a ministry scrapbook
We have become obsessed with effectiveness which, according to Parker Palmer, means that we take on smaller tasks. For the bigger tasks, like love, mercy and peace we need a different measure. That measure is faithfulness.
From effectiveness to faithfulness from Center for Courage & Renewal on Vimeo.
A sermon preached at Mattins at Chester Cathedral on October 13th 2013.
The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher (or, of one who is taught), that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.
Morning by morning he wakens – wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught. Isaiah 50:4f
What are the words that waken us?
What are the words that weaken us?
To what extent do the words that waken us make us?
To what extent do the words that wake us break us?
What are the words that wake us?
I asked some Fb friends, and got loads of replies:
They ranged from the relatively mundane (but still wonderful)
“Do you want a cup of tea?”
to the “This is the day that the Lord has made”
there were those who said that they woke to the sound of silence.
Anna says that it isn’t really words that wake us so much as noises, events, images, light etc. To which jenny replied that it isn’t so much the words, as the tone of voice that wakes us
My friends didn’t think anyone used Rise and Shine any more. A bit old fashioned they thought. Though it strikes me as a good Christian wake up call with its associations with the Lazarus story. Perhaps it’s too upbeat and cheerful when waking from slumber.
The words that wake us have the power to make us or break us. The words pounded through the bedroom door – “you’ve got 10 minutes to get dressed and be on that bus”. What effect do they have on the day and family relationships?
Those who are haunted by fear and those who are anxious about the future have other words that wake them up – not just at the crack of dawn, but repeatedly through the night.
Words spring to mind when we are anxious, excited or depressed.
The words that wake the mother struggling to make ends meet are words of panic. What are the words that wake the child who is being bullied.
Words have power.
Words weigh heavy.They shape the way in which we see ourselves and others. Dismissive put downs can affect us for decades. Careless labeling of others mean that we misjudge others.
Many of the words we pick up from a world that is indifferent or hostile to us are so powerful that we come to believe them.
Be careful how you speak to your children. One day it will be their inner voice . Peggy O’Mara
We have to take care about what we say. Particularly with our first words of the day, or the first words of a conversation. An email reply comes across well with an opening response of “it’s good to hear from you”. Macdonalds aren’t far off the mark when their “servers” bless those they have served with “have a good day” – to which the correct response (probably not often said) is “and also with you”.
Malcolm Guite, a priest-poet, asks the questions in his poem “what if …..” Some lines:
“What if every word we say,
never ends or fades away?
What if not a word is lost,
what if every word we cast
cruel, cunning, cold accurst,
every word we cut and paste
echoes to us from the past,
fares and finds us
first and last
haunts and hunts us down?
What if each polite evasion,
every word of defamation,
insults made by implication,
querulous prevarication,
compromise in convocation,
propaganda for the nation
false or flattering persuasion,
blackmail and manipulation,
simulated desperation
grows to such reverberation
that it shakes our own foundation,
shakes and brings us down?
We must weigh our words carefully. The words that wake us are the words that make us and the words that break us.
The prophet, in our first reading, has the tongue of one who is taught. I suggest that it is not the “tongue of a teacher” as translated in our reading, but the “tongue of one who is taught” … by God – given by God so that he would know how to sustain the weary with a word. (Isaiah 50:4)
The words that wake the prophet are the words that make him. The words that wake him are the words of God.It is because God speaks and the prophet listens that the prophet becomes as one who is taught, as one who can sustain the weary with a word. The prophet says, “Morning by morning he wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught.”
The Bible often refers to the voice of God not being heard. There are various reasons for God’s word not being heard. They include God’s own silence, but also there are times when God’s word is not heard because it is not listened to.
Here we meet with the prophet whose ears woke every morning to the word of God. We can perhaps feel the intimacy between God and the prophet as the prophet feels the breath of God on his ear as he whispers him awake morning by morning.
What are the words that wake us?
There is no shortage to the words that wake us. Newspaper headlines, breakfast TV, advertising – these are the hidden persuaders who know that the words that wake us are the words that shape us, and they want to shape us to their own ends.
The prophet shows us an alternative. His ears are awakened by the whispered word of God, a word which brings blessing to him and the weary.
There are many people who have this discipline of listening to God before first light. It is a discipline shared by very many faith communities.
But our prayer, whether it be morning or evening, can be full of our own words, with God not being able to get a word in edgeways. We can say our prayers without hearing a word from God.
Hearing the word of God requires discipline and attentiveness.
We can choose the words. The words of God can be words of Jesus, words of the angels, words of scripture inspired by the Holy Spirit, words spoken through the prophets. God has spoken many words. They have been repeated down the ages and brought many to life. They have wakened many morning by morning, and hearing them has signified the end of night and the break of day. We can choose the words and we can let the words choose us.
All the words of God are summed up in the one Word, Jesus. All the words of God can be translated as love. “Love is his word” is how hymnwriter Luke Connaughton puts it. All the words of God are for the weary, the lost, the last and the least. They are timed for the dead of night, the ending of darkness and the first light of day.
If it is true that the words that wake us, make us, then is it true that if we allow the words of God to waken our ears morning by morning, we too will have the tongue of one who is taught?
Do the words by which God wakes us make us a blessing to those around us who are weary and those who are oppressed and abused by words and deeds that break them?
What are the words that wake us? What words wake us, make us and break us? These are the questions rattling round my mind today.
Malcolm Guite has a sobering reflection on words in which he reflects on the shadow side of language – he has called it “What if …” (You can hear Malcolm’s reading here). He prefaces his poem with these words from Matthew’s Gospel:
“But I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgement. For by thy words thou shalt be justified, and by thy words thou shalt be condemned.” Matthew 12:36-37
What if every word we say
Never ends or fades away,
Gathers volume gathers weigh,
Drums and dins us with dismay
Surges on some dreadful day
When we cannot get away
Whelms us till we drown?
What if not a word is lost,
What if every word we cast
Cruel, cunning, cold, accurst,
Every word we cut and paste
Echoes to us from the past
Fares and finds us first and last
Haunts and hunts us down?
What if every murmuration,
Every otiose oration
Every oath and imprecation,
Insidious insinuation,
Every blogger’s aberration,
Every facebook fabrication
Every twittered titivation,
Unexamined asservation
Idiotic iteration,
Every facile explanation,
Drags us to the ground?
What if each polite evasion
Every word of defamation,
Insults made by implication,
Querulous prevarication,
Compromise in convocation,
Propaganda for the nation
False or flattering peruasion,
Blackmail and manipulation
Simulated desparation
Grows to such reverberation
That it shakes our own foundation,
Shakes and brings us down?
Better that some words be lost,
Better that they should not last,
Tongues of fire and violence.
O Word through whom the world is blessed,
Word in whom all words are graced,
Do not bring us to the test,
Give our clamant voices rest,
And the rest is silence.
Malcolm has a new book of poetry being published this month – The Singing Bowl.
“True leaders are those who epitomise the general sense of the community – who symbolise, legitimise and strengthen behaviour in accordance with the sense of the community – who enable its conscious, shared values and beliefs to emerge, expand and be transmitted from generation to generation.”
Dee Hock in Birth of the Chaordic Age
Meg Wheatley, from a perspective of “new science” (quantum rather than Newtonian) sums up what leaders are for:
“People need a lot from their leaders. They need information, access, resources, trust and follow-through. Leaders are necessary to foster experimentation, to help create connections across the organisation, to feed the system with rich information from multiple sources.”
First half:
Shaking off the tiredness of the day
ushered black skin dayglo into concessionary parking
(it’s not Premier League you understand)
we trudge to Eastlands
side by side strangers
whose separate feelings
we don’t understand
but whose goal we share.
Parking charges upwards
through five poundland to eight poundland.
The crowd thickens, the heartbeat quickens
by pubs and scarf sellers geared and guarded
for their once in a while chance of trade and profit.
Tickets are for sale.
Queues pour from tiny windows like snakes
slowly slithering. We could complain.
It was an hour. But we’re not united.
We are City and what is a missing half?
Second Half:
A boy in the crowd waits to be found
amongst wannabes dreaming catapults
from limelight to spotlight.
Many moons from Titograd
to the moment of his life
a debut, two goals and a loud speaker
hailing the name Stevan Jovetic,
Number 35. Man of the Match
found and fanned to high heaven,
feelings united, everything forgotten.
Five nil.
“When we look at teaching in terms of hospitality, we can say that the teacher is called upon to create for students a free and fearless space where mental and emotional development can take place…. The hospitable teacher has to reveal to the students that they have something to offer. Many students have been for so many years on the receiving side and have become so deeply impregnated with the idea that there is still a lot more to learn, that they have lost confidence in themselves and can hardly imagine that they themselves have something to give, not only to the ones who are less educated but to their fellow students and teachers as well…..”
“We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Wherever men and women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must – at that moment – become the center of the universe.”
We can learn so much from the liturgies of other faith traditions. These are the 10 Days of Awe, Yamim Noraim in the Jewish calendar. They begin with Rosh Hashanah, New Year’s day celebrating the day the world was born, and end in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.
Rabbi Melissa Weintraub draws attention to the Days of Awe in an article in the Huffington Post. She calls the Yamim Noraim “a kind of high speed enactment of our life’s journey from birth to death”. She says “our liturgy brings us to the edge of the precipice between life and death in order to create the emotional conditions for urgent expression”
She recalls seeing her “schmaltzy” father leaning over his walker crying his heart out. He said, “I never got to say goodbye. Everyone – my mother, sisters, and brothers – all died without knowing how much I loved them.” She suggests that the Yamim Noraim summon us to rehearse the end of our lives – “to lean over our walkers in advance. To say what we need to say before it is too late.”
She illustrates her point by sharing a moving account of Steve Martin’s final meeting with his father, with whom he had had a difficult relationship.
I walked into the house they had lived in for 35 years, and my weeping sister said, “He’s saying goodbye to everyone.” A hospice nurse said to me, “This is when it all happens.” I didn’t know what she meant, but I soon would..
I walked into the bedroom where he lay, his mind alert but his body failing. He said, almost buoyantly, “I’m ready now.” I understood that his intensifying rage of the last few years had been against death and now his resistance was abating. I stood at the end of the bed, and we looked into each other’s eyes for a long, unbroken time. At last he said,”You did everything I wanted to do.”
I said, “I did it because of you.” It was the truth.
I sat on the edge of the bed. Another silence fell over us. Then he said, “I wish I could cry, I wish I could cry.”
At first I took this as a comment on his plight, but I am forever thankful that I pushed on. “What do you want to cry about?” I finally said.
“For all the love I received and couldn’t return.”
He had kept his secret, his desire to love his family, from me and my mother his whole life. It was as though an early misstep had kept us forever out of stride. Now, two days from his death, our pace was aligning, and we were able to speak.
I sometimes think of our relationship graphically, as a bell curve. In my infancy, we were perfectly close. Then the gap widened to accommodate our differences and indifference. In the final days of his life, we again became perfectly close.
There is a physicality to the introspection of the Days of Awe. Rabbi Melissa shows us some of the scope of atonement. I am grateful for her insights from a tradition that prepares such care-full celebrations of the grace of new life and atonement.
L’Shana Tovah. Happy New Year.
Thank you to slgckgc for the photo of the shofar blowing.
Thank you C Jill Reed for this photo of Praying Hands: a 30 ton 60 ft tall bronze statue at Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The praying hands are just so huge that they make our own hands puny in comparison. Surely these are the hands of Christ, through whom our prayers are heard and minded by God. He is the great High Priest whose love blesses the universe.
All Christians are called to be intercessors with responsibilities to pray for our enemies as well as our friends.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote about the importance of intercessory prayer in Life Together:
A Christian community either lives by the intercessory prayers of its members for one another, or the community will be destroyed.
I can no longer condemn or hate other Christians for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble they case me. In intercessory prayer the face that may have been strange and intolerable to me is transformed into the face of one for whom Christ died, the face of a pardoned sinner. That is a blessed discovery for the Christian who is beginning to offer intercessory prayer for others.
As far as we are concerned, there is no dislike, no personal tension, no disunity or strife that cannot be overcome by intercessory prayer. Intercessory prayer is the purifying bath into which the individual and the community must enter every day.
The Church’s Lectionary prompts us to read two passages which talk about table manners. The passage from Hebrews (13:1-8) reminds us to entertain strangers (“for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it”) and to remember those in prison (“as though you were in prison with them”). The Gospel passage (Luke 14:7-14) Jesus turns the tables on our normal manners by telling us to “invite the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind” when giving a banquet, rather than friends, family and people who do us good.
These are extraordinary and good table manners. What we are supposed to do at our tables we are also supposed to do in our prayers. In our prayers we are entertaining people in our hearts and minds. And we have to stretch our minds and hearts so that we pray for those who are at the margins of our consciousness – we prepare a place for the stranger, the poor, the prisoner.
In praying for them we bring them centre stage in an act of remembrance, as if we were in prison with them. We pray for those for whom life has gone wrong, for those who don’t know what peace is, or family is. We pray for the unlovely and the lost as if we are unlovely and lost with them. This is a sympathetic (or empathic) position, but it is not about identification, because, as Oswald Chambers reminds us, intercession also puts us in God’s place. He writes: “People describe intercession by saying, “It is putting yourself in someone else’s place.” That is not true! Intercession is putting yourself in God’s place; it is having his mind and his perspective.”
These are deeply healing processes. When we pray for others we are at the very least remedying neglect and overcoming fears and divisions. And we are, at the very most, putting ourselves “in God’s place” of overcoming evil with far better table manners and prayer.
In an address to a recent seminar on teaching RE and Christianity in schools Professor David Ford draws attention to the importance of “reading religiously” by referring to these words from Paul Griffiths:
So far as I can recall, I have always been able to read, to make sense of and be excited by written things. I know, of course, that there was a time when I could not read; it’s just that I cannot remember it. But I was never taught, and have still not properly learned, how to read with careful, slow attentiveness; it is difficult for me to read with the goal of incorporating what I read, of writing it upon the pages of my memory; I find it hard to read as a lover, to caress, lick, smell, and savor the words on the page, and to return to them ever and again.
I read, instead, mostly as a consumer, someone who wants to extract what is useful or exciting or entertaining from what is read, preferably with dispatch, and then move on to something else… I’m not alone in this condition. Most academic readers are consumerist in their reading habits, and this is because they, like me, have been taught to be so and rewarded for being so.
But I’ve also spent a good portion of my life trying to understand what it means to be a Christian, as well as much time studying literary works composed by Indian Buddhists. Both of these practices have gradually led me to see that consumerist reading isn’t the only kind there is. It’s also possible to read religiously, as a lover reads, with a tensile attentiveness that wishes to linger, to prolong, to savor, and has no interest at all in the quick orgasm of consumption.
Reading religiously, I’ve come to think, is central to being religious. Losing, or never having, the ability so to read is tantamount to losing, or never having, the ability to offer a religious account of things.
Paul J Griffiths. Religious Reading. The place of reading in the practice of religion (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) pp.ix-x.
Grits and Grains 