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

Crook Churches Together

Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2012 -

Day 7: Changed by Feeding   - 

John 21:15-17 Feed my sheep

An address by Revd Ray Anglesea


This year in the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity we have been looking at some words of St Paul who proclaimed “We shall be changed,” (by the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ -1 Corinthians 15 v57). The victory envisaged is not the result of force but achieved by the Son of Man who came not to serve, but to serve, as St. Mark tells us, was prepared to suffer for those whom he served, as we read in the letter of Peter. Victory is not to be expectedly immediately. Those who seek must wait patiently as Revd Vince Fenton reminded us on Wednesday, it is to be a victory of good overcome by evil with good, as Capt Mark Adamson reminded us on Wednesday, it is brought about by the peace of the risen Lord and established by God’s steadfast love as Sister Lucy reminded us yesterday. And it bears fruit in care for those in need, feed my lambs, feed my sheep as I shall be reflecting today. This vision of Christ’s victory is not brutal and coercive. There is no need to fear it as arrogant or threatening. On the contrary it is rooted in service and the readiness to suffer, and in patience, peace and love.

To feed. We can read that verb on various levels. There is some truth in the English proverb that a way to a man’s heart is through his stomach. I married a beautiful wife who loves cooking, the kitchen is my wife’s province, now semi retired I tread carefully in her territory, her roast beef and Yorkshire puddings, trifles, Christmas puddings and chocolate cakes are beyond compare, her sea food pasta, profiteroles and sticky toffee pudding make my mouth water. With such a large and extended family, daily meals were prepared as for an army, friends, family and student neighbours would gather around the table for birthdays, celebrations and anniversaries, 19 I think we had in one famous sitting. 30 or so years of married bliss tired of sitting on an assortment of chairs and stools we have just acquired a new dining room table – it came with 10 matching chairs. My third son, Tom, has taken up cooking as a career, preparing fancy meals in a variety of restaurants around the world, London, New York, Toronto, Sydney, for such well known chefs, Heston Blumenthal, Gordon Ramsey, Thomas Kellar. Last year he worked in the restaurant voted the best restaurant in the world, Noma, Copenhagen. Pete my fourth son has too joined the catering world, opening a cafe Flat White in Durham. When the Lord prepares a table before me as we heard in that well loved psalm 23, I like to imagine that it will be groaning with luscious and extravagant food, the heavenly banquet, like the Harvest teas we had at St Andrew’s many years ago, but perhaps without a whiff of autumnal Chrysanthemums.

Jesus instructs his disciples to feed and care for the world’s poor and hungry, this we do in a variety of ways through many relief organisations. But we can read this passage at a more profound and deeper level.

Three times at the lakeside Jesus asks the question ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me?' There's a memory of the first time Peter set eyes on Jesus; how he looked at him and said: ‘you are Simon, son of John'. Three times Peter replies in the affirmative. Three times Jesus charges him to care for his flock. Three times, for each of the three times Peter had denied him on the night of the passion. Jesus in his gracious forgiveness gave Peter the chance to wipe out the memory of the threefold denial by a threefold declaration of love. Jesus reinstated Peter. If you love me, Jesus said, then give your life to shepherding the sheep and the lambs of my flock. We can only prove that we love Jesus by loving others. Love is the greatest privilege in the world, but love also brings the greatest responsibility in the world. Love brought Peter a cross – later Jesus goes on to predict that Peter too will lay down his life for the sake of the Good Shepherd whom he follows. For where Jesus has gone is precisely where Peter must also go for love of him. It will be the cost of discipleship for Peter, of saying yes to the summons of the risen Lord, ‘follow me'.

‘Simon, son of John, do you love me?' ‘Yes, Lord, you know that I am your friend'. To be a friend of Jesus means loving him personally, passionately, and publicly, because that is the way he loves us. It means embracing the price of friendship, not caring about my life so much that I wouldn't be prepared to give it up for him. It means imitating the Good Shepherd not only in caring for his people, feeding his flock, but in laying down his life for them.

In the power of the resurrection Peter can now put Maundy Thursday behind him, when he so dismally failed the test of friendship. Easter has transformed and changed the coward of the courtyard into the loving friend of the lakeside. And I dare say that of all the disciples, his journey is most like ours, for we too need constantly to be enticed from the twilight of half-commitment into the full day of loyal love, ‘out of darkness into his marvellous light' as a Letter of Peter says. We need to be able to say: ‘yes Lord, we are your friends'. We need conversion of life, we need to be transformed, turned round, not once but each day we live.

Jesus asks us to live and die for him, just as he died and lives for us, even if it takes us where we do not wish to go. Perhaps on good days we can begin to wish to go there for his sake, for where the Master is, there will his servant be. And whatever awaits us on that road, we know that we must embody and express our love of Jesus by feeding his sheep. For Peter and for us, that includes living within the circle of love we call the Christian community. But love always looks beyond itself. To be friends of Jesus means being friends to those he especially cherishes: the vulnerable and voiceless and poor, those whom he calls his brothers and sisters, those to whom we are instructed to feed.

Once Peter said, when Jesus asked if the disciples would abandon him: ‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life'. Perhaps the words came too easily. Sometimes they do in a fit of enthusiasm. ‘I will lay down my life for you' he'd exclaimed in that moment of heightened intensity in the upper room, hardly knowing what he was saying. But he knows now. At the lakeside Jesus puts the test once more, and this time he rises to the challenge. ‘Lord, you know that I am your friend. You know I could not love you more.' On the other side of the passion he understands what this means, what it will cost him. It is his greatest moment. I ask myself, and I ask you, whether ours is yet to come, and how passionate we shall be when it does.

Paul may have been the great orator who voyaged and adventured far in the mission of the gospel, John, theologian and writer it appears had great insight into the mind of God, but it was to Peter who was given the role of the Great Shepherd of Christ’s people. It was Peter who had the honour and the lovely task of being the shepherd of the sheep of Christ. And here is where we too can follow in the steps of Peter. We may not be able to think like John or go to the ends of the earth like Paul. But each of us can guard someone from going astray, and each one of us can feed the lambs of Christ with spiritual and physical food.

Amen

A Tyrant's Lair

A sermon preached by Revd Ray Anglesea at St Andrew's Dawson Street, Crook and at Trinity Methodist Church, Spennymoor, Sunday 8th January 2012


Accordingly to church historians the pro-Roman King, Herod the Great, was a nasty piece of work. King of a small Jewish state he was by all accounts an insecure tyrant; he employed mercenaries and secret police to enforce order; a madman he trusted no one, not even his wives (of which he had ten) or his many sons – he executed one spouse and three of his boys because he feared they were plotting against him. Encouraged by his Roman masters, Herod believed in singling out individuals for public execution as well as the mass slaughter of opponents; any threat of an uprising was put down with brutal and bloody ferocity, so much so that his excessive brutality was condemned by the rabbinical court of judges, the Sanhedrin. Herod's paranoia about keeping power and his ruthless suppression of dissent earned him a well deserved place alongside the great dictators of history. Not a name you would find in the Jerusalem New Year’s Honours List. But like Herod the world is not immune or unaffected by political tyrants.

The death of Kim Jon II of North Korea last month, self-styled superior and dearest leader, great man who descended from heaven, saviour, Highest Incarnation of the Revolutionary Comrades, Great Defender, Guiding Star of the 21st Century, just a few of his many titles, ended a dismal year for the world’s tyrants and dictators. His 17 years of grotesque tyrannical misrule ensured him the top place in most rankings of the word’s autocratic despots. Combining absolute rule Kin Jon II achieved even greater catastrophe for North Koreans than suppression and mass starvation; he has left a population of some 24 million people physically stunted owing to malnutrition, and emotionally and intellectually impoverished. Close behind came another tyrant and oppressor, Gaddafi of Libya, who was ousted in August and killed in October. Murbarak of Egypt was ousted in February after 30 years in power and is on trial with his son, Gamal. In January last year Tunisia’s President ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia after a mere 24 years of plundering and repression. Syria’s revolution is expected to topple President Assad in the next 12 months ending four decades of tyranny since 1971. It is estimated that three dozen dictatorial regimes still ensure that nearly two billion people around the world are denied their basic human rights. While Putin, the prime minister in Moscow has yet to earn the title of dictator the phrase Russian democracy is in danger of becoming an oxymoron as he prepares to return to the presidency next year.

And just when Herod the Great felt his great building projects were under control, the temple in Jerusalem, his military fortifications at Herodias and the construction of the port at Caesarea Maritima news arrives of the coming of a rival king who heralds a different kind of political reality. Wise men with ostentatious and extravagant gifts led by a star come to his lavish fortress palace at Herodium, they are Gentile astrologists/astronomers from outside the Jewish tradition, clever, devious, complicated, nervous learned men, they are late arrivals at the scene. They do not bring this year’s apple merchandise, iPad 2, iphone 4S, iPad touch, but gold frankincense and myrrh. These wise ones come with their scientific enquiry and enquiring minds and announce to Herod that a new King is to be born; telling Herod about the Christ child they provoke the massacre of the children in Bethlehem.

What Matthew is at pains to tell us is in the opening chapters of his gospel is a story not written to satisfy astronomical curiosity or a kind of cosy picture-book story we have created for ourselves; what he is telling us is political dynamite. Jesus, Matthew is saying is the true King of the Jews. Herod is the false one, a usurper, an impostor. Matthew introduces us to something which Matthew wants us to be clear about from the start. If Jesus is in some sense King of the Jews that doesn’t mean that his rule is limited to the Jewish people. At the heart of many prophecies about the coming king, the Messiah, there were predictions that his rule would bring God’s justice and peace to the whole world.

But what is it about the resourceful and clever wise men with their supposed wisdom, that they arrive at the wrong door and in so doing create confusion and mayhem, havoc and destruction – the slaughter of the innocents. It’s as if the wise, the devious, the resourceful, the political strategists can’t help making the most immense mistakes of all. Here we are with our modern 21st century minds and with our technology, knowing more and more, yet stepping deeper and deeper into military, economic and political tragedy. Communications are more effective than ever in human history, analysis of national international situations become ever more subtle; intelligence and surveillance provides theoretical perspectives on human behaviour, individual and collective. And still the innocence are killed, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Egypt, Libya, Congo.

And yet – here is the miracle – Christ is born in a country occupied by a tyrant and a ruthless confused dictator, born in a humble feeding trough in some Jewish backwater of a village. And here is another miracle - the three wise men with their massive foolishness and thoughtlessness are welcomed at the manger door. They are not turned away. Here amongst the tyrannies of the world’s wise men, wise people are to be found, they do not turn away. They are, as Matthew tells us, part of God’s justice and peace plan for the world. In the suffering and political struggles, peaceful demonstrations one day and violent suppression the next, and the massacres that we see daily on our screens, there we find wise people who in their struggles against tyrannies search for the truth, for liberation and freedom; in Lybia, in Syria, America and London where our times are not quiet times of contentment and shared prosperity; there is a deep sense that something has gone tragically wrong as we ponder with the Occupy London protests the gross inequality and injustice throughout our world.

Last month two modern leaders died: Vaclav Havel, former president of the Czech republic and Kim Jong II, the leader of North Korea. Kim Jong ruled by fear, suppressed freedom, murdered dissidents and encouraged a cult of personality. Vaclav Havel on the other hand inspired his contemporaries to fight against totalitarian rule, against tyrants and though he too faced a seemingly impregnable enemy, soviet communism, he knew that freedom is not won by numbers but by courage, physical, intellectual and ultimately spiritual. He once said: “As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.” In other words we have to live for something greater than ourselves if we are to win the freedom to be ourselves. Havel called his most famous essay “The Power of the Powerless,”......... freedom can defeat ruthless power. It needs a few dedicated people with the inextinguishable courage to light a candle of hope in other people’s lives and together we can change the world.

And it was Mohamed Bouazizi, the humble Tunisian fruit seller whose fight for justice created history and was named the 2011 Times Person of the Year. His courage inspired the oppressed masses of the Arab world the right to determine their own destiny. His self lit

oppressed masses of the Arab world the right to determine their own destiny. His self lit candle of hope, his own body, burning himself to death, triggered an Arab uprising. 2011 turned out to be a year of a million heroes of Arab men and women who took to the streets demanding their liberty, dignity, economic opportunity and the right to choose their own lives. Thousands paid for their temerity with their lives, but with enormous courage these nameless and faceless heroes have toppled some of the world’s dictators and autocrats, the Herod’s of the world. Does the nature of Bouzazi’s immolation remind you of another martyr?

As the wise men discovered on their long journey, coming to the Christ child isn’t always simple. I guess we might share the same experience. For some people, faith is difficult, hard, often God is remote, God appears on mute, most of the time we live in dry deserts, we run out of spiritual fuel. Many would admit they no longer have a vivid experience of God. What was bright and shiny is now tarnished and dull. What gave life and purpose has been reduced to disappointment and play acting. Christian people later in life quietly confide that they have lost the fire of their faith, and even sophisticated believers can lose their balance when faced with serious ill health. People journey late and arrive by roundabout routes to the stable door, with complex histories, sin and muddle, false expectations and perceptions and wrong starts. It’s no good saying to them, “You must become simple and wholehearted,” as this could be done just by wishing. The real question is “Can you take all your complicated history with you on your journey to the manger? Can you stop hanging on to the complex and the devious for their own sake, as a theatre for your own skills and recognise where the map of heavens points.

In a world in turmoil, the economic forecast for the New Year looks bleak, uncertain and frightening; particularly here in the North East which is probably back in recession where an embittering growing class of have-nots is beginning to emerge. Just look around the many private and public housing estates in Crook and Willington where there is now severe unemployment. One of my dreams this year is to set a soup kitchen here in church. On my daily walk to the cathedral I pass men sleeping rough in cold wet shop door fronts, graduates with 1st class honours degrees prepare sandwiches and serve at tables at my son’s cafe because there are no jobs for them, qualified planning students are returning to planning school because there has been no planning jobs advertised in the North East for the last two years; I too know the trauma and anger of being made redundant from a profession I loved. Journeying for me for such people as I have mentioned may be a tedious, dreary, dull and difficult journey to the truth. But on the way we must not deny the tangle and the talents, the varied web of what has made us, what has happened to us and who we are. Every step is part of the journey, even the false starts which move us on towards the truth. But we come as we are; room is made for us, healing is promised, even usefulness given to us if we are ready to make an offering of what W H Auden called “our crooked heart.”

In the straw of the stable, the humble and the complicated are able to kneel together, he is there in naked spirituality for the sophisticated and the troubled, those who had long and journeys, cold comings, to the stable. Let none think they are too tangled, too late and messy to be welcomed. Space has been made in this world for the Christ child, who comes amongst us in the real world of tyrants and dictators, politics and struggle, for God to make himself at home and to welcome all of us and use whatever we bring to him.


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

Sharing Salvation

A sermon preached by Revd Ray Anglesea at St Andrew's Dawson Street, Crook
Sunday December 18th 2011

A few years ago I had the privilege of conducting the funeral service of my wife’s midwife. Marie had attended my wife throughout her pregnancies; some of the children were born at home, some in the local hospital. Marie’s no- nonsense approach, her support and care, her professionalism was excellent in every respect. Having held my wife’s hand during the birth of our children I often wondered who whose hands Mary squeezed? Who helped Mary with her breathing exercises 2,000 years ago, who fetched the water, the towels and swaddling clothes? In an age when 1in 3 babies and 1in 4 mothers died in childbirth, giving birth must have been a frightening and dangerous procedure in 1st century Palestine (what a risk God must have taken!)

Early theologians of course were quick to defend the virgin birth - as well as conception – it was so easy. Alas for some conception is far from easy as Alex Smallbone, the longsuffering wife played brilliantly by Olivia Coleman from the BBC2 sitcom Rev is experiencing. Will St Saviour’s in the Marsh be blessed by a new baby this Christmas I wonder?

Early theologians, generally the fathers of the Church were less sure about whether Mary, or Jesus, really needed any help conceiving of giving birth. In classic Christian thinking, iconography and paintings, which we have looked at this morning, it is normal to see the infant Jesus as the saviour-in-waiting, with Mary as a worshipping witness rather than a woman who has just given birth. No one is there to really aid the mother and child. A midwife is not mentioned in the birth narratives, unlike the Hebrew midwifes at the time of the birth of Moses, who feared God and as a result “the people multiplied” says the bible and “became strong.” A Christmas card sent a couple of years ago from the synod moderator showing 1st century Palestinian midwifes attending the birth of Jesus created quite a discussion amongst synod ministers – it was a beautiful card from the collection of Barbara Marian’s Nativity Project - where in the birth narratives is a midwife mentioned? rather like the other presumed characters who appear at this time of the year......the innkeeper, soldiers, donkey, Little Drummer Boy, ox and ass, Cliff Richard, robins and Santa Claus. This year the synod moderator has sent to synod staff her Christmas card showing three wise women attending the birth of Jesus. I guess that will provoke comment too.

In the recently critically acclaimed exhibition at the National Gallery “Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan,” the 15th century exquisite portraits of the Virgin, painted to convey a sense of awe-inspiring mystery gives no hint that Mary ever had a contraction, required gas and air......... the epidural must have been a knock out - literally! There she is in her classic blue gown, radiant with motherly bliss, baby Jesus sleeping peacefully, no crying he makes.

Well if childbirth as recorded in the gospel appeared a pretty easy and straightforward affair then at face value the complicated business of Jesus’ growing up appears equally uncomplicated. It must have appeared a doddle to the daily rollercoaster life of the Brockman family and their children Jake, Ben and Karen from the comedy sitcom Outrnumbered. The gospel stories inform us that Jesus' path and destiny from stable to cross is already marked out. The more spiritually alert folk - his mother, the wise men, Simeon and the shepherds - all seem to know what is happening. Salvation is coming through this one child sleeping tenderly in the manger: it will cost God everything, and you nothing. You cannot help God but he has come to help you.

But looking at the gospels closer they paint a more subtle picture. The bringing of salvation to the world, the title of another major exhibition some years ago at the National Gallery, London turns out to be a work in which the cost of salvation is shared amongst many. Other people are involved in the process. It’s not just all down to baby Jesus, sweetly sleep, do not stir. Mary the teenage mother must say "yes", the Annunciation is her sacrifice. Jesus escapes the wrath of Herod, but thousands of infants do not. Others, such as John the Baptist, lose their lives for Jesus before He can sacrifice his. God's salvation incurs sacrifice on behalf of other, it incurs cost.

And I say the cost deliberately. You may remember the Sunday School pneumonic – what does Grace mean – answer - God's Riches At Christ's Expense – well older and wiser now the pneumonic is not actually quite right. In bringing heaven to earth, light into the darkness, joy to the world – the Lord has come - Jesus' is not the only sacrifice. In short, God cannot do it alone; Mary's "yes" is of course needed, but help is needed too from the unknown helpers on the refugee trail to Egypt, the shepherd, the innkeeper, the wise men. God, in coming as a child, invites the many people who were around at the time, to help from the very first in the bringing of salvation.

And it is these people that the children so loving portray in their nativity plays every year, shepherds with tea towels, wise men in dressing gowns, Mary in her blue dress. The nativity players to be sure are characters and studies in Christian virtue, discipline and generosity which we may wish to look at during the Christmas season. (I always like Mary to have started her contractions on the 24th December before the church enjoys its nativity plays and the singing of Christmas carols). Some of the characters like the presumed innkeeper extends his boundaries to find one more room; very like the mansions of God, there is room. The wise men – or as the synod moderator would have it on her Christmas card – the Wise ones - bring extravagant gifts, speaking of the foolish generosity so rarely found in kingly power, but especially bestowed in God's kingdom now coming to birth.
People like the lowly shepherds, irregular temple worshippers who mirror the spontaneity and searching of Christ; you may find him, but he will come looking for you anyway. And the people of Egypt, this great ancient civilisation, too often unsung, are also part of the salvation adventure, they sustain the asylum seekers the holy family on their journey into their country. Small wonder that, as an adult, Christ preached on the importance of welcoming the stranger.

So, looking at this big complex word salvation in terms of God solely bearing the cost and not needing our help, is by no means simple and clear cut. The complicated Christmas salvation story is far richer in depth and meaning. Grace should really be seen as something that is expansive as it is expensive rather than costly. God involves many people in that work of "gathering up all things in Christ", as St Paul’s puts it, that great ambassador for the Gentiles, and allows all sorts of folk to participate in his saving work. Remember last year’s sermons from Matthew’s gospel. The birds of the air that make their nests in the mustard tree, the eagles, the wrens, the robins, people of all shapes and sizes, cultures, diverse backgrounds including the stranger - He invites his followers to share in the expenditure of salvation, and to distribute the rewards. We are partners in this extraordinary business, in which everyone can receive a full and equal share of God's riches. This is generosity defined.

The wonderful thing to remember on this the 4th Sunday of Advent, before Mary goes into labour and Joseph begins to panic is that in coming to save us, God reaches out to us, because God is partly dependent upon us to bring salvation to the world too, to bring his love for all humanity to share. In so doing we may not only receive the message but can begin to live it, even before we have understood it. This is God's true wisdom, coming to us as a helpless child who reaches out to us. The Christmas story is ultimately one of midwifery as it is the sharing of salvation.

Ray Anglesea