Eternity

For those who missed it, here’s the true story I told last Sunday which begins and ends with the same question: How broken does your life have to be for God to stop using you to speak to the world about Jesus Christ?

It’s 1930. You are young, and you are in Sydney, Australia, the Harbour Bridge is nearly finished. But you have had no education to speak of, and you can’t even write. However you are really good at one thing, drinking – you are an alcoholic. The only job you can get to fund your drinking is being a lookout at a brothel; and the most popular prostitutes at the establishment are your sisters. You know what they do; they know what you do. This is your life.

On the night of August 6^th 1930 you drift into the back of St Barnabas Church and you hear Rev R.B.S. Hammond preaching on everlasting life through Christ and you are inspired, converted by the thought of ‘eternity’. Later, at another meeting, you hear an evangelist, John Ridley, speaking on Christ and on eternity (from Isaiah 57:15) – that word again. Ridley’s sermon climaxed with these resounding words: Eternity, eternity, I wish that I could sound or shout that word to everyone in the streets of Sydney…where will you spend eternity?

You leave the meeting with the word Eternity going round and round in your head, and sobbing you kneel on a Sydney street. Then you take an old crayon from your pocket and you, an illiterate man, write one word in the most ornate copperplate script - Eternity. That in itself is a miracle. The next day you leave home at 5am, this time with chalk, and you write Eternity on the streets of Sydney in the same ornate script – you do it each day for the next 35 years. No one ever sees you write it so the anonymous man who writes Eternity becomes a legend in Sydney. Eventually you are found out by your vicar, we know everything, and you became a hero in Sydney. Your script, pointing to the eternal hope we have in Christ, is immortalised in a wrought iron replica in Town Hall Square.

The man in question was called Arthur Stace; he died in 1967. In the year 2000, 33 years after his death, Sydney had a colossal fireworks display to celebrate the new millennium, the 2000^th year after the birth of Jesus Christ. The climax of the display was one enormous word ablaze in burning lights on the top of Sydney Harbour Bridge in a beautiful copperplate script – Eternity.

How broken does your life have to be for God to stop using you to speak to the world about Jesus Christ?

Red-letter Days

The writing is on the wall. A couple of years ago we installed our new projector into the Abbey; a projector so immense that astronauts have complained about its glare from their orbit, so powerful that it is slowly burning a hole in the East Wall, on to which it directly projects. When the engineers had finished their installation the text we picked to try it out for the first time was MENE MENE TEKEL PARSIN. You can read more about what the Aramaic means in Daniel 5:25-28, but the point was that these words appeared to King Belshazzar as a mysterious human hand wrote on the wall (Daniel 5:5-6) and that is where we get the ominous phrase ‘the writing is on the wall’ from. So our first writing on the wall was the writing on the wall. Boys and their toys, eh?

It’s a Red-letter Day. Another gift to the English language from the church; any guesses? If I open my book of Anglican liturgy, right at the front is the calendar of the Christian year. Some minor observations are in light black font, like our own St Aldhelm (May 25^th), but the biggies like Christmas and Good Friday are in bold red type – Red-letter days. It’s a practice that dates back to the 16^th century or earlier. Your point vicar? I think that we have lost the significance of one of our Red-letter days – the Ascension.

Christmas is relatively easy (I hope.) The Word was God, yet the Word became flesh. The Spirit overshadowed the human being and Christ was born, fully God and fully human. In Wesley’s great hymn, Hark the herald angels sing, he is clear that God and sinners being reconciled begins in Bethlehem.

Good Friday is a moveable feast (ah, that’s where we get that phrase from) but nevertheless it’s a red-letter day. Christ’s obedience and suffering, our death becoming His that His life might become ours. We explore this moment in solemnity and silence each year, and each year the death is shocking and the gratitude overwhelming.

Easter Day and Pentecost (two more moveable feasts) are easier to grasp, but, let’s be honest, the moment we say we totally understand something of God is the beginning of delusion. However, his/our death being defeated at the first and the Spirit being poured out upon the latter are graspable truths.

But what of the Ascension, what is its significance? Is it just that it locates Jesus in the right place to send the Holy Spirit from, or to return from at the Second Coming? Think back to Eden, humanity cast from God’s presence. Think back to Christ’s birth, Jesus, fully God, fully human. So when Christ ascends, humanity also ascends. Paul doesn’t write in Ephesians 2:6 that ‘God raised Christ and seated him in the heavenly realms.’ What Paul does write is this: ‘God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms.’ You can’t work your way to heaven, you’re already there. Understand that.

Rediscovering

Breadth is achievable. Just think for a moment about the diverse life of Malmesbury Abbey in the last month. A visit from HRH the Prince of Wales for a concert by the London Chamber Orchestra. The moving funeral of a well-loved pigeon whisperer with choir singing ‘Cuckoo.’ A soft-play party for young children to celebrate the birthday of our new café. Each day the quiet rhythm of Morning Prayer at 9am. Refresh serving croissants and St Paul for the women of our community. A love-filled Vision Sunday last weekend with a fresh vision for 21^st century church. A pop-in in for the elderly. And the Healing in the Streets team finally getting answered prayer about the weather.  And that’s just scratching the surface. It takes a lot of work together, but breadth is achievable.

Depth is harder. Nearly 30 years ago, the author Eugene Peterson presented his latest book on the psalms of ascent, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, for publication. This devotional classic on discipleship was rejected by seventeen publishers because apparently there wasn’t a niche market in Christian publishing for obedience, or for spiritual growth that wasn’t instant. Depth is harder.

Discipleship is about listening and re-listening to God. Read Jonah (yes, today.) You’ll notice that God says something (1:2) and Jonah ignores (1:3), then God says the same thing (3:2) and Jonah re-listens and obeys (3:3). And there’s a large fish as well. The direction didn’t change, the obedience did. Depth is harder because we scoop the earth with our hands, not with a shovel.

For the rest of the year at Malmesbury Abbey we are re-listening. Eight months of Rediscovering together. Month after month we will get the earth on our hands as we rediscover what it is to share our faith, or what it is to be called to serve God. In July we will be asking what does it mean to worship God, and on Sunday 5^th May at 4pm we get a taster of that as Paul Langham, vicar of Christ Church, Clifton, speaks from Psalm 40. Next week we begin with Rediscovering Evangelism. Details below.