Easter Journey

Four primary schools in the Ferryhill area – Broom, Cleves Cross, Dean Bank and Ferryhill Station came together over two days to explore this year’s Easter Journey at Ferryhill Methodist church in March 2012. The project was led by Anne Offler, a children's and young people's development worker in the Durham and Deerness Valley Methodist Circuit. Anne also works as part of the West Durham Methodist Circuit Team where I am an authorised Methodist Minister.

Table of the Last Supper

The Easter Journey began in 2007 as the brain child of Frodsham's Main Street Community Church in Cheshire. The project provides an exciting opportunity to perform a delightful, easy-to-do presentation of the Easter story to local primary schools. Aimed at Year 5 children, the children take part in the Journey to discover the things that happened during the week of Jesus' death. Through role-play, storytelling and listening they travel through the palm-waving celebrations in Jerusalem of Palm Sunday and the clearing of market traders from the temple. They take part in the last supper with the disciples, listening in on what happened in the Garden of Gethsemane and hear about Jesus' cruel death on the cross on Good Friday. They experience for themselves some of the emotions felt by those who knew Jesus well. The story doesn't end there, of course, and they discover what happened three days later on the very first Easter morning when the tomb was found to be empty!

Anne Offler (2nd right) with helpers

To support Anne in her ministry I spent a day during Lent with her and some of the helpers from the congregation at Ferryhill Methodist church together with school teachers, classroom assistants and parent helpers.

After the journey juice and biscuits were served to the children who later, helped by teachers and church members, made a variety of crafts to take home - gift wrapped boxes with Easter Eggs and coloured small wooden crosses.

The children together with their teachers were enthusiastic and excited by what they saw and learnt from the Easter Journey. It made their time at church an enjoyable and positive experience.

For those looking into possible new ideas for next year I can recommend the book that accompanies the project –
The Easter Journey by Moira Curry and Gill Morgan, ISBN 978 1841016221, published 2009 by the Bible Reading Fellowship at £7.99.

Ray Anglesea

 

Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working in St Andrew’s Dawson Street LEP, Crook and in the wider West Durham Methodist Circuit

A Baptism for Mothering Sunday

An illustrated baptismal sermon preached by Ray Anglesea at St Andrew’s Dawson Street, Crook, Sunday 18th March 2012.

Francis and Helen, Euan and Eve your family and friends, welcome to church today, to your darling infant’s daughter’s/sister’s baptism. It is lovely to have you with us. I and the church here at Crook hope you have a happy and memorable day.

When I visited you both, Francis and Helen, at your lovely home in Roddymoor and Helen told me of Isla’s medical history and of your own I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude and thankfulness to God for the safe delivery of Isla, as I am sure you did too, for Helen’s recovery from hours of surgery; thankful too for the skills of surgeons and theatre staff at the RVI, thankful to the nursing staff on the intensive care baby unit, thankful for our wonderful NHS, free at the point of delivery, if that isn’t too much of a pun. You have a miracle baby, Francis and Helen you are an amazing and very brave couple, you now have the joy and happiness of bringing up Isla, with Evie and Euan.

Today is a good day. We need to remember the good times. In a nutshell, Helen and Isla through baptism have been made children of God’s grace, have become members of the Church. Helen and Isa has been baptised as Christians. This ceremony has obligations foremost of which is to live the Christian life. Helen and Isla’s baptism this morning is a sign of God’s promise to them both as Christians that he will be with Helen and Isla and their family forever. But more than that. God will love them both forever, until the end of time.

There will, as in all families, be darker moments when everything seems to be falling apart. We remember today the grieving mothers of the 22 Belgium and Dutch children killed in a coach crash in a Switzerland, the 6 mothers of British soldiers who died in Kandahar Province last week, last Saturday would have been the 21st birthday of Corporal Jake Hartley; Private Anthony Frampton’s last Facebook posting deserves at least a moment of reflection today for its depth: “I’ll be fine mum. Trust Me”.

When we are keenly aware of hardship, today we launch the church appeal for food bags it can be too easy to forget that there have been good times as well. So these good experiences today, etched on the memory, can support you both, Helen and Francis. You probably won’t be able to recall how you felt. Emotions pass. But you can hold on to the memories and be refreshed and revived.

Francis and Helen – God is committed to the flourishing, well being and happiness of your family, you have embarked on this great baptismal journey of love, not only of loving each other but of loving Isla. As parents you are going to be a sign, an electric spark to Isla of what human love is like, you are going to be the role models of what God’s love is like. Having five children on my own you I can assure you will be in for some challenging times and experiences. Isla may not need a media bedsit where she will have her own TV, internet, game consoles and a new apple iphone. But she will need you to be there for her, to support her, to sit at the poolside during swimming lessons, to listen to her play a musical instrument, to help with the maths homework, to let her borrow your car for the first time. You are going to be signs of love for Isla.

Frances and Helen. You are surrounded by loving families with offers of help and support, sleep-overs, shopping, grandparents. Use them. We as a church are here to help you too, our doors are open, you have our telephone numbers, we too can provide help and support, education and teenage training. Alas human beings live in a world of good and bad and that makes our lives and relationships painful and complicated but not so with God. God will never give up on you, even if you run away from him. Francis and Helen, never stop loving each other - you are for Isla what human love and family life is like and can be for the rest of her life – she will learn from you, you will be her example.

And in all this we, as we are able, together, the church will do everything possible to keep our promises to love, help and support you.

Let us remember today we should that we have cause for thanksgiving – God has committed himself yet again to one more human family, the Kealey family here from Poplar Terrace, Roddymoor, and in the lives of this lovely family with whom today we join in celebration, we see the sign of God’s embracing, renewing vision of God’s faithful love.

Francis and Helen, may God bless you and your family on your journey of faith.

Amen

Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working in St Andrew’s Dawson Street LEP, Crook and in the wider West Durham Methodist Circuit

Access to God

A sermon preached by Revd Ray Anglesea at Sedgefield Methodist Church and Trinity Methodist Church, Spennymoor, Sunday 11th March 2012

Durham Cathedral bookshop is on the move. The bookshop is moving from the splendid 14th century octagonal monastic kitchen with its spectacular star-shaped ceiling, to a new location opposite the white-washed vaulted restaurant. It is hoped that the new retail space, once home to the Cathedral treasury, will be open later this year. At the moment the space looks like a building site, a holding area for disused exhibition cabinets, glass panels, chairs and stools; the flagstone floor has been removed creating lots of dust, filth and grime, there is little natural light in this crypt like cellar except for high small windows on its western wall.

The building’s present condition reminded me of a recent archaeologist’s report which seemed to think that under the Temple in Jerusalem was a huge storage area, a vault, like an underground car park, similar to the Cathedral’s dark empty building space, and this was almost certainly the area where the booths of the money-changers stood, and the pens of the animal-vendors. It’s quite a powerful image: a vast echoing chamber, with a few slits for light right at the top, perhaps some flares or oil lamps, deafening noisy, smelly, airless, and overcrowded. It’s easy to imagine the panic and uproar in this crowded space when a dusty and unkempt northerner pushes over a few stalls and sets the pigeons loose and begins to shout incomprehensible biblical quotations about prayer and all nations and the evils of commerce in a holy space.


As has often been pointed out, we’ve no reason to suppose there is anything wicked going on in that dark and noisy vault. Traders of (no doubt) average honesty were doing what such people do the world over, providing a necessary service as efficiently as they could, similar to the present day retail operations at the cathedral. The noise and the smell and the crowding were doubtless unfortunate in some ways, though we shouldn’t apply Western standards too rapidly here, anyone who has been to other religious shrines around the world will realise that the idea that silence and solemnity are necessary for reverence is a new and strange one to a good part of the human race. We can’t assume that what was going on was exceptionally squalid or exploitative. So what exactly was wrong?

The traders could reasonably say that they had to be there: they weren’t an agreeable but optional extra, like a cathedral shop, but part of the very business of the Temple. To go in, you had to empty your pockets of foreign, idolatrous coinage and acquire approved Temple currency, and of course, you had to have animals and birds for sacrifice, pleasing things to offer to the Lord. The trade was essential to the system, a condition of the Temple worship continuing as usual. If the authorities chose to see an attack on the traders as an attack on the sacrificial system, perhaps they weren’t so far wrong: and when St John associates Jesus’ action in the Temple with the words “Destroy this Temple and in three days I will raise it up,” he was not wrong. There is more at stake here that an attack on wicked grocers.

The Temple attacked by Jesus was once a sign of grace – the spot where God chooses to make his name to dwell (as in Deuteronomy), where he makes himself “public” and “accessible.” You go up to Jerusalem to see the God of gods in Zion, as Psalm 84 tells us, you go to seek his gracious presence, from which, according to

psalms 42/43 it is pain and humiliation to be cut off by exile or sickness. The temple served as the focus of identity, religious, national, social, you name it – for some it stood as the architectural and symbolic centrepiece of their most important city – a city that played a key role in their most cherished memories, and a location that would figure in a hope-for future when God’s promises would be fully materialised.

In the last days, the prophet said, the Temple hill would tower above all hills and draw all people to it like a beacon. But what has it become? A place where rigorous and complex conditions of entry, conditions that generate a whole cottage industry around the Temple: the right coinage, the ritually pure animals and so on, have to be supplied. Religious activity, seeing God and serving God, had become a busy, satisfying and distinctive area of human action and experience. The temple had become a place of barter and exchange, haggling and bargaining, where poor people were cheated, swindled by clever and capricious scoundrels. What was sacred and holy had now become profane. The real and proper activity of the temple had been replaced by commercialism and greed; ordinary people searching for God had been prevented from doing so by avaricious traders who made the atmosphere of worship impossible.

Jesus comes into the subterranean Temple’s precincts as a strikingly secular figure - we know from the gospels, in his acts and parables, that Jesus was unconcerned to ask questions about the status or purity of those who come to him, you may remember the woman at the well, Nicodemus, Zaccheus, the blind and the lame. In the light of his proclamation, the Temple makes perfect sense as a sign of promise, a space consecrated to the openness of God’s invitation to the world, a space that we may recall in another parable where all the birds of the air can find a space, a roost, and a nesting place. It is a space that is free, open and available to all. God’s temple does not and cannot make sense as the centre of a bustling religious sub culture, devoted to satisfying the demands of God and God’s purity. And the story we tell later in Lent, in Holy Week, presses this point further still: Jesus consecrates himself, makes himself holy, as he goes outside the city to a godless and cursed death in an unhallowed public place, a rag and bone heap beside the road, where he is stripped naked and nailed up like a scarecrow. And as he dies, says the evangelist, the partition between the Holy of Holies and it forecourt is torn apart. In that week the holy is redefined and recreated for us, not the temple, church or cathedral - the Temple is now rebuilt as the body of the crucified Christ. His body, this temple, this holy space is not a place of exclusion, a house of merchandise where we must barter to be allowed in, trading our daily lives, our secular joys and pains for the sacred currency of ritual and the acceptable pure gifts that will placate God; but the cross by the roadside, unfenced, unadorned, the public and the defenceless place where God gives us room. It is this that has become a holy space.

The irony shouldn’t escape us. Our churches, chapels and cathedral are often a long way from that rubbish dump outside Jerusalem. The church has determined its own access policies, rightly or wrongly as to who can approach God, where to sit and in what position, books to use and sing from, look at our own baptismal and communion policies. It is too easy to distort the worship of Almighty God with self serving complacency, consumerist greed and hunger for control.

And so we must tell ourselves again and again. Beneath this shrine, beneath the words we say and hear today, as beneath the old Temple, is a lightless, deafening, choking and smelly vault, a place we are constantly in danger of slipping away to without noticing. We brush aside the rumour of the scarecrow on the cross and stick with a God we can do business with. This God is pleased with our bustle, our committees and structures, our willingness to make him an absorbing even expensive hobby. He is pleased that we treat our worship as something isolated and special, pleased by our religious professionalism. He is delighted that we so successfully manage the conditions under which he may be approached, saying yes to this one and no to that one and possibly if you do the following things, like removal one’s hats and switching off the mobile phone as we enter the cathedral, you can sit here, have you been confirmed to receive communion? The scribes sit and discuss who is pure enough to come to the communion table, and the anxious crowds’ mill around to find where they can acquire the right coinage to come into the sacred precinct. Religion and morality become religiosity and moralism. The wholeness of persons – their sin and their need and their thanksgiving – is broken down, as bits are exchanged for the acceptable equipment of the cult.

Of course the crowds aren’t that much in evidence these days. I can get 12 for worship at Stanhope, 8 at Wolsingham, look around the cathedral at it’s empty seats, it is now so easy to think of the cathedral as a concert venue run by the National Trust, rather than a place of prayer. To most people, the hectic activity of that vault where we worship is both comical and alarming, most people find traditional Christianity morally, socially and politically irrelevant. Perhaps so strikingly seen as the protest occupy movement outside St Paul’s Cathedral, London, now disbanded, has shown. The church through vacillation and division has missed the chance to contribute anything meaningful to important issues of global capitalism, poverty and the financial world. The response of St Paul’s to the angry, scruffy and loud occupy movement has been a lost opportunity to reach out to a wider population and thus perhaps to construct a new and compelling narrative for itself in years to come. Perhaps after a decade of fundraising – £42 million – it is easy to see why St Paul’s has lost its way, it is just too easy to worship Christopher Wren and not the God who spoke of the rich having to give up all its possessions. The camp maybe dead, but long live the campaign.

The tragedy is that our church members suppose that these cathedral precincts are holy places, the Temple of God. And for all of us who are religious, who dutifully perform the rites of our faith and especially for those who like me are professionally religious, clergy and so on, there is enough of that hot and crowded vault somewhere not too far from the surface to give plausibility to that error. We live down there a good deal of the time without even noticing, with the God who needs both pleasing and managing – an occupation that substantially eats into the time we have for the concerns of the world.

And so it is my plea that as we move deeper into Lent our work and worship in places like this should not fail to lead us back to the central fact of grace, God’s gift shown in the depth of human pain, that scarecrow in a public place, unfenced and unadorned, open for the whole world to see. Then the vault where we spend most of our church life work can be emptied, because the service of our holy God sets us free from the setting of boundaries and conditions. That service can call forth the

riches of imagination in prayer and music, the quiet dedication of all those who help in other ways, and even the long winded labour of us ministers. There can still be life, thought and vitality and beauty in the service of holiness, perhaps even more when we are set free from the manic and obsessive God and the hectic airless religion of the subterranean vault. But what will matter is the patterning of all this towards the truth at the centre of the world, God’s cross, in all its openness, all it secularity and unprotectedness.

John’s Jesus reproaches his people for making the Father’s house a place of merchandise: Go is not served with bargaining and managing. The Jesus of the other gospels says that the traders have made the holy place a den of thieves: the honour give to the God of the traders’ vault is taken from the true God. The real Lord of the real creation, God with us, is robbed of love and trust and service by the fantasies of religious busyness, robbed of those who are his scattered children by the way we men and women of faith so readily make our churches defended fortress. Lent and particularly Holy Week with all its intensity of ritual and imaginative elaboration, come paradoxically to break down the walls of self-contained religion and morality and to gather us around the one true holy place of the Christian religion. Jesus himself, displayed to the world as the public language of our God, placarded on the history of human suffering that stretches along the roadside. This is a time for learning not management, bargaining and rule keeping, but naked trust in that naked gift.

Amen

Readings: Exodus 20: 1 – 17; John 2: 13 – 22

Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working in St Andrew’s Dawson Street LEP, Crook and in the wider West Durham Methodist Circuit

Astonishing - A Lenten Reflection

Crook Churches Together - Day 6 Week 2 :  Mark 6: v45-56

Little Women is based on Louisa May Alcott's classic 1869 semi-autobiographical novel. But have you heard of the musical, Little Women, which came to Broadway in 2005, lyrics by Mindi Dickstein, and music by Jason Howland? The musical follows the book, it focuses on the four March sisters — brassy, tomboy-like, aspiring writer Jo, romantic Meg, pretentious Amy, and kind-hearted Beth — and their beloved Marmee, at home in Concord, Massachusetts while the family patriarch is away serving as a Union Army chaplain during the Civil War. Intercut with the vignettes in which their lives unfold are several recreations of the melodramatic short stories Jo writes in her attic studio. But things are not going well for Jo, she receives a notice of rejection from another author in New York City, making it her twenty - second rejection. Laurie, decides to ask Jo to marry him, but gently he is rebuked . Jo tells him that she will never marry Laurie. Jo then ponders her future, which is changing significantly. She vows to find another way to achieve her future and sings one of the best loved songs of the whole musical at the end of Act 1 entitled astonishing.

Astounding: amazing, surprising, astounding, shocking, beyond belief. These are some of the words that come to mind when the disciples had watched Jesus walking on the water. Let’s zoom in to the scene on Gennesaret - There they are, hair plastered down by lake water, crouching in a boat, its hull now caressed by gentle wavelets. For all the calm around them, in their hearts and minds they are buffeted by questions, fear, awe, wonder, confusion. Perhaps a tempest of recrimination blasts at them? They have woken up to their spiritual amnesia. Jesus is always healing and teaching, healing and teaching; the stakes are raised when demons are driven out, storms are stilled, the feeding of the five thousand, and now this: walking on the water. Guys, you saw Him heal people. You heard him teach. No, I don’t think the calm on the lake is matched by calm in their hearts. When is it all going to end, what’s going to happen, where is it all heading – He now has power over the elements. He is sovereign over the natural world. If the feeding of the 5,000 hadn’t astonished them then walking on the water will totally astonish them.

And what of us? What astonishes us........ are we immune from this spiritual amnesia.

* Have you had those moments of an intense sense of God, times when you have prayed and seen God at work – powerful, fearful, wonderful.

* That retreat when you were overwhelmed by the love of God.

* That time in the garden when the wonder of creation moved you so deeply you wept.

* The sublime beauty of the quiet of the spiritual space, infused with His presence.

* A moment with a mentor or spiritual director when you see that what looked like death is a gateway to life.

* The consoling presence of God filling you up and you tell yourself that you have moved on in your faith to a new place.

Perhaps you write this in a journal and come across it some time later and you are surprised by the memory. You’d forgotten it. Like some lost love letter written 40 years ago, a precious time when life was vibrant, challenging on full green ahead. But now in the amber years the tensions, trivialities and traumas of life had robbed you. The banality of life numbs you in its routine. Spiritual amnesia. It shrinks Jesus down until he is dashboard sized. We forget - the Lord of heaven and earth, God almighty, is only a heartbeat away. Sometimes we need an astonishing moment to wake us up, as Jo March sang in her song from Little Women

Sadly the disciples in Mark are slow on the uptake, astonished, yes, surprised, scare out of their wits, slow to believe “because their hearts were hardened.” They don’t seem to be learning the lesson, all this rushing around, and Mark does go at a fast pace, healing and teaching, the restless running around and people being brought to Jesus. I think Mark is inviting us to ask the question ourselves, and to ask in addition whether we are like the disciples, watching events happen but not drawing the right conclusions, or whether our hearts have been softened or perhaps opened to believe the extraordinary thing that is occurring before our eyes. Mark is at pains to bring to our attention in this part of the gospel at least is that Jesus is the Messiah, this is where the story is going - the deeper meaning Jesus divinity as shown by his walking on the water will come later. When the New Testament writers want to tell us that Jesus is in some sense divine, this is not something set apart from hunger, thirst, fear, sorrow and death itself, but found mysteriously in the middle of them all. Our astonishment comes not by seeing Jesus as divine but by seeing him as human. We are right to be astonished, but our astonishment come from seeing something more mysterious by far, a dimension of our world which is normally hidden, Mark is offering Jesus to our startled imaginations as the world’s rightful king, now returning, putting things right.

This astonishing news makes us at least blink and rub our eyes – Mark indicates that we are in good company. I don’t think his remark about the disciples being hard hearted is a major criticism of them, what else one might expect. He is simply warning that to grasp all this will need more than suspension of belief, it will take a complete change of heart, and that is what Jesus has come to bring. It is in our thinking, our imagining, and our praying as well as in our bodily health that we are invited to come, like the frantic crowds and touch the hem of Jesus garment, looking for salvation. Now that is astonishing!

Amen

 Ray Anglesea

Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working in St Andrew’s Dawson Street LEP, Crook and in the wider West Durham Methodist Circuit