Service for the Passing of Kenny Baker (Who Played R2D2)

Archdruid: Bee-bee-bee-boop-boop-trill

All: Bee-doo-bee-doo-bee

Archdruid: Tree-bee-doo-doo-bee-bee-doo

All: Bree-bree-dree-drill-doo-be-doo

Archdruid: Doo-bee-doo-bee-doo

All: Isn't that "Strangers in the Night?"

Mark Hamill:  We've lost R2!!!!!

All: May the Force be with him

Every Anglican Everywhere: And also with you.

A Camden Tale

Told to me by Burton Dasset, who was on his way home via St Pancras

A young woman in a hijab is walking along Pancras Way. She crosses a side road. Unknown to her, an angry bloke in a car is tearing along that side road.... the other side of a small rise in the road as she starts to cross.

Angry bloke has to stop at the white line because the young woman is already crossing the junction. He stops, beeps, and then swears profusely at the young woman.

Without looking towards him, she raises one middle finger in his general direction and carries on walking. Serenely.

Burton and other nearby pedestrians are left gasping for breath with laughter.

Homework Question : Which of these things makes you less fully human? A car or a hijab?

For Some Strange Reason - Durrington Walls and Ritual Relevance

Excitement at Durrington Walls as researchers discover, not a load of stones, but evidence of wooden posts.

Not  finding what they were looking for caused one archaeologist to say,

"For some strange reason they took the timbers out and put up the enormous bank and ditch that we see today."

Well, it may be a strange reason to Doctor Nicola Snashall. But I bet it was perfectly obvious to the people that did it.

Here at the Beaker Folk we are dedicated to the use of the thoughts and traditions of other cultures - Celtic, Aztec, Syriac - even if we have to make them up. Their being strange makes them more authentic.

But to the people that inhabited these cultures these things were normal. The Aztec empire fell when people realised that worshipping feathery bird-gods and playing nose-flutes and Tibetan gongs* were all getting a bit samey. Whereas Roman Catholicism seemed so much more.... authentic. Plus the Spanish had much more effective weaponry.

So "strange reason" to you may well be "perfectly sensible reason" or "sound liturgical practice" to someone else. The people that built, inhabited, and messed around with Durrington Walls would probably think you'd need a pretty strange reason to dig up somebody else's ritual site


* Hnaef - please check.

Vote Librarian

Just realised the political affiliation of Gary Johnson, very much the St Jude of the American presidential election.

He is a libertarian. Not, as I thought, a librarian.

Which is a shame. Librarians rarely get to the higher positions of political life. Power goes to career politicians, lawyers and, occasionally, chemists or actors.

A librarian president would, I think, have a radical effect on the Constitution. The First Amendment, for instance, would have to be changed, to say you had the right to free speech as long as you whispered.

And the Second Amendment would say Americans could bear arms as long as they didn't use them. Bloody noisy things, guns.

But what if it were a libertarian librarian? Perhaps people would be allowed to put their own books on the shelves - and not necessarily in accordance with the Dewey decimal system. That way chaos lies.

But for me the clincher is this. If George W Bush and Tony Blair had been librarians we would never have invaded Iraq. They would have been too busy working out whether the "dodgy dossier" were politics, geography or fiction.

Vote Librarian for a safer world.

Speak Like a Vicar

When leading services do you drop your aitches? Or, worse, call them haitches? Do you say "wou'n't" like Tracey from "Birds of a Fever"? Do you worry that your ars are a bit rarnded into wubble-yews?

Then you need the Beaker special retreat, "Speaking Like a Vicar". Here, in the relaxed surroundings of our English stately home, you can learn to speak like the Vicar in Dad's Army.

DAY 1

4pm - Arrival and tea in the Drawing Room

5pm - " Lessons from Pygmalion" - a warm-up session

6pm - Sherry. Yes, we know it's disgusting. But if you want to sound like a vicar you're gonna need some of this.

7pm - Supper. Your personal tutors will be listening for any linguistic laxity.

DAY 2

8am Breakfast

9am Stream 1 (Northern) - "On Ilkley Moor Without One's Hat". A musical unlearning of flattened vowels.

Stream 2 (Southern) - Considering the weather patterns in Hereford, Hertford and Hampshire.

11am - "Going a bit sing-song" - developing your own "special" voice for preaching.

12 noon - "The HTB alternative". Learn how to preach while sounding like Tony Blair.

1pm - Lunch

2pm - "How to speak very very slowly" - find out how to take 2 or 3 minutes over one word without hyperventilating.

3pm - The best of Derek Nimmo.

4pm - Tiffin and end.

The Fall and Rise of Duck Henge

It's been ages since we had problems with Duck Henge - that ancient (ish) trilithon that looms over the pond, and through which the sun rises on Saint Bogwulf's Day.

But it was a hot summer day, and Hnaef wanted a barbecue. And you know how much Hnaef likes a barbecue. He had the special gas-powered, Incinerato Mark III. And he was merrily blazing away when he accidentally took the brake off.

Duck Henge is a mystery. Erected in the mists of 2009, it has seen several solstices, Bogwulftides and St Kirsty's Days. But it is no more. Two burnt stumps rising from the edge of the pond, and some ash still floating on the water, are all left. We've had to cancel the rally in support of Christopher Biggins, we're that upset.

And so once again we have the task of rebuilding Duck Henge. We're thinking maybe steel girders - but is that such a good idea for an ancient monument? The Moot will have to decide.

Credited as Righteousness

Genesis 15 (abridged...) After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.” But Abram said, “O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?”

He brought him outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your descendants be.” And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.

As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years; but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions.

When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between [the sacrificed animals]. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates,

I'd like, in engaging in this little piece, to refer you back to a piece I previously wrote, called "In a Pagan Place". As the thing I wrote there certainly applies here. Not least as this passage from Genesis was the basis of a lot  of that.

Abram here is a stranger in an alien place. He has left his home and family and is in the company of strangers.  Leaving behind intertextuality for a moment, it is clear that his mind is disturbed. He's clearly a man to whom family means a lot - he's just spent chapter 14 rescuing his  nephew Lot from evil king Kerdolaomer of Elam. He's not an avaricious man, and he's a religious one,  because he gives 10% of his winnings from that battle to Melchizedek the priest-king of Salem.

But he has no children. And in a culture which apparently doesn't think much of the hope of an afterlife - children are your future. There's that line from last week's reading from Ecclesiastes - where he says what's the point of working for riches when you don't know what will happen to them when you die? At least, one hope is that you bequeath to your children.

So he's fretting. He's maybe feeling hopeless, empty. And God comes to Abram and says - do not be afraid. I will be your shield and great reward. And Abram's an honest bloke and all, so he replies well thanks, Lord. But that's not as good as having children, is it?

I like the honesty. At this point Abram should be grovelling with gratitude at  being told the Lord is his great reward. Instead, he says yes - but what about where I'm gonna leave all this money I just won? Thanks for all the being a shield and very great reward - but I actually wanted a baby.

Wanting a child. So deeply engrained into us that it is literally - and I don't often say "literally", this being a oasis of fuzzy thinking - in our DNA. And I don't often say " in our DNA." This being, as best as I can manage, a cliché-free zone. So deep a part of our human nature that it can override so many of our other human desires. Abram, I think, would have swapped all his gold and possibly even God being his great reward, to be a father.

It's so part of our nature - that's why, with questions of family and children, with the whys and hows - with our inbuilt assumptions that people want, and can have, children - we're normally best to ask no questions, make no assumptions, and listen graciously if we are called to.

The Lord has a plan for Abram. And it's beyond one line of inheritance, one stack of gold. He takes him outside, and Abram sees the stars - and God says, this is what your descendants will be like.

And Abram believed God's promise. And the Lord reckoned it to him "as righteousness".

And on that one short passage, so much of Paul's theology of salvation was founded. All of Romans 4 - as St Paul is working out how God's promises are given to Jews and Gentiles - comes from this one idea that when Abram believed the Lord, he was treated as righteous because of it. Galatians 3 - Paul rejects the idea that male Gentiles can only become proper Christians by having certain - ahem - modifications made, and all Christians should follow the Jewish food and ritual laws? Why? Because when Abram was credited as right with God, this happened because he believed, not because of him following the right ritual actions or eating the right food.

So God takes Abram and scares the wits out of him in this dark, pagan place. The darkness falls like death in that lonely place, but Abram sees God's light in the darkness and receives a promise that the Lord will keep.

Because Abram has faith God treats him as righteous. And Abram through Sarai his wife and through Hagar went on to have two sons who would become the ancestors of many nations.

But through the example of Abram's faith his inheritance was much wider than genetic children. God's love could not be constrained by human inheritance. Abram believed the Lord - and it was credited to him as righteousness. In that dark place, that eerie place, that place where the difference between the Lord and humanity was so stark. Here is a human being up against the wildness of the world - and the Lord transcends that wildness and speaks to Abram and makes promises.

And so God may seem far off, unspeakably distant, incomprehensible, all powerful. We may try to put God into many different boxes. Or we may chain him through liturgies, tame him through leading services in chinos. Domesticate him with simplistic hymns, and weigh him down with tea lights and pebbles. But God breaks all those boxes. God rejects our attempts at domestication, because God is the wild, eternal, unstoppable Being beneath all being. But awesome, unthinkable, unchainable as God is - God listens to a prayer spoken in terror or fear, breaks down all barriers to come to us and count us as right with God.

The sacrifices cut in half in that awesome place were not what brought Abram close to God. That was another sacrifice - made once and for all - many years later. They were just an image of what was to come - a shadow of the true sacrifice. God came close to Abram in that wild place. Came close to us in Jesus. Comes close to us through the Spirit. And says - "my nearness to you is not because you are good enough - because you're plainly not. It's because I love you enough. Only trust in me. And I will count you as good enough, because that's what Jesus makes you."

God is Really Quite Big

Came to me as we poured out beakers just now.

According to Beaker lore, night air is good air. I picked this idea up from my mentor, St Sue of Middlesbrough. I suspect her views, in turn, were formed by her experiences in 1970s Teeside, when there was slightly less chance that the smoke factories would be chucking out pollution at that time.

So we allow the holy beakers, filled with purest water from the Hus Bourne (n. b. - do not drink) to receive the goodness that pours down like God's mercy all night. And then in the morning we pour the waters out upon the ground, representing God's blessing. The ceremonies have the advantage of feeling vaguely pagan, without having anything you could put your finger on and get burnt as a witch for.

But as we poured it out, it struck me that water's incredible stuff, isn't it? Its polarity means that its atoms stick together - just enough for it to flow, when you pour it but not so much that it comes out of the Holy Beaker in a solid chunk. Except in the middle of winter, when we redefine the ritual as Chipping Out of Beakers.

Its polar nature means it is a liquid at temperatures much lower than organic molecules of the same weight. And it is a great solvent for salts - giving it the ability to carry calcium, the raw material of shells and skeletons. It dissolves carbon dioxide too - weakly  - and oxygen- bringing those other key materials into the seas that formed the womb of earth's life.

And also, in the right conditions, if you're rowing or dabbling around with the washing up or beside a river - it can run right up your arm. How does it do that?

And I'm not saying water is any kind of evidence of the existence of God. But I will say that, assuming there is a God, the thought that God could dream up water is an indicator of the fertile, diverse, creative God we have.

Water that can destroy an army, can pour over someone to wash them, can drag them down or bear them up. The thing that carries the fuel of our lives around our bodies - or pour out of a broken heart.

And when I imagine the Earth hanging, blue and beautiful with its seas like a water-drop in God's imagination, before God scattered its raw materials across the universe through the death of uncountable stars I have to face facts.

The God whom we create in our imaginations, who backs up our prejudices and approves of our flaws - or the God who nit-picks at our weaknesses - is really quite small.

And God, it seems to me, is really quite big.

How to Deal With a Crying Baby

Donald Trump has caused yet more controversy by telling a woman with a crying baby to get out of his rally.

But of course crying babies are just a thing in life. People have babies - apparently even Trump supporters find each other attractive enough to make them. But churches frequently have babies in the congregations - and not just for baptisms. So what tactics should we employ?

Saying "can you please remove that child? There's people trying to pray here". If Jesus said to bring the children to him, and then you order them out, whom are you most resembling? You could argue "a group of people we now call saints." Or you could think of a bloke with an orange face who insulted the parents of a dead soldier last week. Your choice....

Having a Baby Park. Have a space with some toys, and even a cupboard with emergency wipes and nappies and a changing mat. Make sure it's out of earshot, obviously. And make it clear that parents must supervise their babies at all times. But obviously only insist that babies are there if they are crying loudly. Or might....

But resist the temptation to clear a space for children at the back of the church, next to what Anglicans would call the "North Wall" . Nobody puts baby in the corner.

Tutting is sometimes quite effective. Can really put a young parent on edge. And you know how that calms babies down.

Likewise Staring can really look like prayerful concern. If you're really hungover or shortsighted.

Picking the Baby up when leading is a real high-risk strategy. If the baby calms down and starts gurgling happily people will think you're Francis of Assissi. If the baby panics at being picked up by a strange person when they were already upset - well, holding a purple, howling infant throwing their toy duckie in your face while milk-sick pours down your liturgical hi vis is never a good look. Still, out of the mouths of babes and ducklings....

A creche* is something that happens when people from Holy Trinity Brompton aren't driving their 4x4s carefully on the way to church. Probably started singing in tongues, lifted up their hands in praise and - bang - into then back of that Porsche Cayenne.

My preferred technique is to just carry on with the show. Maybe introduce a song in the hope that you remove embarrassment and give the baby / parent (s) chance to relax. If preaching, speak up, keep it snappy. Let them go out for a break if they want. And make sure you coincidentally get to them during the Scrum of Peace / coffee time and just be nice. Happy for any of my lovely readers to come up with better suggestions, of course.

Or, obviously, you could just utterly embarrass them and look like a complete horse's bottom. How you treat crying babies tells us a lot about what you think of other people whom you think are less important than you.

* yes it's an old joke. But worth it in the context I thought.

Liturgy of Your Day Being Wrecked by Trains When You Have Church Responsibilities

Burton Dasset staggers into the Moot Meeting, an hour late.

All: Where've you been Burton?

Burton: Train late due to signal failures.

All: Couldn't you have left earlier?

Burton: Not really. We're sorting out the end of month...

Archdruid: We haven't received your Treasurer's report, Burton.

Burton: No. I was going to do it on the HST this morning. But then a road fell on the line at Barrow on Soar - wherever that is - so I had to get the Thameslink and they don't have WiFi....

Archdruid: Do they not have WiFi in London?

Burton: You know how I mentioned the end of month....

All: What about coming home Burton?

Burton: We were all standing up. It's really hard to write a report when you're standing up.

All: That's the trouble with Burton. No dedication.

Lammas / Yorkshire Day

A reminder that liturgical wear today is hi vis and flat caps. Whippets will be raced at 4pm.

Old Mrs Boycott will be taking the collection at Pouring out of Beakers. Just throw coins towards her and she'll catch them in her pinnie.

Given the number of people refusing to eat Lammas loaves due to real or sympathetic gluten issues, we will instead be distributing sticks of rhubarb. It's up to you whether you eat them, or play a nice cover drive.