The Shepherd

People all over our county of Wiltshire are used to singing Psalm 23 at both weddings and funerals. ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd’ is a familiar and comforting phrase, and the old tune has a simple beauty as well as a large dollop of nostalgia. As marriages begin we prophecy ‘pastures green’ on the good days and ‘thou art with me’ for the tough times. And at funerals we declare with poignant faith that ‘in God’s house for evermore my dwelling place shall be.’

But why would any of us sing this 3000 year old Jewish song, a shepherd longing for the safety of the Jerusalem temple, as if it’s our own? Frankly, I don’t particularly want to lie down in a green pasture, unless we have the glorious long hot summer some of us are optimistically predicting. And perhaps we should fear the worst when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death; it doesn’t sound a particularly hopeful place to travel through. However, the shepherd king, David, that wrote or inspired this song, had a simple testimony that continues to resonate with the faith of the church and our knowledge of God: in death’s shadow God is with me, God brings back my life (a closer translation of ‘restores my soul’), all my days I will dwell with God in his temple. The Christian themes of crucifixion, resurrection and ascension are just below the surface; the Cross, the Tomb and the Throne.

Holy Week is difficult because in it God makes us lie down in profoundly challenging human pastures: the short-lived exuberance of Palm Sunday, the betrayal of Judas Iscariot, the denial of Peter, the sleeping sorrow of the disciples, the malevolence of the religious leaders, the lottery for Christ’s clothes and the inhuman execution of Christ. None of this makes us particularly proud of our humanity; in their worst we see our worst. In Adam we all die. But Holy Week ends. Easter Day brings humanity back to the temple, back to God’s house forevermore. In Christ we all are made alive.

As we sing our songs of resurrection this Easter, may the Spirit of God impart to you a hope based squarely on this, and this alone: He is risen. May you look at each area of disappointment or sin or sickness or sorrow or brokenness in your life and say three words: He is risen. And may the life of Christ surge through death’s valley and bring us to His temple.

Music in Country Churches 2013

We are delighted to be welcoming back Music in Country Churches to Malmesbury Abbey on May 3rd and 4th 2013.

Founded in 1989, Music in Country Churches was set up with the active support of the Prince of Wales, with the specific aim of bringing world-class musicians to country churches of particular beauty and importance. The concerts they arrange, over three weekends annually, are designed to raise funds to help these churches with maintenance and upkeep of their fabric.

This year on Friday 3rd May at 7.30pm the featured musicians will be The Nash Ensemble in a performance of Schubert, Berwald and Beethoven. On Saturday 4th May at 11am Caroline Cerasi (fortepiano) will be performing CPE Bach, Mozart and Haydn. And then on Saturday 4th at 7.30pm the London Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Sir Neville Marriner, will be performing music by Mozart, Wieniawski, Saint-Saens and Beethoven.

Full programmes and ticketing information can be found here. NB Tickets can not be bought in advance from Malmesbury Abbey, although on the day unsold tickets may be available and on the Saturday morning young people are welcome to attend for the price of a programme.

A Different Drum

Last Wednesday 150 of us packed around a 6m x 6m square stage, up close to the five actors of Riding Lights as they performed a different drum – truly riveting, inspirational theatre. Having lived in Derbyshire when I was a curate I was pleased that the story focused on the villagers of Eyam in north Derbyshire, where in 1665 the village decided to sit out the plague, which had arrived unnoticed with a cloth merchant from London, carried by the fleas in his overpriced cloth. In order to protect surrounding villages, and even the nearby city of Sheffield, from the plague, the villagers decided to live in a self-enforced isolation for a year, and in 1666 the plague was gone and one third of the village had died. There has been no major outbreak of the plague in the UK since.

With this story at the heart of the evening we heard other stories of how inspired by the teachings of Jesus people and communities defied convention, oppression and even laws to demonstrate their love for God and others – people prepared to walk to the sound of a different drum:

Revd ‘Woodbine Willie’ Kennedy with his faith and cigarettes in the WWI trenches; Archbishop Oscar Romero standing up against the torture, assassinations and injustice of the government of El Salvador; the Catholic monks of the Notre-Dame de L’Atlas monastery dying with, rather than deserting, their Muslim neighbours; and contemporary stories of Katie Davis working selflessly with Ugandan Children and Anna and Chris Hembury working with CMS in the most troubled areas of Hull. All walking to the sound of a different drum. His drum. Christ the drummer.

As we mark Jesus riding into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday with our ‘sweet hosannas’, perhaps our perception of this event has become a bit house-trained; domesticated by repetition and familiar ritual. We might miss this one man riding against the efficient brutality of the Roman Empire and the political scheming of the religious establishment. We might miss one man dying that others may live. We might forget that for many to take up their cross and follow Christ is more than a philosophy. Palm Sunday reminds us that because Christ entered Jerusalem to the sound of a different drum, we are forever called to live and speak differently. Words from Archbishop to lead us to the cross:

“We have never preached violence, except the violence of love, which left Christ nailed to a cross, the violence that we must each do to ourselves to overcome our selfishness and such cruel inequalities among us.”

Open Minded

I recently heard in a lecture the phrase ‘open minded space.’ I immediately started bouncing in my chair because as we prepare to put jazz, café, prayer, science and art in Malmesbury Abbey for our Holy Week Festival I felt that 'open minded' might describe something of our communal life in North Wiltshire.  We are certainly a space and a half, and there is something open minded about the approach we are taking in it. I dug deeper.

The philosopher Michael Walzer writes about ‘single minded’ spaces and ‘open minded’ spaces. A single minded urban space might be a car park, or if it’s an interior space perhaps a dentist’s surgery. These spaces have a clearly identified purpose, you don’t dance in either. There isn’t a flexibility of usage or tolerance from the dental nurse. An open minded urban space would have a more fluid usage, possibly like a park – where you might find resting, exercise, café, art and concerts – or if it’s an interior urban space our bookshops have been morphing for years to include café, IT, community and education (yes, I know that they still want to sell books, but they’re being nice and open minded about it.) The architect Richard Rogers buys into this (in Cities for a Small Planet) and I think if we turn back the clock and consider the ancient multiple usage of our Abbeys – prayer, education, hospitality, shelter, commerce, music – we might claim that there have long been open minded spaces with some pretty awesome architecture across our nation.

One reason why we might have lost this sense of open mindedness, around and in many of our church buildings, is the encumbrance of fixed single minded furniture redefining our space; and also the ground around our churches gradually becoming a single minded space totally focussed on burial. And, as if to reinforce this single mindedness, for many people their experience of church every other year or so is sadly a funeral, sitting in an uncomfortable pew. Death and furniture, that’s what the church is about. Oddly, when churches die and close their moribund buildings are often liberated to become art centres, sheltered housing, community centres and worship spaces, offices and restaurants, as if reclaiming their open mindedness.

Victoria Ward, director of Spark Knowledge, attempts to put open minded space in a 21^st century context and her insights challenge us to create space with

(i) places for prayer and reflection,

(ii) proximity between different usages,

(iii) ritual,

(iv) performance and  creative buzz,

(v) artefacts,

(vi) places to meet and even work, and

(vii) markets, both of ideas and things.

Ha! I enjoyed ticking all her boxes and want to buy her a latte near our 15^th century bibles and contemporary art as we listen to scientists speaking about God and Josh and the Wild singing blues and find a chapel to pray and a dance class to go to. I could then leave her to go on the internet and work near the tomb of the first king of England.

The church knows that we should be transformed by the renewing of our minds, the question is where? 

New Wine 2013

The trouble with you is that you are just too spiritually alive. Go on, admit it. Every moment of every day you are intentionally growing as a disciple. You are hungry to shut the door and sit with the bible open, at the feet of the master, and to simply absorb and change. You are irritating to be with because when you are putting on the kettle or sitting on a bus you keep bursting into abandoned worship. And your faith, well sometimes it just seems limitless. When they were recently selecting the new Archbishop and Pope your name was probably somewhere on that list. A dark horse, but nevertheless a contender to lead the global church.

Or maybe that isn’t quite your 24/7 reality; it isn’t mine. (Although I hope the cardinals considered me for just a moment: ‘What about that Archer chap? He may be Anglican but he can sing in Italian.’) Maybe you are genuinely perplexed by the ordinary challenges of allowing your life and the Kingdom of God to flow together. Maybe your diary and your workplace seem to have too much to say about your spiritual life. Maybe you can’t shake off discouragement in your Christian journey. Maybe the only thing consistent about you is your inconsistency.

This summer, we’re delighted that John and Alice Monaghan and their family (above), will be leading a large group of people from Malmesbury Abbey to the New Wine summer conference at Shepton Mallet (August 4^th-10^th). New Wine Deeper is a space to stop, to spend extended time with friends from church, to learn from inspiring teachers and to meet God, sometimes in the solitude of a tent or a caravan, or sometimes with 3000 worshippers. New Wine is a week to intentionally grow in your faith, young and old, veteran disciple or new Christian. The reality of life meeting the Kingdom of God, and good holy things happening as we go deeper. And also a lot of laughter, late nights outside the tents and food cooked for just too long on the BBQ.

Now is the time to book. There are reduced prices if you book in before April 2^nd, and it’s cheapest to book online at www.new-wine.org. John, our new curate from June 29^th, and the family will be at our 4pm service on March 17^th to introduce themselves and also to speak about New Wine and encourage you to come along. It’s also possible to stay off-site in luxury, one of the Abbey leadership is doing this and she shall be nameless. Another option is to commute down for a day or two – but you don’t quite experience the benefit of stopping for a week to be with God and the church. But however it happens, we’d love you to be part of the Abbey community at New Wine this year.

Blessed?

We were rather subversive last December; we snuck the Bible into Christmas. A few scenes into our Malmesbury Nativity our four young professional actors started telling the story of the birth of Christ. It wasn’t a fancy script with a new gloss, yes we did intersperse some fairly funky carols, but the actors simply used the complete text from the Bible, the New Revised Standard Version – not a word added, not a word taken away. (And I took the credit as the script writer.) I’m still pretty sure that of the 1,300 people that came through the doors a pretty large percentage had no idea that they were simply listening to the Bible.

What of course this meant was that there was no Little Donkey, Good King Wenceslas stayed in Czechoslovakia, and before the Magi arrived in Matthew’s gospel, in Luke’s gospel Mary and Joseph name Jesus on the eighth day and take him after the 40^th day to present him to the Lord at the Temple – events normally left out of the Christmas story. And there, right in the middle of our Christmas narrative the old man Simeon (see picture above) prayed the Nunc Dimittis, blessed the couple and then prophesied our reading for Mothering Sunday: 

This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too. (Luke 2:34,35) 

Mary is an astonishing young woman and mother. When she hears from Gabriel that she is to bear the Christ-child she declares in her song ‘from now on all generations will call me blessed.’ And indeed we do, and we recognise that, on top of the natural blessings of motherhood itself, Mary is what our Orthodox brothers and sisters call Theotokos – the God-bearer. But Simeon’s prophecy, magically portrayed by our actors, concludes with the shattering words ‘and a sword shall pierce your own soul too.’ In these few words the cross enters the birth narrative.

As we remember mothers in our lives and in our community this Mothering Sunday, the text set by the Church of England pays attention to the full spectrum of parenting where the richest blessing can sit alongside complexity and heartbreak. In a very short time we will see Mary at the foot of the cross.

It’s not that we have anything against fathers today, they must have some use, but we honour today those who bore us and who walk(ed) in the diverse blessing of motherhood.