A Sermon for Sunday
October 12th, 2008

Proper 23

Exodus 32:1-14
Philippians 4:1-9
Matthew 22:1-14

What do the mice do when the cat’s away? “When the cat’s away the mice will play”. In the French version of the same saying it seems that the mice “dance”. You get the drift. They move the tables and chairs off the floor, put up streamers and turn the stereo on nice and loud. They can’t be trusted.

Any substitute teacher knows what will happen when he leaves a class and wanders down to the office with some paperwork. He can hear the voices begin to mount in the classroom as he takes the first steps away from the door and knows that he’s got only seconds before his class erupts in chaos. If he’s clever, he’ll time the day so that there are no gaps – one activity will follow the other like clicks on a metronome. Keep the children busy and you’ll keep the children happy.

Delay and you’ll only create a vacuum which nature itself or human nature abhors. William Golding’s novel ‘The Lord of the Flies’ shows how in the absence of order and structure new hierarchies will develop among children left to their own devices. We’ll always fill in the gaps. We’ll always make accommodations. We hate to wait.

In our story from the Book of Exodus, which we read this morning, Moses was off on a mountain speaking to God and the people of Israel were left alone. Moses was away. God seemed remote - an idea - a memory. There was absolutely nothing to hand. An agreed common history – brutal though it may have been – had slowly begun to redeem itself in the memory. Where were we, in Egypt? Slavery, yes – but was it so awful, after all? There was food, there was a place to sleep. And the future - what can we say about that? We’re told there’s a land somewhere out there. It’s where we’re going. It’s filled with milk and honey, don’t you know. Milk and honey? Here we are - barely able to find our way and we’re living in the shadow of a promise, an idea, a possibility – something which an invisible God said to a man who isn’t here today. He’s gone and we’re alone. Now there’s a gap which wants filled.

There’s a lot to be said for filling gaps. There’s a lot to be said for accommodating one’s self to reality. We do it all the time. Accepting something less than we once wanted might just be a sign of maturity. Taking stock of where you’re standing and squinting slightly until it begins to look better is one of the things that we find ourselves forced to do. Adapting. Accepting something less with a shrug. As my grandfather used to say: It may be an ugly dog but it’s my dog.

Accommodation. If you can’t accommodate you won’t stay married for long. If you can’t accommodate you’ll never find a church you’re happy to settle in. I know plenty of people who’ve don’t join a church as much as they camp in a series of churches for six months or a year. They’re looking for something grand and they end up with real people with real foibles and a pastor who’s merely human and a roof that leaks. They can’t do it - they refuse to accommodate and so they move on.

You wake up one morning next to the snoring tousled person you married and you reflect how this was not part of the daydream you had. Living with the reality of your marriage, your church, your work – living for that matter with the reality of who you are and have become – requires a degree of accommodation. You jostle your expectations a bit. You make do. You go to work anyway. This is your job. This is your husband – your wife. This is life. It may be an ugly dog but it’s my dog.

But are there limits? Yes I think there are. I think there are dreams, which we need to rediscover when we’ve accommodated too much. When we’ve accommodated ourselves endlessly to a life grown small and stunted. It’s possible to accommodate too much.

The people of Israel out there in the desert go about building their own god. They melt down their jewellery. They make a veal calf out of it and bow down to it. We might not understand that. It doesn’t have a lot of analogues in our own experience. It’s just a thing. It’s the same gold you could fill teeth with or make wedding rings. Like Isaiah says: a man takes a piece of wood and cuts it in two. With one half he builds a fire and warms himself. With the other half he makes for himself a god. Isaiah repeats the same thing three times in case we don’t understand. It’s just a thing. It’s no god.

We have appetites. We cling to groups of like-minded people. We scream at the other team. We are Scots, we are Canadians: we have political or national affiliations. We have preferences in music and art. We’re members of families. We live for our children, we live for our art. We buy lottery tickets. We worry about our health and try to keep ourselves fit. It may not be God but it’ll do in his absence.

There are a lot of things which feel like Grace and which feel like God.

Sometimes we know we’re following the wrong track – sometimes we don't. We may have wrapped ourselves up with the lives of our congregations – with their intrigues and the particular web of relationships and institutions. Churches have a life of their own. "We’re doing our part for the Kingdom of God", we say. There are only a few of us on the Vestry or the Session. Somebody needs to do this. But maybe we forget that our church points to something beyond itself. Beyond the actions and the hymns, beyond the execution of good liturgy, beyond the sermon and the young people’s group, there is the presence of God within and around us. Kneeling there at the altar rail, vulnerable and face to face with the reality of a God who loves us and nourishes us we might need to be reminded that none of these tasks and responsibilities is an end in itself but simply a means. That’s what it’s about. So take your place in the life of the church, fill your shoes as part of the property committee or the altar guild but don’t forget what stands above and beyond all that – remember the invisible reality which underpins all of that and don’t ever let the contingent things of life replace the Eternal things. We’ve accommodated too much – our boredom is showing - and it’s time we raised our sights. We need to look beyond the things that are to hand.

Anxiety and impatience: that’s what drove them to it out there in the desert with their Golden Calf. We live in an anxious and impatient age as well. The smouldering sense of dread is seeps out of our newscasts every evening. We’re meant to believe that this is an age where humans have outlived a personal God and have evolved beyond the revealed religion of earlier ages but what we see is tremendous hunger. We will go to great lengths to fill the gap with something – anything. Genuinely hunger for a relationship with a living God deserves to be satisfied. The tragedy out there in the desert occurred because the people would not wait and allowed something less than God to take his place.

Lift your eyes higher. Be hungry a little longer. Be satisfied with nothing less than the real thing which alone will satisfy.

Taking the lead from a master.....

I got a few words muddled up in yesterdays "Thought for the Day". They were the same words I muddled up while I was practising it so have made a note-to-self to replace anything hard to say before I get in front of a microphone. Clearly I need to take more of a lead from the master himself.

Good advice from Asbo Jesus.

A film I'm looking forward to...

Ian Jack's review in this morning's Guardian of the Terence Davies' new film Of Time and the City certainly makes it look like something worth waiting for.

Sermon for Sunday the 5th of October

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
Philippians 3:4b-14
Matthew 21:33-46


Krzysztof Kieslowski made a series of ten one-hour films for Polish television. The series was entitled simply ‘Dekalog’ and each episode took one of the Ten Commandments and told a story loosely based upon it.

In the episode ‘you shall not covet…’ two brothers inherit a valuable but incomplete stamp collection from their estranged father and become obsessed by both the wealth they have inherited and the fact that the missing stamps in the collection are owned by other people’

In the episode based on the commandment “you shall do no murder” – the brutality of a disadvantaged killer is contrasted with the cold efficiency of the state in its preparations to take his life on the gallows.

In the film ‘honour your father and mother’ a child’s relationship with her father becomes complex and muddled when she discovers that he is, in fact, not her biological father.

I can lend it to you if you’re interested and are over the age of 18.

One of the critics notes rather innocently, that viewers should not take the connections to each commandment to be literal but rather that they are used as a reflection upon the complex nature of moral decision making. 'Please take this as art' – he seems to be saying – 'and not reality – because this is complex and not simple'.

But – we want to cry out – Life is not simple! Moral decisions are made in complex relationships – rarely are things simple and clear-cut.

Complex and not simple: If we keep to the simplest reading of the ten commandments then we will admit that it possible to keep all ten of them.

I, for one, expect to end my years not having killed anybody – I regard that as a reasonable hope. I would expect my family and members of my congregation to be genuinely surprised and dismayed if it were ever revealed that I had committed murder.

Surely there is no necessity to stray from the marriage bed. People remain faithful to each other within the covenant of marriage quite regularly.

I would even go as far as to suggest that with a certain degree of childhood formation in both humility and generosity that it might be possible to fulfil the plainest personal meaning of not coveting your neighbour’s goods.

And I have met folks who do, in fact, say ‘Darn, Shucks, or Fiddle when they bang their thumb with the hammer.

And so, for example, when the rich young ruler announces with cheery self-assurance to Jesus that he has kept all these commandments from his youth we have no reason to suggest that he is either a lying toad or some rare breed of human. It is within the realm of reasonable discipline to keep the Ten Commandments in the simplest and most ordinary way that they can be read.

Now if you were really cheeky you might interject that we are not all equally advantaged when it comes to law keeping. Some of us have stronger drives than others and straying from the matrimonial bed is easier. Some of us were raised with very little and so coveting the goods of others is harder for us to avoid than it is for you who were raised with much. Some of us are quick-tempered or live in violent communities. Raising our hand against another man is not so great a stretch.

So what about that one over there on his donkey with a cheery face talking to Jesus: is he a law-keeper merely because his drives are low and his needs met?

But that’s sort of a side-line, isn’t it? We were saying that it is possible to end one’s life having kept the Ten Commandments.

When Jesus launches himself into his ministry after the death of John the Baptist he finds himself constantly bumping into the Pharisees. These were men who had taken up the challenge of teaching ordinary Jews how to keep the law and affirm their identity as God’s people. Not only Jews living in Jerusalem but as was more often the case living in the midst of Gentiles – in the homeland but also abroad – in Asia Minor or Egypt - ordinary Jews living complex lives and not simple ones. And the law they were to keep was not merely the Ten Commandments but the whole of the Levitical law as it governed food and marriage, work and religious observance.

But the Pharisees believed it could be done and they also treated this as a reasonable hope and intended to be successful in what they taught.

We’re used to thinking of the Pharisees as Jesus’ opponents but they were practical and often very popular teachers. It might have even seemed to them to that the failure of partnership between themselves and this new rabbi was a great tragedy. For their part they initially looked on Jesus as one of their own – a teacher of righteousness who was gathering disciples around him. They showed genuine interest and unfeigned offers of fellowship - though somewhat tinged with curiosity because of the sorts of people who Jesus was beginning to gather to himself.

Jesus will part company with the Pharisees on this point – taking both a greater and lesser emphasis on law keeping. The Sabbath was made for man – he says – and men and women can be healed on it. God desires the return of his people and God’s servants must maintain contact with lawbreakers. There will be no shunning of sinners but, rather, contact and engagement. And yet the commands of the law are even greater than we imagine.

If you could only see – Jesus tells his disciples – that murder is not merely doing another to death but is a part of the whole cycle of anger which we cannot and regularly do not avoid. Adultery is part of lust and exploitation. It begins in the heart and not the bedroom. Bearing false witness merely the promotion of an unwinnable point in the face of much evidence.

We might call it spin! We’d pay someone to do it on behalf of our company or our government.

Ultimately the law will tell me what sin is. The deeper I look the more I will find myself implicated and culpable. And I will come to recognize the violence that is within me when my anger boils over.

The law will tell me what sin is and I will begin to recognize that the half-truths I speak are covered by the heart of the commandment relating to false witness.

So what will I do? This is the question which is ultimately asked in plaintive tones by the disciples when Jesus gives them some home truths about the full weight of the commandment. 'Who then, can be saved', they ask.

In the long run I shall not ask for a certificate of my compliance from my Creator. I will not say that I have done all these things from my youth because I have not. I will not begin to pretend that I have fulfilled the demands of honesty which the law truly requires or that I have kept myself completely apart from the network of exploitation that is part of our world.

I shall not presume to have fulfilled the law’s demands.

I will do what the law of God and the judgement of God give me no alternative but to do which is to ask, ultimately, for grace and for mercy.

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The whole service is HERE. Sermon starts at 12:57 on the counter.

Isn't it always the way!

I've been in restaurants where it's simply not possible to be served. In Montreal it was the Greek fast-food joints where the family would clearly be having an argument in the back and if you cleared your throat or waved feebly at them they looked at you as if you'd walked into their living room with an inappropriate request. "What" they seemed to be saying "can't you see that Philomena is coming home late and has started seeing an Italian boy from Park Extension? And you want a souvlaki?"

Here in the UK it's just the normal 'retail tradition' where customers might as well lie on the floor and cough up a kidney before asking for something which - once requested - won't be available.

Even in such restaurants as Subway - the last bastion of food "at hand and served hot" and in friendly little communities like Kitimat, British Columbia, a hungry customer can't depend on the staff sticking around long enough to provide sustenance.

Standards

I mean is it too much to ask young people to be able to identify the following items of ecclesiastical garb prior to being admitted to Communion?

Standards - that's our problem - too few standards!

No, it's not a Vimpa Billy, it's a Humeral Veil!

Yes, Wally, "Vimpa" would be worth quite a lot on a triple word score in Scrabble but will you please pay attention and stop changing the subject!

Of more than purely local interest.....

There's an election going on in Canada and another taking place in the United States. And it appears, once again, that chronic unpleasantness continues to transpire behind half-closed doors down at the Kremlin in London where the've got the Prime Minister's leg and half his arse out the window but he keeps managing to locate the majority of his weight inside the building. Lots of change but the same characters reappearing - the same Svengalis, the same tycoons, the same bankers.

Maybe a few cracks are finally appearing in the thesis that what's good for the bankers is good for the man in the street. Follow the money, they say. Well we've followed the money up and down and now a whole lot of people are about to lose their jobs and their houses because of what may in the long run have proved to be an enormous gambling exercise using other people's money.

This little video is about a story told in the old days by Tommy Douglas - New Democrat, Premier of Saskatchewan, Godfather of Universal Healthcare in Canada. It's introduced by his grandson Kiefer Sutherland.

Many thanks to Malcolm+ - the Simple Massing Priest - for the link

Maybe when.....

Maybe when the new diet has progressed a little bit I'll become a naturist!

One does need goals.

On the other hand being a naturist in Scotland would require some protection from the rain.

A hat maybe.

Church Picnic

The average Scot has a vitamin D level which is through the floor. It's not getting any better.

The weather having been abominable for two years here in Scotland, one takes in all the sunshine one can when it presents itself in little dribs and drabs. A drab was rumoured to be occurring on Sunday and so we went ahead with a long overdue congregational picnic up at Penicuik House.

".....husband, father, missioner, youth worker, musician, blogger, priest, disciple...."

A congregation gathered in St Mary's Cathedral in Edinburgh this afternoon for the funeral of The Rev'd Tom Allen who had recently taken up a post with the Mission to Seafarers in Scotland and was living with his family in the town of Linlithgow, outside of Edinburgh.

Tom had only been in post for a few months and so he was a newcomer among us. He had already made himself known to many of us as Big Bulky Anglican and as Bishop David states in the sermon (which appears below) Tom's interests were many and the accumulation of experience and insight over his years as a musician, a youth worker and a priest were really quite remarkable.

The majority of Tom's contacts will have been outwith the Scottish Episcopal Church. A number of colleagues and friends with broad northern accents were in attendance including one young priest (there with his wife and little baby) whose vocation had been nurtured during Tom's time as a youth worker.

There were two hymns sung at the funeral: "Come down O love divine" and "My song is love unknown". Steve Butler was present as well and sung "Hill of the Angels"

Sermon at the Funeral of Rev Tom Allen
St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh,
17th September, 2008

Rt Revd David Chillingworth,
Bishop of St Andrews
Chair of the Scottish Council of Mission to Seafarers

"Death is not an unforseen accident, not something left out of the scheme of our Creator. Rather it is something natural in the sight of God. … As we give thanks today, we are also given a blessed opportunity. We are each given a loving invitation to trust in God, and let him turn our fears into faith, our sorrows into joy, our loneliness, into divine companionship." Tom’s words not my words.

Anne has asked of us two things today: that we should remember Tom with thanksgiving and that we should worship God as Tom would have wished. So we put death in its place – something natural in the sight of God. We give thanks for Tom. Through our tears, we glimpse death not just put into its place but destroyed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

But we are only human. We begin by offering our deep sympathy and our love to Anne, to Katherine and to Matthew – to Tom’s father John – and to Tom’s wider family and friends. We who shared with him in ministry are bereft. Our loss is but the outer edges of yours. You are held at this moment within the prayers of a wide community – all sorts of people whom you have never met but who knew of Tom and what his coming here promised.

My first meeting with Tom was a virtual one – when I met Big Bulky Anglican in the community of bloggers. What impressed me about Big Bulky Anglican was the breadth of the agenda – his music, his reading, his reflections on his ministry.

When I began to get to know Tom, I realized that he was big in every sense. There were many parts to his life and he lived very intensely in each of them.

In the family, he was Do Do – beloved husband and adored father. This was the family life of the priest in which all were committed and sacrifices were shared.
As a youth worker, Tom adored children and young people and he held their affection and admiration in return. And always, he wanted to offer them more.

And that’s how he was in life and love and ministry. Restless energy and incisive mind. Music, theology, communication people. Parish and community. Taking people where they didn’t expect to go – and isn’t that just what Jesus did? Giving people the courage to step out of the conventional, the ‘what everybody does’ – so that they might grasp the fullness of life which is God’s will for each of us.

And those who, as Anne says, ‘Got it’ – were inspired and led and opened up to the Spirit of God in new ways. Tom was new wine – and he sometimes made the old wineskins look a bit frayed and tatty. To mix the metaphors, the word ‘dinosaur’ did cross his lips occasionally. But it was kindly meant. And Tom was unusual because he had a majestic God-centered vision – but he read and understood the small print as well. So he was deeply theological and intensely practical at the same time. He was usually – and sometimes infuriatingly – right.

It was the love of the sea which drew him to Mission to Seafarers. It was about seafarers but, above all, it was about mission. He was going to lead us too in directions where we didn’t expect to go. ‘Do you mind the traveling?’ I asked him. ‘No it gives me time to think’ was the reply. He was already reshaping our whole approach to chaplaincy and that would have had an impact not just on maritime ministry but on chaplaincy in many other areas of life.

But the righteous, though they die early, will be at rest. For old age is not honoured for length of time, or measured by number of years; but understanding is grey hair for anyone, and a blameless life is ripe old age.

Death came to Tom in the midst of life. He lived intensely, richly, completely the journey of his own love of God and of his family.

"When we have done everything, and said everything, we realise it isn't enough. At death we come to the end of human knowledge. We are left to the mercy of God. Comforting it is, therefore, to have a God to trust in, and one who has perfect love, absolute knowledge, boundless forgiveness and infinite patience. God is love, and that is a glorious fact to lean upon now. "

Not my words – Tom’s words.

Tom – husband, father, missioner, youth worker, musician, blogger, priest, disciple. May he rest in peace and rise in glory.

The sincerest form of flattery

They're complete sponges, aren't they. They soak it all in even if we think they're not listening. Quite obviously a baby who's been listening to the pastor ranting on a Sunday morning. I suppose that Episcopal babies would be lifting their cups up in the air and inviting Teddy, Dolly and Ducky to come up and have a little bits of their teething biscuit no matter what their denominational affiliation might be.

Children do pay attention.

A day trip to the Isle of Inchcolm

Caireen, Stewart and I hopped on a small ferry this morning and took the trip down the Firth of Forth to the Isle of Inchcolm. The buildings of Inchcolm Abbey are in relatively good shape (with the exception, of course, of the ruined Abbey church). It was great visit. I missed the two grey seals lying on the edge of the buoy which we passed en route.

Ducks

Ducks and eleven-year-old boys have this in common. They both hate to go to bed on time. Chickens are relatively easy. When they arrive in the white van in their little cardboard boxes you keep them in the henhouse for a couple of days. It registers that this is their home. When evening comes they begin to get a little spooked and look nervously to the right and the left. Then one of them wanders in and then another. Finally the final chicken realizes she's all alone and goes 'squawk' and runs in quickly.

Ducks are another matter. We've built a nice little ramp for the duck house but do the ducks go in at night - even with a plate of food inside? Do they hell! We've been chasing indignant ducks every night this week. One hopes they'll get the idea eventually.

There are worries that the new Large Hadron Collider thingy buried under the French-Swiss border will generate tiny black holes which might somehow manage to exist on their own, grow in size and suck the planet earth inside out before going on to swallow the solar system,

etc etc.

Other less worried sorts have pointed out that the sorts of particle collisions being generated by this large gizmo occur naturally when gamma rays enter our atmosphere and so that the only difference here is that these collisions will be measurable and therefore useful for understanding the conditions of the universe several seconds after the big bang.

I dunno. It's all too much for me. Too many details.

The machine was turned on yesterday and particles are now whipping around the long circumference of the machine. At some point in the next few weeks a lot of clever people will begin aiming particles at each other and getting them to collide.

It's promising to be a busy few weeks here in Penicuik. I'm not looking forward to everything which needs to be done. It would be just my luck to have the world end after my upcoming Vestry meetings and not before.

Our sister in Christ over at Get out of Jail Free has a link to the following website where you can have the fundamental question answered without getting too bogged down in the details.

Has the Large Hadron Collider
Destroyed the World Yet?

Son House singing 'John the Revelator'

Fruit and what it means.....

Two articles this morning on fruit (and more). Boris Johnson in the Telegraph and George Monbiot in the Guardian.

Jesus is the Way
......and not merely the Answer

I think I had a T-shirt once which proclaimed 'Jesus is the answer' - t'was back in the 70s.

Such statements could not help but provoke the response:

"Doesn't it depend what the question is?"

Tim Chesterton from Edmonton has a good piece of prose bits of which I shall inadvertently nick for a sermon.

I am the proud (step) father of an eleven year old boy who struggled, on occasion, within the all-female environment of his local primary school and who does, from time to time, present an excess of attitude and a lack of desire to clean his room.

I was thoroughly chuffed to read an article in this morning's Times by Alice Thomson. Well done!

Things you can't plan for!

From the Telegraph

"A Ryanair jet was forced to make an emergency landing after a jar of mushroom soup leaked from an overhead locker on to a passenger, causing an allergic reaction"

New additions to the back garden!

In the person of three Aylsbury ducks purchased from a farm near Peebles. These, I am instructed by my wife and stepson, are never to become duck stock or confit de canard. They exist for pleasure and companionship. They have their own little house and a largish 40 litre basin which is sufficient for this breed. Their names are Poppy, Rosie and Peekotang. Don't ask!

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain
Flying off the Handel

An aging cleric reminisces

It was a difficult funeral. Shirley had taken me out for a cup of coffee after early Mass and mentioned that she was in poor health and needed to put her affairs in order. She had never written a Will and knew that she needed one. Well sir, if she didn’t up and die on us within the week - before she'd had time to arrange any of these things. Her grown children gathered to make the arrangements.

And the little old man Shirley was still officially married to but who no one had seen for twenty years – he arrived in town too and moved into Shirley’s flat. He sold her things, took the art off the walls and drove it down to a dealer, found the key to the safety deposit box and claimed the contents of that as well.

The children had told me this would happen. There was precious little they could do to prevent it. A number of items, of purely sentimental value, were simply disposed of. Which hurt. Which seemed almost like spite. When the old man showed up at the funeral or at least at the graveside, people were pretty subdued. They shifted their weight from foot to foot. They didn’t know what to say around him.

After I’d finished the words of committal and Shirley’s coffin was lowered into the ground, the old renegade husband broke the silence.

“She was a good wife” he said.

It was the wrong thing to say. Bill the funeral director and I caught this sudden movement out of the corner of our eyes as the youngest daughter – a pretty little blonde thing - launched herself across two or three relations in the direction of the old man. We stepped between them Bill and I did. I was young and Bill had good reflexes. Like many funeral directors, Bill is a solemn fellow – very prompt and very correct. But he admitted later that he’d delayed intervening just long enough for the daughter to land one good right hook.

“It was the least I could do”, said Bill, with a twinkle in his eye.

Rick Warren is no Billy Graham

Notwithstanding the Economist's recent headline, no fat man in a hawaiian shirt can be the new Billy Graham.

Which puts me out of the picture as well but I have no such pretensions.

Did you ever see the interview which Woody Allen did with Billy Graham? I've put it here before but it's worth repeating. I clearly comes to us from a more respectful age.



part two of the interview

I've just ordered a couple of fair trade clergy shirts. My every-day shirts are getting transluscent and greeny-black so I'm overdue.

What gives with these young English clergy tromping around in grubby blue jeans, tho? I wear my grubby blue jeans too when I'm with people I know really well but they're generally worn with the requisite Hawaiian shirt.

Folks would have a fit if I showed up somewhere with my top bits housed in a clergy shirt and my bottom bits looking like the Marlboro Man. Somebody here is not comfortable looking like a priest. It's more about him than it is about anybody else. That's why we had curacies in the old day. You got all this ambivalent bullshit dealt with. The head teacher at the local High School wouldn't let me in the door to do an assembly dressed like this and he'd be right. Jeez!

When the mighty Norwegian Royal Guard with their fearful feathered bowler hats needed a mascot they chose a penguin. Only a Scottish Penguin would do. Sir Nils Olaf: the world's most decorated penguin.

Bathtime in Clerkenwell

One of the stranger things I've seen for a while. Think of it as Badger Badger, meets Wallace and Gromit meets "V" for Vendetta. Muchas Gracias to Fr Denman from Edmonton for the reference.

The Peebles Agricultural Show

The Peebles Agricultural Show took place today during which the rain miraculously ceased for a few hours. We've got a parish outing tomorrow and we're hoping the interlude lasts until then.

The first album I ever owned was by a group called The Collectors (whose later incarnation under the name Chilliwack was a bit better known). I can't remember how I came to own this record album - it seems to me that somebody was moving house and gave it to me. The second album I owned was a little more sophisticated - Herman's Hermits.

Anyway - back to The Collectors - there's this girl called Lydia who wears purple and lives in a steeple. The most pressing thing for the songwriter(s) would appear to be to have words at the end of each line that rhyme. Little else matters.

An article by the Georgian president appeared in today's Guardian.

My favourite line from the last paragraph:

I have staked my country's fate on the west's rhetoric about democracy and liberty.

A fresh spirit of militancy is rising up even in peaceful corners of the world. This is the Ginger Heartland after all. Mr Spongecake and Mr Cherry Tart, along with their families and their gods are not welcome anywhere in the oven.

Reuters
August 12, 2008 at 5:04 AM EDT

TOKYO — Japanese police have arrested a 20-year-old man who attacked and robbed two people after they stared at his Winnie-the-Pooh costume, officials said on Tuesday.

Masayuki Ishikawa was hanging out on a Tokyo street corner after midnight last month while wearing the cuddly costume, accompanied by two friends dressed as a mouse and a panther, when he took offence at being stared at, police said.......

.......Mr. Ishikawa and his friends beat up the two victims and stole $160 from them, the spokesman said, adding the group had apparently donned the unusual garb because they had run out of clean clothes.

Hmmm. I remember the whole phenomenon of 'my cleanest dirty shirt' back in college days. I don't believe I was ever reduced to this though.

Dmitri Orlov on the Georgian crisis. He was once a student of Abkhaz language and culture (I wonder if he's available for dinner parties - it certainly beats an after supper game of Twister) and by his his own admission his take on the present situation is influenced by an earlier keen interest in one party to the present troubles. His parallels with Kosovo make things seem a simple matter of alliances - who's bloc one supports.

Things are probably even simpler than that.

Yards of stuff here I didn't know, though, about the ethnic makeup of the region.

Thanks to Sam Norton for the ref.

This is more or less what was preached at a Requiem Mass for Frances McLean. A couple of folks have asked for the text. I couldn't help adding a few bits and pieces which better reflected the whole day and not just the sermon at the Requiem Mass. Think of it as a retrospective sermon.

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A funeral sermon for Frances McLean
November 7th, 2008
The Church of Saint James the Less
Penicuik, Midlothian

The words which the Bishop recited as he led Frances McLean’s coffin out of the church were those of devout Simeon who had been told by the Holy Spirit that he would not die until he had seen the Messiah. As Luke tells the story, Simeon has now arrived at the end of his life and the child Jesus is brought to him. What he says is this:

Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace,

according to your word;

for my eyes have seen your salvation,

which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples,

a light for revelation to the Gentiles

and for glory to your people Israel.

Simeon was promised one thing only and has now received it. Words like his speak of ‘sufficiency’ and, in my way of thinking; sufficiency has a lot going for it. You might not leap for joy to see the word ‘sufficient’ scrawled across the top of an exam paper or on a written appraisal of our work but I think sufficiency is badly under-rated.

We balk nowadays at eulogies – with their long lists of achievements – being read at funerals in the church. They’ve gone out of style, haven’t they - eulogies? You get the feeling that when such lists of achievements are being read out that we are swimming upstream and are battling what everybody in the church already knows, which is this: that rich or poor, famous or unknown, languid or troubled – we all go this same way!

The same sentences from the Burial Office – which Tony read on the night before the funeral as Frances’ coffin was carried into the chancel - are going to be read at our funerals one day. Our coffins, made of solid cherry wood with real brass handles, or made of veneer or canvas-covered chip-board are going to be covered with the same funeral pall in the church and will give the same visual effect as any other coffin. Frances was buried at Rosebank Cemetery on Pilrig Street near the 200 soldiers on their way to the front lines in the First World War who died in the Gretna Train Disaster, in the same graveyard as her grandfather and great grandfather and in the company of saints and rascals from two centuries of Scottish history. Gravediggers – Council employees in yellow coats – could be seen hiding behind trees puffing on their cigarettes until we’d gone. It was just one more burial to them.

We’re all together in our deaths. It is a great leveller.

Notwithstanding the uniqueness of the woman and our feelings for her, and even though there are remarkable stories that can be told about her, what the bishop said in his prayer at the Commendation referred simply to her participation in the Grace which God has granted to us in Christ:

Into your hands, O merciful Saviour, we commend your servant, Frances. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming…..

I believe that when Frances asked her nurse on Wednesday whether she would survive this illness and was told, as directly as any nurse could possibly tell her, that she would not survive it - she must have put her head back on the pillow and said to herself

that she’d had enough.

There was sadness. I sensed it on the Tuesday afternoon when we spoke. There was solemnity. The bishop told me that Frances said ‘goodbye’ to him on Wednesday after lunch with a great sense of occasion and finality.  You see,

She’d had enough. 

What does that mean? Not that she had no strength to fight it (we can’t know what she was thinking about that) – but that had you asked Frances if she’d had occasion to love and be loved, to apply herself to the world around her, to fill her generation and to meet Christ in the midst of the world’s people she’d have said ‘yes’. It was sufficient. 

She’d had enough.

I hope this for you – first of all, sufficiency.

Do remember that funeral sermons, such as they are, are intended for the living and not for the dead. The question today is not only ‘who was Frances’, but ‘who are we’? Men and women, boys and girls who may well not be in a position yet to say that

we have ‘enough’

- that we live today in sufficiency – that we would be satisfied were our life to reach its end on the 7^th of November 2008. This poses for us a challenge. It could provoke in us something of an ‘ache’ and were we to walk away from the hospital bed, the church or the graveside resolved that we would follow the lead of that nagging feeling rather than fleeing from it, then the loss of our friend and the experience of gathering around her coffin or more accurately, the experience of gathering with her around the Lord’s Table could be a tremendous blessing and a new beginning.

Now - you know and I know that ‘sufficiency’ is not a word that adequately exhausts the subject of Frances McLean. It doesn’t end there of course – but it’s something that has to be said.

The image we all have in our minds when thinking of Frances is certainly not a checklist with one ticked and sufficient box but something more akin to a cornucopia – a horn of plenty – filled with fruit – a cup - running over. It has much to do with a sense of humour, with a very loud and boisterous laugh and with a series of active associations around the world of a woman in her eighties. It has to do with the stories we heard of Frances on her last trip to South Africa with Angela being surrounded by the children she helped bring into the world, by the nurses and students she encouraged – people who remembered her and looked at her as one who nurtured life and enjoyed the fullness of her relationships.

And so, this I hope for you as well – abundance – not in what you gather to yourselves but what you scatter abroad into the lives and beings of others. In the remarkable lives or ordinary saints like Frances McLean we get a sense of what can be done with our particular portion of life.

This is the route of the pipeline which is Europe's alternative route to the Russian pipeline running from Baku to Novorosslysk. It doesn't leave a whole hell of a lot to the imagination, does it?

Mixing military enterprise with the oil business is not unknown, of course. It always seems a little more craven when somebody else does it though. Amateurs! Where were the spin doctors?

Disclaimer

Please note this sign does not appear outside the house of a clergyman just returned from holiday. I don't feel remotely the way this man feels.

Don't even suggest that I do.

The rectory at Penicuik is open for business.

Snowdome

At over 11,000 feet, this glacier-capped massif drains in three direction. It is a (possibly 'the') hydrological apex of North America. Its glaciers drain into the Pacific Ocean via the Columbia River, the Arctic Ocean via the Athabasca and Mackenzie Rivers and into Hudson Bay via the North Saskatchewan and Nelson Rivers.

If you've got a big screen you might click on the picture. I'm pleased with how it turned out.

The Stanley Cup has apparently been used in a 'private christening', according to the Canadian Press. The service took place in Sweden where Tomas Holmstrom was having 'his day' with the Cup having been a member of the Detroit Redwings which took the Cup out of the country (Canada) and the city (Montreal) which would ordinarily merit it.

Okay, so Detroit is a cold place and the Redwings a venerable team. We've now got a whole lot of teams in places where ice doesn't occur normally. They get the best teams American oil money can afford. Long past are the days when desirable foreigners had to defect in order to play hockey and all the American teams had Canadian players.

There is a long tradition of Canadian Naval Chaplains using an upended ship's bell for baptisms so I suppose it's not too much of a stretch. No mention in the article of a minister being involved in the service or whether the baptism was properly peformed using Trinitarian formulae.

We eagerly await to hear about the child of a Formula One winner being sprayed with champagne. Thanks to Joe over at Felix Hominum for the link.

More news from Rev Ruth about other innovations in ecclesiastical hardware.

Back in the saddle

Scotland is suitably grey and rainy. Will look idly out the window for an hour or so this morning and get back into it. Coming back from holidays isn't always easy. But we did see bears, and mountains. We spent time with my family in British Columbia and a week in a great summer community in Sorrento. Good worship - new friends. The whole nine yards.

The picture above is of two nice little people standing in the Columbia Ice Fields with somebody who looks like the rector of Weyburn Saskatchewan.

I can report that a wonderful time is being had by all at the Sorrento Centre in the interior of British Columbia. All the good ghosts - all those memories of past summers - are still well and truly in place. Many new friends and insights. I am probably not the first to discover that placing one's self in the tutelage of brothers and sisters in the faith is a good idea. I must do more of this. Caireen and I are in different courses - a good idea - Stewart is spending hours climbing onto the wobbly little dock out on the lake with his friends until it begins to upend, falling off with great shrieks of delight and then climbing up onto it again.

A good time being had by all.

RR

I'm leaving on a jet plane.......

Off on holidays with my wife and stepson.

Three days with the folks on Saltspring Island, British Columbia and then off for a week to the Sorrento Centre in the interior of the Province. I first went to Sorrento with my parents in about 1967 or thereabouts and have made my way back there periodically.

It's a magical place filled with grace and good memories. I'm hoping that my new family will sense some of what I sensed there.

Will finish up with a couple of days bumping around the Rockies before getting on the plane in Calgary and returning to Scotland.

And, as it turns out, it's also good for you!

Abundant, grainy and not overly expensive. Think of it as Red River Cereal for the soul. We know already that incense is an appropriate symbol of the soul's ascent and a means of hallowing or 'pointing to' significant places or actions - something which enjoys both clear Biblical warrant and obvious analogues in other religious traditions.

But is it good for you? From the reaction of certain folks it might appear not:

... Consider this symptom of distaste: the Protestant Frankincense Cough, a psychosomatic or (as we used to say) hysterical phenomenon. People who disapprove of incense often respond like Pavlov's dogs to the dinner-bell. I, way up in the sanctuary of my last parish, could merely hold up an unlit thurible, for one dear soul, thirty yards away, to hack and retch as if gassed. Her Scotch blood, perhaps: she only had to see an incense machine to think of popery (rather than pot-pourri), and she couldn't think of popery without gagging on the thought of Inquisitions, idolatry of false bones, pyres at Smithfield, Armadas, papal concubines, Jesuit assassins -- and of Galileo, mocking Abbés in powdered periwigs, salacious nuns, the Provisional Irish Republican Army bombing schools -- .

Now Fr Major has, I suspect, never been accused of understating a case. Nonetheless there is much unhappiness on the part of some people when the new rector begins to slowly and carefully introduce the practise on selected Sunday mornings. Not all of it has to do with the physical effects of the stuff.

This just in: It is now being suggested that the components of frankincense act to reduce anxiety and depression - at least among mice.

Those short unhappy lives, marked by high heartrates and quick dashes between corners of the kitchen looking for crumbs and dodging the cat and the householder's broom. If such lives can be made tolerable with the addition of a little frankincense think of what it can do for you.



If you've not read the irascible Fr Richard Major's (as yet) uncompleted series of articles on the Mass entitled 'The Freeze-Frame Mass" it's worth a read. The link sends you to a table of contents. Look a little further and you'll see a link to download the .pdf file


I heard some vile little creature cheering him on at certain points and realized, to my shame, that it was me.

Jeez, I suppose this is vaguely familiar.......

thanks to Ugley Vicar via Tim Chesterton

Feelgood video for the day

In order to get some quiet time with a book on a Sunday afternoon it's occasionally necessary to set some boundaries. This is possibly taking it a little far.

The very latest thing

Unfold Google page whereever you happen to be. Images immediately appear in the rectangular spaces provided. Move the page to the right or left, up or down. Borders will adjust themselves accordingly.

This morning at Saint James the Less we're celebrating Sea Sunday at our Family Service. We do this once a year. We hold a Fellowship Lunch afterwards and make a donation to the Mission to Seafarers. A few years back one of our stalwarts discovered and old hymn from the Sankey hymnal which has become a favourite here in Penicuik. The lyrics are below and the dreadful MIDI tune-bar thingy is here

Light in the darkness, sailor, day is at hand!
See o’er the foaming billows fair haven’s land,
Drear was the voyage, sailor, now almost o’er,
Safe within the life boat, sailor, pull for the shore.

Pull for the shore, sailor, pull for the shore!
Heed not the rolling waves, but bend to the oar;
Safe in the life boat, sailor, cling to self no more!
Leave the poor old stranded wreck, and pull for the shore.

Trust in the life boat, sailor, all else will fail,
Stronger the surges dash and fiercer the gale,
Heed not the stormy winds, though loudly they roar;
Watch the “bright and morning Star,” and pull for the shore!

Bright gleams the morning, sailor, uplift the eye;
Clouds and darkness disappearing, glory is nigh!
Safe in the life boat, sailor, sing evermore;
“Glory, glory, hallelujah!” pull for the shore.