesday 27 February 2024

Beaker Collect for St George Herbert

 We desire that, if we meet George Herbert on the road, we may kill him.

And that we may so balance our desire to care, our desire to please, and our bodily and mental health needs, that we don't end up burned-out wrecks or die of consumption.

Amen. 

Saturday 17 February 2024

Bishop Alan Wilson

I'm so sad to hear of the death of Alan Wilson, Bishop of Buckingham.

Alan was a good friend of the Beaker Folk, a funny and caring man. 

May he rest in peace and rise in glory. We'll be lighting tea lights for him, Lucy, and all his family. 

Thursday 1 February 2024

Say it with Ashes

We're so excited that this year's Ash Wednesday falls on Valentine's Day.

It gives Melissa Sparrow the chance to write a special series of poems reflecting on both the joy of love, and the fleeting nature of all earthly joys. 

Welcome to our special collection of Ashy Valentine cards. I think you'll agree - they're the perfect combination of romantic love and impending doom.




Text inside: 

Violets are blue, roses are red
let's get it on now, before we're both dead.



Text inside: 

Don't leaf me this way 
Why can't you see
I might fall off this tree?


Text inside:

A rose by any other name
Would still be withered and dead within a fortnight.
Will you be my Valentine? 

Text inside:

I've fallen for you
Can you pick me up
Before we're all just ashes?

Wednesday 24 January 2024

Family Worship and Inclusivity

I'd like to apologize for this Sunday's Family Worship.

Some people have complained that the use of the term "Family Worship" might be regarded as patriarchal. Insensitive to those that have non-traditional family structures. Or even non-Biblical family structures. I know that Dweezil claims his family structure (himself, his wife, his wife's sister, two housemaids and all their children) is Biblical. But, at least in 21st Century Husborne Crawley, it's not traditional. I know we say we're inclusive, but I wasn't intending to include that.

However. I did argue that even though I don't really like the term, you could say that Family in this context means all the Beaker Family together for the whole act of worship, not just for the first ten minutes and then the Little Pebbles are sent to do something more interesting, while the adults all try and pretend that lighting tea lights in a different order is somehow creative. It's important that we all learn together sometimes.

And that's why, when Gredwell said he was prepared to lead Family Worship, I was happy to think that we would all be together.

I didn't realise Gredwell meant we were supposed to worship the Trump family. Not that kind of Family Worship. 

We're certainly not that inclusive.

Sunday 21 January 2024

Church Vacancy: Facilitation Facilitator - Diocese of Barchester

As part of the Bishop of Barchester's strategy for the diocese: "Re-envisioning the Vision", a number of roles have been created for Mission Facilitators.

Each Mission Facilitator is assiged to a Mission Facilitation Group. They can be either lay or ordained. Their role is to facilitate Mission within the Group, identifying opportunities for facilitation when the Mission is under-facilitated, and enabling greater facilitation.

But Mission Facilitators cannot facilitate Mission on their own. They are above all mediators between those who apparently worship in what used to be called "parishes", and the team of Mission Archdeacons-without-Portfolio who have been appointed to manage the facilitators. Their roles require communication both vertically - up to the Mission Archdeacons and down to the people who occasionally meet in churches - and sideways, to ensure that they are facilitating Mission in a way that is truly enabling and envisioning.

In order to ensure the cohesion of the Mission Facilitators, Benefice Consolidators, and Mission Archdeacons, we have therefore created the role of Facilitation Facilitator. The right person for the role will be responsing for both upstream and downstream Mission Facilitation, chairing the Mission Facilitation committee and providing the Mission Archeacons with up to date information on the Mission Facilitation dashboard, enabling them to gain a helicopter view of where Mission requires additional facilitation, and where Mission has been quite facilitated enough.

If you feel you are the right person for this job, send your CV, together with full details of your career in Post Office management, to the PA to the PA to the PA to the PA to the Archdeacon of Barchester, Plumstead Episcopi, Barsetshire.

Thursday 11 January 2024

The Typical Church Notice Board

 Welcome to our guide to church notice boards.

We're not saying this is the perfect notice board.

But it's probably the one you'll end up with.






Saturday 6 January 2024

Happy Easter

"Why are you displaying Easter Eggs already?" asks Rachel Treweek, Bishop of Gloucester.

The short answer is - "Logistics". 

The long answer - what else are the supermarkets now going to put on their shelves? 

The Christmas clearance is being cleared. The Mothering Sunday flowers can't be brought in until a few days before Mothering Sunday. Likewise those for Valentine's Day. And Epiphany and Candlemas aren't great marketing opportunities. So what is relatively long life, can be got onto the shelf, and some people might buy them in advance? Chocolate eggs. 

You simply can't deliver every required Easter Egg on Maundy Thursday. There aren't enough warehouses to hold them until then (though you might believe there is if you take a tour from Marston Gate, via Wellingborough and Corby, to Rugby). There aren't enough lorries to get on the road to deliver them all in a day or a week or a fortnight. 

Also - they're colourful, they're jolly, and they're just the thing to brighten up the shelves in these dark days of after-Christmas while we wait for the days to lengthen in earnest.  And Cadbury's Creme Eggs have been available from 1 January to Easter since 1975.

So happy Easter!  

Oh, and as for Nigel Griffin of Gloucester, who said: "It is a bit too early. I wonder what the sell by date is on them. They could go out of date before Easter." 

Go and look at one, Nigel. They're easy to find. They're on the supermarket shelves. Then  you'll know.