Category: Love Life Live Lent

Love life live Lent – day four: Watch the news and pray…

Love Life Live Lent, random thoughts

Sometimes when we look at the news it feels like all we can do is pray. The situation is too dire, the problem too big, for anything we can do to have any effect. Sometimes it may even feel as if our prayers are too small.

But today, people will be praying for what’s on the news like never before, because today, the Love Life Live Lent action is to watch the news and pray about it.  There will have been prayers arising with the breakfast news, there will be more with the lunchtime news, and still more with the evening bulletins.  And thanks to 24 news services, news websites and twitter, I imagine that today’s prayer vigil for all that’s going on in the world is pretty much non-stop.

But even today, it’s not the size or the quality of our prayers that makes the difference, it’s the fact that God is always more ready to listen than we are to pray. And that he knows the deepest truth and hurt of every situation better than we ever can.  Even if it seems that nothing is happening, God is already at work, answering our prayers – and responding to all the things we should have prayed about but didn’t – in ways that we can’t even imagine.  And he’s at work in us, ensuring that our praying changes not only those things that are external to us, but also that which is inside us, so that we ourselves can become ways for God to answer our own prayers and those of others.

Prayer is a mysterious process.  It’s something we do in faith and in hope and in love as well as out of duty and habit. And sometimes it’s the only thing we can do.  But if you’re struggling with today’s action, to pray for what’s on the news, then why not try some of these ideas to help your prayers feel more real:

1. When you near about a news story, write down a list of all the people affected by it (our you could even draw them) – include not only those who appear to be the victims, but also those who seem to be causing the hurt. Pray for them all.

2. As you sit down to watch the news, set out a row of small candles. For each news story, think about were the darkness is, and how it comes to be. Who is bringing the darkness into that situation? Are you part of what makes that place dark, or sad, or scary?  Ask God to be with those people for whom the world is a dark place. Then light one of the candles, and think about all the people who are able to bring light into that situation, and thank God for them. Ask yourself if you are one of those people.

3. If you read the news online, pick a story that has moved you, or challenged you, and share it on facebook or twitter, inviting those you’re in contact with online to spare a moment to pray, with you, for the people involved.

4. If you’re reading the news in a newspaper, cut out the articles that you’ve chosen to pray about, and put the clippings in a safe place, where you can revisit them each day.  If a news story develops, keep subsequent articles too, so that you can update your prayers, and even start to give thanks if things look as if they are getting better. You could even start a prayer scrapbook.

There are lots of other ways to make prayers for what’s on the news feel real. Why not share your ideas on twitter using the #livelent hashtag, or leave a comment here?

Love Life Live Lent – day three: be more giving

Love Life Live Lent, random thoughts

Today’s action is to start a small change jar – in aid of any suitable charity – and add to it all through Lent.  A very excellent thing to do – even copper coins and 5p pieces add up over time to make a decent pot of money to hand over to somewhere where it can make far more difference that it would have done in our purses.

As it happens, I already have a rule that all 1p, 2p and 5p coins go in our Children’s Society box, but reading today’s task reminded me that for some reason I couldn’t find the box the other day, and I still can’t. This is worrying – not because it means the Children’s Society won’t get their money (they already have – I’ve done a £20 donation in lieu of the box of small change, just in case) but because the box is usually in the front hall, next to the phone, where I see it every time I pass, and therefore remember to check my purse.  If the box has been put somewhere else, or if it’s fallen down behind something, or got buried in a pile of junk mail, then this is a Very Bad Sign.  It’s a bad sign because it means that just possibly being generous has stopped being a daily (or many times a day) activity.

Someone once told me when I was a member of a church youth club that I should keep my bible out, and not on a shelf, but that I should also pay attention to what gets put on top of it.  The idea of this is that the stuff that ends up on top of the Bible, obscuring it from sight (and therefore risking putting it out of mind) is also the stuff that may be getting in the way of my faith, my Christian life.  I’m not sure that this is a foolproof way of discerning one’s main barriers to a growing relationship with God, but there must be something in it for it to have stayed with me.

Which brings me back to the Children’s Society Box.  I still don’t know where it is.  But every day that it’s not in plain sight, right in front of my face, there are 5p, 2p and 1p coins accumulating in my purse (or worse still, being spent by me) and therefore missing their true vocation.  They are like the ‘gleanings’ (the spare crops at the edges of the field) that rightfully belong to those who need them more than I do.  If the Children’s Society box doesn’t turn up when I tidy up tomorrow morning, then I’m going to start my jam jar. And I’m going to set it going with some nice fat 10p coins. And I’m going to paint it pink, or yellow, or something else that’s so bright and colourful that it will stick out like a sore thumb and make generosity prominent again on our hallway table.

(Oh yes, and it’s well worth checking down behind the sofa cushions – it’s amazing how much money is sometimes lurking there!)

Ash Wednesday sermon 2013

Love Life Live Lent, sermons

What do we actually do today?

For want of a better way of putting it, I think we turn ourselves inside out. For one day, we show each other and ourselves what we’re really like. We put a messy cross on our foreheads to say, publicly, ‘I have mess. I have sin. I am not right. I need help.’

Today is about honesty. About admitting that we’re not perfect. Admitting that there is much in us which, left unchecked, will prove destructive for us, for those around us, and perhaps beyond, too.

Ash Wednesday can be seen as a service that condemns, that concentrates on what is wrong.  But as some of you may have noticed from what I tend to preach, I have this unrelenting urge to find good news in things, and I want to find good news in the ash, too.   When you start looking, there’s lots of it.

The first bit is that this service doesn’t work if only one person comes.  If I was on my own tonight (which I might well have been, given the snow), it would not work. Why? Because the ash cross is a great leveller. It says, my sin is my own, but I am not alone in being a sinner.  It’s precisely what we see in today’s gospel reading: the woman taken in adultery is not alone. Her sin is her own, but she is not alone in having sinned. That’s the first bit of good news.

The second bit of good news is that although this is the day when we tell ourselves and each other than we are messy people, full of dirt and sin and shame, the fact is that God already knew.  The fact that we are sinful, that humanity as a whole is sinful, is not news to God. He sees us for who we are – perhaps God is the only one in the universe who truly sees us as we really are, inside – and he still loves us. Infinitely. That’s the second bit of good news.

The third bit of good news is that when we receive the ash on our foreheads we are told ‘remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.’  We hear these words and we might remember the second account of creation in Genesis, in which God lovingly puts his hands in the earth and shapes a human being out of the dirt, breathing life into its nostrils.  The fact that we are dust is testament to God’s creativity, and God’s ability to bring life out of that which seems dead.  God has done it once. He can do it again. And again.  That’s the third bit of good news.

The fourth bit of good news is that the ash cross is tangible, and visible. It feels real.  It’s an action which changes us on the inside – the church would call what we do tonight ‘sacramental’.  The classic definition of a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward invisible grace, whereas the ash cross is almost the opposite: an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible lack of grace!  It means that our ‘sorry’ isn’t empty, but feels real.  And that reality is something that needs to be carried forward into our thoughts and words and actions beyond our repentance tonight. The ash reminds us that what we do, our action, the things that people see when they look at us, and what they hear when we speak – these things shape who we are inside as well as changing the world around us. We have a lent’s worth of actions ahead of us that can help us become more who God created us to be.  We may not be able to make good on all our past sins, but our actions and words can bring us closer to being who we are meant to be.  That’s the fourth bit of good news.

And finally, the fifth bit of good news is that we can wipe the ash off our forehead.  It’s not a brand, there for ever as a reminder that we are sinners. It’s a temporary mark, which rubs off to remind us that we sinners who can be forgiven.  Whether you keep your ash on for the rest of the evening, or wipe it off later in the service, there comes that moment when you remove the sign of your sin.  At school, on ascension day, we draw a cross in glitter on our foreheads – to remind ourselves and each other that we are called to ‘shine as a light in the world to the glory of God the Father’.  It’s a long way to go till Ascension Day, but that commission, to be the body of Christ, to witness to the peace which can, against all the odds, exist between earth and heaven, and to reveal the glory of God, starts now.  That’s the fifth bit of good news.

Love Life Live Lent – Say sorry!

Love Life Live Lent, random thoughts

I emailed a wedding couple today, finally sending them their order of service, for which they had been patiently waiting some time.  I am sure I’m not the only vicar in the world who finds the administration of the occasional offices (baptisms, weddings and funerals) sometimes ‘slips away’ and that bits of paper and emails become buried under many other bits of paper and emails.

Hence my apology.

And I do feel better now.

I feel better not only because I said sorry, but because I made good on what I’d done wrong.  The happy couple now have an order of service, and this has no doubt reduced their stress levels and made them happy.

Sometimes an apology is enough on its own, especially if we really, really mean it. And sometimes it’s all we’ve got, if the thing we’ve done wrong has been and gone and there’s no way to ‘make it good.’

My big apology last week was for completely missing Offord Women’s Guild – they always have Evensong on the first Tuesday of the month, and I always take the service and deliver a short homily-type thing, and enjoy tea and biccies afterwards. But last week for some reason I spent most of Tuesday thinking it was Monday, and only realised halfway through the midweek Eucharist on Wednesday that I’d missed the Guild.  Nothing I can do at that point. But I did write an apology on a nice tasteful card (it happened to have a picture of the church on it) by hand, and hand-delivered it to the chairperson of the Guild, on Wednesday, even though the level crossing meant that it took half an hour to do so.  And it felt better then. Until I next forget something….

Because the trouble is that I apologise quite a lot.  Some weeks I seem to spend most of my time apologising for things that I have got wrong.  So much so that while I was emailing my wedding couple earlier today I happened to glance up and see that I still have last Lent’s ‘motivational sign’ stuck to the shelf in front of my desk: “Get your act together, Barrett!” it reads, in bright red pen.  Clearly my disorganisation is not a new problem. And clearly I can be heartily and miserably sorry for the ways that it gets in the way of the gospel (ie the ways that I get in the way of the gospel), for the ways that it lets people down (ie for the way that I let people down) and for the damage that it may do to the credibility of the church (ie the damage that I do to the credibility of the church).  And I can apologise till I’m blue in the face, but my apology, my penitence, is empty unless I have the desire and the means to do things differently, and genuinely prioritise and care for every single one of those things entrusted to me.

So, one last sorry: to everyone reading this who I have ever offended by my disorganisation, tardiness, or forgetfulness, I truly and sorry, and I truly am asking God to help me do things better.

So maybe this Lent, my ‘sorry’ can be less empty.  Maybe this Lent my ‘sorry’ will come with a genuine ‘please’ to God to help me get my act together.  I pray for myself and for all disorganised vicars everywhere that the Good Shepherd will seek out and save the things we lose track of…

Ash Wednesday – a Love-Life-Live-Lent-flavoured sermon

church resources, Love Life Live Lent, sermons

It’s not mess…

There was an advert a few years ago for Persil automatic.  It was on TV and on billboards everywhere, so most of you will probably have seen it.  It features a film of children happily painting a wall in splashes of multicoloured paint.  Inevitably, more of the paint gets on their clothes, their hands and faces, and on each other, than on the wall.  The captions read “It’s not mess, it’s creativity, it’s not mess it’s learning,” and so on.

An Ash Wednesday service is a messy one: it involves marking our foreheads with the sign of the cross in a very messy mixture of ash and oil.  This service is messy because we are: sin is a messy business, and the ash reminds us of all the mess that we make of our own lives, of other people’s lives and of this world.  If a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace, then the ash cross is the reverse: an outwards and visible sign of an inward and invisible lack of grace. We sign ourselves with this messy mix of ash and oil because all of us are in a mess.  It helps us be honest about the disparity between what we appear to be and what we feel we are.  Many of us may sometimes feel uncomfortable with the respect that people give us – that we don’t quite match up to the person people think we are – the person we want to be.  When people praise us we may feel, ‘if only they knew…’   So the cross of ash helps us reconcile the person we feel we are with the person that others see.  It helps us remember that God sees us as we are – the good stuff and the not so good stuff – and he still loves us, even having seen the truth. Lent is a time for us to learn to see ourselves just as God does: as beloved sinners.

But the washing powder  advert puts an altogether more positive slant on mess, which is worth exploring.

One of the captions reads, ‘it’s not mess, it’s creativity’.

When we receive the ash cross on our forehead, we hear the words, ‘remember that you are dust’.  And so with the ash perhaps we can recall that wonderful picture of God’s creativity in Genesis 2, lovingly molding the earth into human beings, and breathing life into what was dry and lifeless.  And so as we receive the ash on our foreheads we can give thanks that God can still breathe new life into us even in the dirt and dust and deathliness of our sin.

One of the key themes of Love Life Live Lent is being creative and imaginative – whether that’s making cakes and sharing them or trying something you’ve never done before: when we do so, we reflect something of our creator God, and we give a little bit of life to the world as well as becoming a little more alive ourselves.

Another of the captions reads, ‘it’s not mess, it’s pride’. Pride is perhaps not quite the right word.  But the sign of the cross that we carry is certainly not something that we are ashamed of.  At our baptism, Christ claimed us as his own, and so we are glad to be marked with his sign of the cross.  Because Jesus took the shame of death on a cross and transformed it into hope and victory, he can also transform the shame of our sinfulness into the triumph over it.

Many of the Love Live Live Lent actions are also about our own identity as human beings and as beloved children of God; learning to be ourselves, making the most of who we are, and giving thanks for the way that we have been blessed – even if it’s just for the food we eat.

The TV advert ends with one of the children accidentally on purpose painting another’s nose – at first she looks cross, but then starts to smile.  The caption reads, ‘it’s not mess, it’s forgiveness’.  When we have the sign of the cross on our foreheads, we are a walking testimony to the fact that everyone can be forgiven.

Again, within Love Life Live Lent there are actions that bring real peace and reconciliation – between us and other people, and between humanity and the earth.  Ash Wednesday’s action is to say sorry for something we have done wrong: it may be enough simply to say sorry to God, or it may be that there are others who need to hear it too, and we may also need to acknowledge and repent of the harm we’ve done to ourselves, for sin has a habit of harming the sinner, too.

We are messy people.  The messes we make in our lives are real messes.  They are dark and dirty, and if left unchecked they will be the death of us.  And God does not condone our mess.  It is not that God does not mind about sin – on the contrary, it grieves him that we hurt and abuse ourselves and others, that we deface and corrupt the very air, water and land of this world he has given us. We take heart, and take courage, because we believe in a God who already knows the secrets of our hearts.

Guilt is a prison with sin as the bars, trapping us inside our past mistakes, but true repentance allows us to receive the forgiveness that God always offers, and it may even start to rebuild relationships that we had given up on.  Forgiveness is just as real as sin – and indeed is stronger. Life is stronger than death, light is stronger than darkness, and love is stronger than hate.

The actions in LLLL are all about the triumph of life over death, of light over darkness, of love over hatred.  Just as sin harms the sinner, so random acts of kindness, creativity and love can help repair the wounds on the soul.  This Lent, let us ask God to breathe life into our dust, that we may live lives of love, for our own sake, for each other’s sake, and for the sake of God’s world.