Some bits and bobs for Remembrancetide. Help yourself if any of it would be useful:
Author: reverendally
Human, parent, priest, (hymn)writer, painter, vegan, amateur. She/they. Chaplain @catz_Cambridge (views my own). Trying to do justly, love mercy & walk humbly.
Bible Sunday 2016
Sermon for St John’s Hills Road, Cambridge
Bible Sunday, 2016
Many years ago as I was planning an All Age service for Bible Sunday I lamented to a colleague that there weren’t many hymns about the Bible. The Colleague rightly pointed out that this was because hymns are songs of worship, and we don’t, in fact, worship the Bible as the written word, but rather the Living Word of God, Jesus Christ. There still aren’t many decent hymns about the Bible, for that very reason.
When the gospel is read in some churches, the reader kisses the gospel book – this is something I do, in fact, as you probably noticed – I don’t know if you’re used to he here or not. But what does that mean? Why do it? Am I really kissing a book – an object – print on paper, with a nice binding? What if I’d printed out the reading and ended up kissing just the bit of paper from my printer, as I said, ‘This is the gospel of the Lord’? Or what if I’d been reading off an ipad? Surrounded as we are by beautiful bibles of every kind, and with means to ‘read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them’ this is an interesting question. When we say ‘this is the gospel of the Lord’, what is, in fact, ‘this’? We’ll come back to this question a little later.
Our gospel reading tells of Jesus reading from Isaiah, and telling the gathered faithful that today those words come true – he’s going to show them what the words look like in real life. What an amazing thing to hear. ‘Today this comes true.’ ‘Today you find out what the word of God looks like in action.’ It’s Jesus’ manifesto in which he connects the words of the scroll with his own identity as the living Word of God.
Let’s look more closely at what’s there. What is is that Jesus promises to bring to life? The Isaiah passage speaks of freedom and wholeness and good news….
And only three chapters later, we hear him again refer to the same passage about his ministry:
This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country. The disciples of John reported all these things to him. So John summoned two of his disciples and sent them to the Lord to ask, ‘Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?’ When the men had come to him, they said, ‘John the Baptist has sent us to you to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?”’ Jesus had just then cured many people of diseases, plagues, and evil spirits, and had given sight to many who were blind. And he answered them, ‘Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offence at me.’
We need not stick just to Luke 4 – there are plenty of other places where we are given challenging manifestos – blueprints, in word form, of what the heart of the gospel looks like when it’s lived out, and which we can see in the life of Christ, and then in the life of he saints through the ages. We might think of the beatitudes, the ten commandments, the summary of the law, the parables, even the Lord’s Prayer… so much of scripture consists of words that are to be lived. There might be some words that you have found to be formative on your journey of faith, words that you’ve gone back to again and again as you’ve worked out what being a Christian means not just in church but in daily life.
You’re welcome to make your own suggestions…
You might want to pick just one from all these and focus on how you will live it today, this week, this month… how will it form you, change you?
Now look back at Luke 4, at the very beginning of the quotation from Isaiah: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me… It’s the Holy Spirit who brings the words on the page to life in our lives. The breath that gives voice to the word, as at creation. The breath that makes us come alive, and live as people of God.
The ‘this’ that is the gospel of the Lord, isn’t the physical object the page itself – though we do quite rightly treat the bible with reverence and respect – nor is it even the content, the words on the page. It’s more as if the gospel resides in the proclaiming and hearing of it – the way that it’s spoken aloud and heard, in public, so that we become like the crowds who first heard the words of Christ and saw him put them into action, the way that the Spirit inspires the proclamation, moves through and informs the hearing, and empowers the doing of the word. The gospel, ‘this’, is the contemporary living out of the words on the page, as the Spirit gives us power. This is how the word of God is ‘living and active’ – constant, and yet always fresh, always being made incarnate in the lives of God’s people.
So as you look at the bibles on display around the church today, don’t just look on them as objects – think of the fingers that have turned those pages, the eyes that have read them, the voices that have read them aloud… all the people who, through the generations have been been shaped and formed through their encounters with Christ in scripture, who have connected their story with God’s story, and lived the gospel.
This is how we are the body of Christ on earth. As Once the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel ate the scrolls on which the word of God was written, so we, in the words of the collect, ‘inwardly digest’ the Word of God, through our reading, our hearing, our speaking, and indeed through our receiving of the bread and wine, as we ‘become what we eat’ and become the good news that God is sharing with the world.
St Vincent de Paul (1581-1660)
You can read a brief biography of St Vincent de Paul and the readings set for today (27th September), when we remember his life and ministry, here.
If there was ever a saint who matched their set gospel reading, it is Vincent de Paul: ‘I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.’
Vincent de Paul and his gospel reading invite us to look at others and see Christ, and not only to see Christ but to serve Christ – ‘just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.’ It is in so doing that we become more like Christ. The subjects take on the character of their king.
This means, though, that we must also look at others and see ourselves – this is something that I became real for me on a prison placement while I was an ordinand. It is in seeing the Christ in those in need or in those who we find difficult or strange or disturbing that we start to be able to see the Christ in ourselves, not only out of empathy (note the similarity between the gospel reading’s ‘I was hungry, I was thirsty’ and the #Iam solidarity hashtags that have been around since the Charlie Hebdo massacre) but out of an awareness of our common humanity, our common belovedness in the sight of God . We might think of the great commandments: ‘love God and love your neighbour as yourself’ for it is in love of neighbour that we understand what it is to be loved, and to see ourselves and our neighbour alike truly as beloved of God.
Meanwhile, if we, like Vincent de Paul, were to live out this gospel fully it explodes beyond the individual, and becomes a way for us to participate in the building of the kingdom of God, in which the chasms that are so often fixed in this world between the privileged and the not-priveleged might start to be broken down in preparation for the radical equality of the kingdom of God. What we do right now to join in with this work both brings earth nearer heaven, and prepares us for it.
This is how Vincent de Paul lived, and these are the kingdom values which we are invited, or rather commanded, to live out here in Westcott, in this city of Cambridge, and beyond.
Thoughts towards a homily on Luke 14.25-33
Luke 14.25-33 is another one of those horrible gospel readings where you read it and think, ‘Really? Jesus said this?’ And then you realise you’re supposed to be preaching on it – in other words, making sense of it not just for yourself but for other people too. So you’re not just talking about hating your own parents, you’re talking about other people hating theirs, and that’s just another whole lot of tricky.
I realised something as I read this through: the way it’s phrased makes it sound like a genuine choice: this thing or that thing, parent or God, as if the two were in any way equivalent to one another. Perhaps our metaphorical use of ‘Father’ for God compounds this immediate (and unhelpful) sense of the possibility of being equivocal. But what if instead we took seriously the reality that God is not equivalent to anyone or anything? That we’re not, after all, being asked to make a choice between two equivalent external sources of authority, validation or love, but rather to take on board who God is and what that means for who we are?
God is, after all, the creator of the universe. That’s everything. Stars, planets, black holes, and all the immensity of stuff in between that we don’t even have a proper name for. All of time and space (and spacetime). Huge things and tiny things, and things that don’t even properly exist in any way that physics can explain. Animals, vegetables, minerals. The whole lot. Me, you, my parents, your parents, life itself.
If we believe that – really believe it – then the universe only makes sense if we are aware of everything being held in God’s hands.
Two brief diversions:
1. My children used to often ask whether, if God was everywhere, ‘is God in this dirty coffee cup?’ ‘Is God in this teatowel?’ ‘Is God in the mud on the bottom of my trainers that I just trod into the nice clean carpet?’ Exasperated, I eventually answered, ‘It’s the other way round. God is not in those things, those things are in God, because the whole universe is in God. Happy now?’ And remarkably, they were. At least until the next question.
2. If you’ve not read Mother Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, you should. The most famous of her visions is of a tiny round thing the size of a hazelnut, which the holy Mother holds in the palm of her hands. She wonders what it is, the answer comes to her, ‘It is everything that is made.’ She wonders how it continues to exist, for it is so small it might just disappear. Again, an answer comes to her, ‘It exists, and will continue to exist, because God loves it.’
So, in our mental image of God as creator of the universe, holding everything that he has made in his hands, that includes us – you, me, our mothers and fathers, the people we love and the people we hate, and the people we don’t even know and will never meet. As well as the stars and planets and black holes.
God is the ultimate context for all our other relationships – with people, and with creation. And our relationships with one another and with the world can only really make sense that way round, in the bigger context of God. It simply doesn’t work if we try to make anyone other the creator of the universe our “ultimate context” – if another creature (a parent, a lover etc) is given the status of Ultimate Context, that’s way too much pressure to put on them – nobody is big enough to be someone’s whole world, no matter how romantic or loyal that may sound. Only God is big enough, flexible enough, strong enough to be our first call, the ground of our being, our all in all. And if we try to make another human being into those things, even if they could hold us in their hands, they simply cannot hold all our other relationships as well, and they definitely cannot also hold all of God in their hands. Our relationships with others can be held in the hands of God, but it’s very hard indeed to ask someone else to hold our relationship with God in their hands. It’s just the wrong way round.
In ministry I’ve always been grateful for an image of the hands of God being huge, and careful and gentle and strong and utterly reliable – and placed just under mine, ready to catch all the things that slip through my fingers. There are people who rely on me, for whom I am their first port of call. But I am not their last port of call, because of those big generous hands of God just below mine.
For me, there is something of this in the gospel this week. And this may be my clumsy way of putting what Rowan Williams puts much more deftly in his book, Being Disciples:
“Being with the Master is recognising that who you are is finally going to be determined by your relationship with him. If other relationships seek to define you in a way that distorts this basic relationship, you lose something vital for your own well-being and that of all around you too. You lose the possibility of a love more than you could have planned or realised for yourself. Love God less and you love everyone and everything less.”
To love God is to realise that you are held in the hands of God, along with everyone and everything else. That tends to put things in perspective.
Which tune?
I wrote a hymn a couple of months ago, to the tune ‘King’s Lynn’ (aka O God of earth and altar), and it turned out that quite a lot of people didn’t know the tune, and asked if it would go to anything else. The simple answer was, it can go to most 7676D* tunes.
(*If you’ve never known what those numbers and letter mean, they’re a shorthand description for the metre, in this case, it means that the first line is 7 syllables long, the next one is 6 syllables, etc, and the D stands for ‘double’, meaning that it’s an 8 line hymn in which the metre is the same in the second half as in the first half. Clear as mud. What it doesn’t tell you is that my particular words have an upbeat (technically known as an anacrusis) which means that the accent falls on the second syllable rather than the first – in the trade, this is known as ‘iambic’. So the full description would be 7676D iambic. )
Another complication is that you can sometimes ‘fudge’ it so that a metre that technically has the wrong number of syllables can be used, by the judicious use of slurs and by splitting longer notes into two. Consider the last line of Londonderry air (O Danny Boy), which has 12 notes, of which three are usually slurred together – there is nothing to stop a hymnwriter removing that slur, and having a 12 syllable line instead of the usual 10. Consider also the very popular tune ‘slane’ (Lord of all hopefulness), of which the second line has a two-note upbeat, which is generally slurred – there is nothing to stop two very short syllables being used instead, as long as a congregation will be able to intuit that this is what’s going on at a first read-through.
But even if you find a tune for which the metre fits perfectly, will it have the right mood / vibe? Take ‘O Jesus I have promised’ as an example. It’s also 7676D iambic, and there are at least three tunes that are commonly used, each with their own personality. Two of those tunes would be fine for the hymn I wrote, and one would definitely not be, because it’s way to ‘bouncy’ and would jar horribly with the mood of the words.
My hymn was used in a broadcast act of worship a couple of weeks after it was written, and the producer used my nominated tune, King’s Lynn. But it’s about to be used in another broadcast, and this time the producer has gone with a different tune: Corvedale. As it happens it’s actually originally written for 8686D words, with a two-syllable up-beat – the addition of a slur at the start of each line means it fits my words really well in terms of metre. Corvedale is a triple time tune, so is instantly less foursquare, and as a major key tune (though with some lovely harmonies) it immediately feels more positive. What does this do to the words, and how we hear them? Under what circumstances might one prefer King’s Lynn? And when might Corvedale fit the bill?
A final factor to consider is whether the tune itself has cultural resonances that add something to the way we experience the words. Consider Richard Bewes’ metrical setting of God is our strength and refuge, which he set to the tune ‘Dambusters’ from the popular war film. This, I think, leads those who know the hymn to see that psalm in a particular light, casting the ‘refuge’ and ‘strength’ as a strongly defended castle, possibly surrounded by an army, rather than as something more peaceful and even homely. The tune can hugely affect how we hear the words. Consider also what it means to write a set of words to, say, ‘Thaxted’ (usually sung to the words, I vow to thee my country’) – that may well also affect how we experience the lyrics, and may also limit what sort of words are deemed appropriate for that particular tune. What feelings are evoked by tunes usually used in Christmas carols? Or for hymns often used at funerals? Are those resonances helpful, or do they conflict with what the new lyrics are trying to do? I found G K Chesterton’s words, O God of earth and altar, very powerful, and the tune King’s Lynn will always have GKC’s words somewhere in it for me – I was glad to borrow that frame of reference for my own words.
As it happens, there’s a third tune now being used for my own hymn, and it’s in a completely different idiom – mostly I write to well known traditional hymn tunes, and this new tune is a specially written one, by @mrwiblog in the style of a more modern worship song. And I really love it – it has energy, and the right balance of hope and emotion. You can listen to it here.
The lovely @artsyhonker also wrote another tune for some of my words – as a lyrics-writer there’s no greater honour than to have a composer write a tune specially, so a huge thank you to Kathryn, and to Chris.
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