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. 

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Oxen and the Angels

A Christmassy Poem - The Oxen by Thomas Hardy. Based on an old tradition that the animals would bow in worship on Christmas night: 

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

“Now they are all on their knees,”

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

“Come; see the oxen kneel,

“In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know,”

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

A lovely poem from one of the great writers about Christmas. Albeit he was an agnostic or atheist, or somewhere in between He had embraced the mid-Victorian changes in views on science, taken up Modernism, and decided they didn’t tally with Christianity. 

I’ll be honest, to me the science of those 19th Century Modernists – deterministic, everything in its place – seems naive in the light of the 20th Century discoveries in Relativity and Quantum Theory. And that confident belief in the religion of Progress was shattered by two world wars. Which also broke Western faith, and left nothing in its place.

Hardy seems to believe that in shedding the folk faith of his childhood, he has lost something. And I think he has. Douglas Adams has one of his characters say, “Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” – which causes me to reflect two things – one is that even the wildest of wildflower gardens has a gardener. And the other is – wouldn’t it be great if there were fairies at the bottom of the garden?

And because the church is so often in hock to the ideas of 30, 50, or 100 years ago, we can be part of the disenchantment of our world. Because we’re often basing what we do on the secular modernism of the past. It’s too easy to cling to schemes for growing the church, following the methodology of business, working on our bug-free five steps to salvation or seven weeks to change your life. Or the business methods of charismatic leadership can give us churches which are about the personality and power – and protection – of the leaders rather than actually following God’s ways.

And sometimes, the job of the church is to stop being busy about schemes, be quiet, and listen to the angels sing. And on Christmas Night, of all nights, it’s appropriate. Because – back to Hardy’s poem – a world devoid of mystery is a world just a little hollow. And while I don’t believe that cows bow the knee in their barns on Christmas Eve, I do believe that a mystery happened the day that God dropped in.

Our tired old world has made its 4.53 billionth trip around the sun. Or thereabouts. We remember that one year, the God who made the earth made it his home.  And we can praise the God whose birth was heralded by the angels who sang when the Universe was made. Whose dark eyes reflected the stars that he called into being.

So we come, and bow, lay our claims down, and give God thanks. Today a child has been born to us. Born to bring us close to his Father. Born to make the world anew. And the heavens tell us his glory. So take a moment, make space in your heart, and hear the angels sing.

The Fairytale of Isaiah

"Yet, O Lord, you are our Father; we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand." (Isa 64:8) 

Hard to know where to start with the woe of the world today. Innocents suffer and die as Hamas attacks Israel and Israel bombs Gaza. Ukraine faces another winter of bombardment of its energy supplies, up against a gormless yet relentless opponent. In order to try to resolve the issue of climate change, three English dignitaries fly to a conference in separate private planes. And Shane MacGowan has died just before Christmas. And the hope that Fairytale of New York may finally make it to number 1 after 36 years comes as small consolation.

Like Kirsty McColl and Shane Macgowan, Isaiah 64 is looking into a world of disillusionment after hope. After Exile, the hope was that the Jews would return to a land of blessing - where ever valley was raised up, every mountain lowered, every road made smooth, and they would live up their calling to be God's chosen people.

Instead, they managed about half of it. Malachi will point out to them that they're letting down their side of the covenant in the imperfect sacrifices they're bringing.They were still a fractious little nation, with a poor replica of their original Temple, surrounded by enemies and at risk of being crushed by the great empires around them. The dreams weren't bad, but after the party they still have the hangover of reality to face. 

And if that's not sounding familiar yet again today, I don't know what is.

And yet amid the disappointment, there is hope. And the hope doesn't come from the failing People of God, as they forget to call on God's name and do their substandard good works. Instead it comes from their Covenant God. The one who on Sinai made the mountain shake with holiness.

And so the turn to God as their faithful parent - "we are the clay, and you are our potter; we are all the work of your hand." The clay on the wheel may go wrong - but that doesn't make it worthless. It can be remoulded, returned, broken flat and made into a ball and raised up again.

All those people that sell us perfect lives - with the right products, the right lifestyle, the right prayers, the right way of following God's laws - are lying to us. Because in this world it is not in our hands to have a perfect life. Even a man as rich as Elon Musk must put up with his own fallibility - whether he believes in it or not.

When Kirsty tells Shane in "Fairytale" that he's taken her dreams from her, he says "I kept them with my own. Can't make it all alone. I built my dreams around you." In the drunk-tank, as two lovers scream abuse at each other, there's still a glint around, as the boys of the non-existent NYPD choir sing and the bells ring out Christmas Day.

We can despair, or we can turn and say - you are the potter, I am the clay. Let's try again, and again. Remake me again, and let's see how it works out this time. And let me be remade and remodelled and changed until the day when I am fully in the right image - the one I am called to be, the one I was seen as before time began, the one I will be when time ends. And if it takes the end of time to make this all right, then let that be.

Be a Goat

 Intrigued by this re-interpretation of the Parable of the Talents where the third servant (who didn't do anything with his talent, and was cast out into the darkness etc etc) is in fact the hero.

And turning to the story of the Sheep and Goats, and thinking - maybe that's how we should approach that? What if the Goats, who are not doing the "good works" expected of them, are in fact the ones who are protesting against an unfairly structured society? What if visiting those in prison is effectively supporting the elite in their use of imprisononment as a tool of injustice against the poor? Acting as an opiate of the masses when they should be rejecting the whole concept of jail as a civilised way of dealing with issues?

What if those feeding the hungry are in fact thereby propping up and unjust and capitalist system? Because, after all, it's the State that should be feeding the hungry. All the food banks are just covering up the injustice, when to refuse to feed the hungry is the radical act that demands we rise up and overthrow the whole system from the top down? Starting with... erm... God.

And so the goats are cast into eternal punishment. Martyrs to the cause. We stand with you, comrades.

In the making of Memes there is no End

Apparently this quote from Facebook  (where I saw it) is by someone called David Rankin. I have no idea which of the many David Rankins. But it doesn't matter, of course, as it's been turned into a meme. It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you've put words onto a wacky image and saved it as a jpg, it must be true. No Harvard referencing system required.

The meme is using a fairly imprecise meaning of "apocalyptic that really means "eschtological", I think.  And when you look at the Parable of the Talents, you've gotta say it's pretty end-timesy, but not all that apocalyptic. Jesus doesn't invoke dragons, beasts, talking horns and all of the genuine apocalyptic stuff, just a bloke going on a journey and leaving behind some slaves to look after some money.

And bear in mind it is money. The English word "talents" comes from this parable. But in the parable, it's a huge amount of money. One talent is maybe twenty years' labour for a worker.

 And the parable isn't about just sitting around and waiting for the owner to come back, whatever the meme writer may think. If anything the opposite. The slave who just sits around and waits for the owners' return is the one who gets the telling off. It's the ones that are active about their masters' business who are commended.

And that's what Jesus expects of us through this parable. We have an amount of time alloted to each of us. We don't know how long it will be till we are called home, or Christ comes - in whatever way. What are we going to do with it? We can make smug Internet memes like the smug atheists (other smug belief systems' memes are available). Or we can assist food banks. Visit the sick. Raise money for Ukraine. Work to give medical assistance to people in other, less fortunate countries.

The irony of the slave who buried his talent is that burying it was actually more trouble than taking it to the bankers. We can actually put more effort into evading the responsibilities we have, than into fulfilling them. We can run after all sorts of unproductive things rather than do something useful with your time.

And this is not a call that every Christian should be a superhero for Jesus all the time. It's possible for us all to be tired, depressed, old, feeling that we cannot be producting servants, generating eternal wealth. But the master in the story has handed out the talents in different amounts - and yet both the man with five talents and the man with two received the same reward - to be given more responsibility and enter into their master’s favour.

But in the round, for all of us - to quote the meme - is our identity around the world ending? Yes it is. But when Jesus comes, we shan't be sitting around waiting for him - that would be burying our talents. We shall have been busy doing his work for him, and shall receive our reward.

All Souls’ – an explanation

A quick correction on the advert we put up on the BeakerWeb for our All Souls’ Service.

When we said “we will be commemorating all those who have died by lighting candles at our Sunday Evening Service”, we didn’t mean that Sunday Evening services are particularly dangerous.

Nor is there any need for an exclusion zone around the tea light stands.

I hope this clarifies matters.