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.

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.

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. 

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.