A blogger’s ennui

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City boy

Ever since moving away from the London suburbs some 5 years ago, I’ve said to anyone who’ll listen that I really enjoyed growing up in the Capital but I really don’t feel drawn to the idea of moving back there.

I wouldn’t say that I’ve that become a convert to country living – ok, part of my pastorate is semi-rural and I’m finding it not as alien as I would once have imagined, but home now is in a town of about 25,000 and I still really value and need the convenience that such an environment affords: the shops (especially the ones that open late), the transport links, and so on.

Still, it’s only since leaving the city that I’ve realised how – well – urban it can be. When I’m there now I find myself quietly grieving for the paucity of trees; subconsciously breathing a little less deeply as if in protest at the polluted air.

How different the experience today, though, when I arrived in another capital city.

I like Edinburgh. I can’t say I know it well – hardly even superficially, for I’ve only been here about 4 or 5 times and rarely with much free time to speak of.

In fact, although it’s only a couple of months since I last passed through, I’d forgotten how much I do like Edinburgh. But after a crowded train journey today, I found myself really glad of the time to walk from the station to our training venue near the Botanic Gardens.

Glad to pass some of the shops that you just don’t get in villages or towns – the department stores and fast food outlets on Princes Street, the piano shop with a striking blue Bechstein upright, the two or three hybrid antique shop/pawnbrokers.

Glad also to find myself on a street called Dundas, and thus to be reminded of my training placement in Toronto and all that I learned there about cultural identity. Glad to notice a shop sign in cyrillic script, and thus to find myself in a place that knows about multicultural living.

I found myself glad not only for the time to walk, but for the fact that I was in a city.

Eucharistic sufficiency

Nothing quite so profound as the post title might suggest – I was just quite intrigued yesterday evening by the fact that, for the second communion service in a row and notwithstanding a bigger-than-usual evening congregation, the stewards had prepared beforehand exactly the right number of little glasses.

There’s a theological reflection in there somewhere…

Theological aphorism of the day

Trying to explain the Trinity is like trying to describe the sound of three hands clapping.

Fissiparity

Surely it’s only a matter of time before some biblical archaeologist somewhere uncovers a fragment of parchment with a textual variant for Matthew 18:20…

For where two or three are gathered in my name, there is schism in the midst of them.

Rainbow Cloud

Driving from one meeting to another yesterday lunchtime, my attention was caught by a small, wispy but very bright cloud. It seemed to shine with a green-blue light; over the next few minutes other colours became visible, until all the colours of the rainbow could be seen along its length. Then, after another few minutes, it was gone.

I didn’t have a camera with me, but it looked something like this… only brighter, more vivid.

Its proper name is a circumhorizontal arc, according to the National Geographic:

The arc isn’t a rainbow in the traditional sense—it is caused by light passing through wispy, high-altitude cirrus clouds. The sight occurs only when the sun is very high in the sky (more than 58° above the horizon). What’s more, the hexagonal ice crystals that make up cirrus clouds must be shaped like thick plates with their faces parallel to the ground.

When light enters through a vertical side face of such an ice crystal and leaves from the bottom face, it refracts, or bends, in the same way that light passes through a prism. If a cirrus’s crystals are aligned just right, the whole cloud lights up in a spectrum of colors.

It was a thing of beauty, and the privilege of seeing it was a moment of blessing. Deo gloria!

Suggest a sermon topic

So I’ve agreed to take part in a series of midweek lunchtime services elsewhere in the Circuit next month. The series theme: ‘Questions we don’t often hear in sermons’.

I gather that my colleagues have already snapped up the opportunity to explain whether God swears, why God won’t help us win the lottery, and whether there are slugs in heaven.

Since they’ve chosen all the obvious topics, what burning question do you think I should preach on? Suggestions welcome!

Update: In the absence of any better suggestions (well, any suggestions actually), I’m going to go with “Would Jesus watch Big Brother?”

Thoughts on Change and Reform

I don’t do “change”.

But not because I’m living in the past, or tied to tradition, or blinkered, or a coward. I don’t do “change” because “change” inherently makes claims about my initiative, my ingenuity.

I don’t even do “reform”.

But not because I’m convinced my way is right, or confident I already have all the answers, or stubborn, or unimaginative. I don’t do “reform” because “reform” inherently makes claims about past ways being incorrigibly wrong ways.

I am reformed. Because God has claimed my past, my present, and my future. I rejoice in the wonders the Father has wrought in my history and the history of my forebears; I watch and listen for the movement of the Holy Spirit today; I seek to place my trust in Christ who leads me onward towards things I don’t yet know.

I am reformed; and by God’s grace I’m not through with being reformed. I am a member of the Body of Christ, the ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda.

Thanks be to God for such profligate grace and mercy.

Worship and Irrelevance

Reading through the very good April 08 edition of the URC’s magazine Reform, my eye stopped on a word that recurred in a couple of items:

“One of the ways we can attract young people to church is by making our worship relevant and contemporary.”

“We worshipped, prayed, studied Bible passages and learnt a little more about God, but we did it in a way so much more relevant to 21st century culture.”

Hmm. Now what is it about these remarks that makes me hesitate?

Certainly I’m aware of the church’s tendency to fall into the trap of tradition, the comforts of the familiar hymn sandwich and from-the-front monologue. Certainly I think it’s important for us to critique these patterns: a healthy dose of iconoclasm is vital in every age, rather than the unthinking perpetuation of ecclesial forms that remain mysterious to the uninitiated.

So whilst the “traditional” model may still be my own comfort zone, I’m actually all for Café Church, Messy Church, Liquid Church, Sk8r Church, in fact any church but empty church.

But I still don’t think I’m quite ready to subscribe to the call to “make worship relevant”. Because it seems to me that this call, well-intentioned as it undoubtedly is, relies upon a presupposition that merits closer attention.

OK, of course there’s a need to connect to people where they’re at, to give people assurance that their concerns and interests matter. Of course we need to challenge any misconception that church concerns spiritual matters entirely disconnected from the “real world”.

But then, didn’t Jesus say something about leaving everything behind to follow him? Wasn’t his arrival in Jerusalem marked by an overturning of ingrained and culturally prevalent expectations of a warrior-king Messiah? And speaking of overturning, when he threw the traders’ tables over in the Temple complex wasn’t this a demand to liberate his Father’s house from its thrall to the prevailing culture?

Insofar as worship is offered by people living in today’s world with today’s tastes and technologies, our worship can and (one might say) should be contemporary. But is that the same as “making worship relevant”? Or isn’t it rather a function of worship to be profoundly irrelevant – to proclaim that, far from being a mere lifestyle choice, worship brings us face-to-face with realities that relativise all our lifestyle choices?

When the Westminster Divines proclaimed that our chief end was “to glorify God and enjoy Him for ever”, I have a hunch that they were referring to God’s pleasure, not ours (grammar-geek note: cf. the way we use words such as enchant, encircle etc.). If our concern is to package and deliver worship in such a way that it slots into the cultural milieu utterly seamlessly, is there not a danger that we have put the cart before the horse? When another article in Reform asserts that “Worship works partly because of our investment in [musicians and hardware]” (my emphasis), hasn’t our perspective become slightly skewed, quasi-Pelagian even?

With Tim Hughes (also in April’s Reform), I would affirm that our songs “mean very little to God if we’re not living lives of worship” – which I take to encompass a way of life that may at times sit ill-at-ease with prevailing cultural mores. In the world but not of it, as someone once said.

And that, for me, suggests that in the final analysis we can no more make worship relevant to our culture than we can make God irrelevant to our world.