Archbishop of Canterbury Baptising at the Abbey

The Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Justin Welby, is to baptise 17 people, at a service of celebration in the grounds of Malmesbury Abbey. (See below)

On Saturday September 13^th at 4pm, as part of a three-day visit to the Diocese of Bristol, the Archbishop will be speaking at an outdoor service in the Abbey grounds and then baptising 17 adults and young people by immersion in a baptismal pool. For many this marks the beginning of a journey of faith, for some this is a return to the Christian faith and a reaffirmation of an earlier baptism or christening.

This will be a really significant day on a number of levels. This is a celebration of historic links between Canterbury and Malmesbury, it's also a genuine once in a lifetime community occasion, and it's a fresh declaration of the Christian faith, a faith that has been alive and well in our community for over 1,300 years.

We know that Malmesbury Abbey’s founder, St Aldhelm, studied with Hadrian in Canterbury in the 7^th century, and we know that pilgrims from Canterbury and elsewhere used to travel to Malmesbury to study with the monks here and use the famous Abbey library; in fact the Old Bell Hotel was originally built by Abbot Walter Loring in the 13^th century to house the many visitors. So it feels like the Archbishop is treading a pretty ancient path, albeit via the M4 and the A429.

I’ve also asked many of our local historians whether the Archbishop of Canterbury has visited Malmesbury in modern times and nobody can point to any visit at all in the last few hundred years, so this is a very notable event for the people of North Wiltshire.

And for the friends, family and communities of those being baptised this will be a moving personal moment and a great celebration. God is at work in all our lives, and our services of baptism and confirmation allow us to gather as a church and say 'look at the good thing God is doing.'

All are welcome to what is an un-ticketed event, to be held inside the Abbey if wet. After the service concludes, at about 5.30pm, the evening will continue with bouncy castles, live music, a hog roast, an Indian buffet and a bar.

Then church the following day!

Thanks

I remember a conversation on a plane as we descended into Kampala. Members of our party were discussing summer holidays when one of our group from the Diocese of Bristol said ‘perhaps it’s best not to mention holidays while you’re here, as for most Ugandans holidays simply just don’t happen; in fact the concept barely exists for many.’ It was later in my trip that I saw an offering with produce brought forward to front for the first time. This wasn’t a Harvest Festival, this was subsistence farmers, whose hands never encountered cash, bringing their offering to God. And this time they were spending in church was in fact their holiday, their holy-day, a blessed bit of Sabbath in an exhausting life. Seeing in a different context helped me to see my own context a little clearer; and with gratitude.

Ugandan Commuting (Photo: Chris Dobson)

The writer Mark Buchanan (in his book The Holy Wild) describes a night in Uganda when he couldn’t be bothered to worship God, thought the food was awful and was too sour to join in the praise, when a woman stood up to declare her love for Jesus:  ‘I praise Him all the time for how good He is. For three months, I prayed to Him for shoes. And look! He gave me shoes!’ The Ugandans went wild. They clapped, they cheered, they whistled, they yelled. Buchanan sat there devastated,  realising that not once in his life had he prayed to God for shoes, and he had certainly never thanked God for them. He was snapped out of his self-pity, he was repentant, and he made this astute observation: Thanklessness becomes its own prison.  Insightful words.

I sometimes wonder why I spot indifference within myself in a time of worship. That to an onlooker I might look no different standing in church singing to God than when I am standing in a queue in the Coop (although I don’t normally sing at the checkout.)  And I think Buchanan is right: Thanklessness becomes its own prison.  And I think Psalm 100 calls us, a people with shoes and holidays and the Cross of Christ before us, to a better place:

Make a joyful noise to the Lord,

all the earth.
Worship the Lord with gladness;
    come into his presence with singing.

Know that the Lord is God.
  It is he that made us, and we are his;
    we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture.

Enter his gates with thanksgiving,
    and his courts with praise.
    Give thanks to him, bless his name.

For the Lord is good;
    his steadfast love endures for ever,
    and his faithfulness

to all generations.

The Meeting Place

You’ve seen them. What a bunch of nutters, standing out there in Birdcage Walk in the rain, the snow, and less frequently the blistering Wiltshire heat, to proclaim the Kingdom of God on a Saturday morning. For six years the Healing in the Streets team from the Abbey has been faithful and has seen God’s immense faithfulness, with a steady stream of people coming for prayer between 10am and 12pm, and an encouraging number coming back or writing to thank God for His healing or His blessing. 

What has developed over the years has actually been very biblical. Healing prayer not disconnected from every other dimension of church, but connected in some way. Some have come to faith in Jesus Christ, some have made their way into the waters of baptism, some have chosen to come back week in and week out—Healing in the Streets is their church it seems—and others know the team members as a source of ongoing pastoral care and friendship. And recently the offer of a cup of coffee has been welcomed by market stall holders. Healing in the Streets +.

So in July we’re allowing things to emerge a little more, and Healing in the Streets will become the Meeting Place for a month. Churches across the UK have seen fruit when they've placed a new informal expression of church in ordinary market places. So the Meeting Place for us will be a trial of an Abbey Fresh Expression.

It will be small and beautiful and broadly be healing prayer, pastoral care and prayer, hospitality to Market Stall holders and passers by, and probably around 11am some sort of worship, music or creative arts (weather permitting.) In fact something undramatically similar to what has gone before. But we are asking the Spirit to lead us, to give us open and willing hearts, and to reveal to us how we might join with Him more fully in his mission in Malmesbury.

So a request to pray for the team, to come along and be a part if you wish, as church gets out on the street, and particularly an invitation to come for prayer or to be part of the worship or creative arts at 11am.

Therapeuo

There are three main Greek words for worship in the New Testament.  The most common (PROSKUNEO) means to prostrate, or bow down as to kiss in homage; you’ll find it in John 4:23 as Jesus describes true worshippers. Another (LATREUO) means an act of religious service or worship; Paul uses it in Romans 12:1 and it’s related to our word ‘liturgy’. A third (SEBO) appears mainly in the book of Acts and means to reverence or hold in awe. You might ask which of these you are up to every Sunday. But there is a fourth, little used word, (THERAPEUO), which has two interesting dimensions that particularly intrigue a musician like me. In Acts 17:25 you’ll see it used in the sense of serving and worship; in Matthew 4:23&24 you’ll see it used to describe the healing ministry of Jesus. Look again at THERAPEUO and you can see the word ‘therapy’ struggling to get out. Enough of the Greek lesson, but you’ll probably get why Malmesbury Abbey’s partnership with Music for Autism over the last few years has been profoundly significant in the lives of young and old, and a deeply moving act of hospitality in the midst of which God has been at work.

This Wednesday, July 2nd, Music for Autism are back at the Abbey. Drop in during the day if you can. From 11am-12pm children and young people on the autistic spectrum from schools across Wiltshire & South Gloucestershire get the chance to dance, sing and conduct with professional musicians and an international conductor guiding the music making.

Then at 2pm there is a concert for seniors. All are invited, but there is a special invitation extended to those living with dementia and their carers as music and songs from a few decades ago unlocks memories and emotions, and for many brings deep joy. Stay for a cuppa and a slice of cake after this.

Then at 7.30pm the church needs to turn up for a fantastic concert of beautiful music. We really, really need your £10 for your ticket, and your donation for your glass of bubbly at the interval. All the proceeds fund the work of Music for Autism earlier in the day. So this is me being a bit pushy for once (!). Drop in during the day if you can, but turn up this Wednesday evening and facilitate something wonderfully life-giving in our community. God is at work.

Generous Giving

I walked past Malmesbury Abbey recently. I normally walk in, so walking past was a simple pleasure. My first thought, as a passerby, was how beautiful the fresh cut lawns looked on a warm sunny evening and how the Abbey and its grounds shape the feel and life of our town. My second thought was what an incredible gift to the town (and by implication, of course, to ourselves) is the generous giving of our Abbey congregations—we paid for the lawns to be cut together. We paid for the weeding too.

The impact of the generous giving of Abbey members is profound. It’s not just grass and buildings and heating, although I would say the stewardship of our buildings and their care and development really matter and point towards something beyond the stones themselves. As we give together we resource the genuine breadth of ministry and worship across our Abbey community, we support a number of our own congregation in mission further afield, and we back our diocese as they train and provide ministers and resource Christian distinctiveness in church schools. And, as I mentioned on Vision Sunday, we’re looking to resource our Junior Church and Youth ministries on a different level in 2014/2015 and the recruitment conversation has already begun. So I’m asking you to review your monthly giving in the next couple of weeks with these biblical principles in mind:

It’s all God’s. As a rather overwhelmed King David cried out to God ‘who am I, and who are my people that we should be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from you, and we have only given what comes from your hand.’ (1 Chronicles 29:14)

Jesus’ needed money too. We can mistakenly think that genuine Kingdom life and ministry doesn’t need money. But actually Luke records that women travelling with the disciples helped to support them out of their own pockets. (Luke 8:1-3)

Give proportionately. Many use the tithe, the tenth, as a guide to their monthly commitment to the church. (see Malachi 3:10) We should work towards proportional giving as disciples together, because ultimately that is fairer—and those with less in our community aren’t being asked to give more.

Thank you for working with God to sustain the ministry of your church. You can get further information on how to give regularly and  how to giftaid from

chrisjager@malmesburyabbey.com. All communications and giving is treated confidentially.

10,000 Voices

There are two stories floating around basically. The story of God, and the story of you (well, all humanity actually.) And the interesting thing is that they are connected.

Many of us struggle to share our faith because we think it has to be a pretty sophisticated and convincing explanation of the doctrines of the Christian faith—the exhaustive story of God, where I understand absolutely everything about God and dazzle people to the point that they become disciples of Christ. Yes, that’s so going to happen! Consider changing the word ‘faith’ to the word ‘trust’ and suddenly it becomes a bit easier; we’re not explaining our faith, but sharing where we have trusted in God recently. Telling our stories, but not leaving out the bit where our story intersects with God’s story.

If you look at the end of the account of Pentecost in Acts 2, there in verse 41 is one pretty impressive statistic: ‘about three thousand were added to their number that day.’ Well that’s depressing; we must be doing something wrong. However if Pentecost is a unique unrepeatable event, which it is, the life of the Spirit isn’t; so is there anything you and I can learn from that first Pentecost, which we celebrate today? ‘Peter stood up...and raised his voice.’ (Acts 2:14) Peter said something. Basically, Churches grow, when people tell other people about God. Or put it this way: what would be our strategy for the church not to grow at all? Saying nothing; exactly.

So the Diocese of Bristol is after us. It is challenging everybody to share the story of them and God, for 10,000 voices to be raised, in the hope that 500 will be baptised in the next year. You can find out more about this at www.bristol.anglican.org/voicesAnd the challenge is coming in your direction locally, right now, in that I am asking every member of Malmesbury Abbey to share their faith with a non-Christian between now and when the Archbishop of Canterbury visits on September 13th. At all our services we’ll be grabbing people out the front to hear how it’s going and praying for those who have heard something of the Christian message. And then we can invite a lot of people onto the Alpha Course this September. Church is about to get messy.

In the power of the Spirit, Peter raised his voice. Let’s raise ours.

Partnership

In 2010 I had the great privilege to spend 2 weeks with the Anglican Church in Uganda and one week in Kabale, with the Diocese of Kigezi. My host was Canon Stanley Byomugabe (see above), and it was a wonderful chance to eat matoke, to pray and worship with the diocesan leadership each day, to visit schools and watch Canon Stanley dance—Archdeacons don’t tend to do that in the Diocese of Bristol—and to spend a day learning about the inspiring and transformational  work of the Diocese of Kigezi Water & Sanitation Project (see cover). Through Tearfund our special harvest collection is given to this project each year.

So, although I am sadly away on leave, it is a joy as a congregation to welcome the Bishop of Kigezi, the Rt Revd George Bagamuhunda, and the Revd Reuben Byomuhangi, Director of the Water & Sanitation project, to Malmesbury Abbey for our 10.30am service of Morning Prayer this Sunday, May 25th. We are honoured by their visit. Bishop George will be preaching and Revd Reuben will be interviewed about the project by Revd John Monagahan. During the service our offering will be for the Water & Sanitation Project and after the service we will be sharing together the food we have brought and spending more time with our visitors. 

As we looked at Revelation 1, two weeks ago, there was very good and encouraging news, that Christ holds the seven stars, the churches, in his hand. When Christ said ‘I am with you always, to the very end of the age’ (Matthew 28:20) I think our minds naturally travel to the ascended Christ, enthroned, who has sent His Spirit, the Comforter to breathe life into the dry bones of the church. God with us, by his Spirit. But the mysterious writing of Revelation 1 suggests that He is with us always because we are held in his hand. As you stand in Malmesbury Abbey look down and you’ll see a 12th century floor, keep looking and you will see the hand of Christ. And, unless Christ has many, many hands, by implication Kabale Cathedral and Malmesbury Abbey exist in that same hand.

So the joining of the Diocese of Kigezi and the Deanery of North Wiltshire is not just the result of a link that has borne fruit over many years, it is the expression of a spiritual reality, the church is one.

I pray that God will richly bless Bishop George and Revd Reuben on their visit, and that our link may be blessed by God for many years.

Stars

Last Wednesday night we filled the Abbey for a large Diocese of Bristol service where hundreds of churchwardens (including our own, truly awesome, Lesley Wilson and Diana Crowe) were commissioned for a year serving in leadership and administration in their local churches. At the service the Bishop of Bristol, Mike Hill, recounted this true story:

A local church wanted to tell every member of their community about Jesus so they purchased 13,000 DVDs about the life of Jesus and delivered them through the letterbox of every front door in their community in Buckinghamshire. The vicar was delighted until the Parish Office received a call from a surprised member of their town saying that the DVD in the box just delivered wasn’t about Jesus at all, but was in fact the Hollywood movie ‘When Harry met Sally’ starring Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal. (A really funny film, but not something you’d show at the parish supper.) The parishioner in question also informed the press of this huge mistake and the press ran the story that the local church had delivered ‘When Harry met Sally’ to every house in the town by accident, and had a bit of a laugh at the church’s expense. The vicar then phoned his Bishop (Bishop Mike) in a bit of a state.

However the journalist hadn't done his research before he ran his story, and in fact only one DVD starred Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, the other 12,999 were all about Jesus. But because of the local media coverage, massive numbers of people sat down to watch a Hollywood movie with a glass of wine and instead saw a biopic of Christ. On the back of this, the church had over 400 inquiries about their forthcoming Alpha Course, and many, many people came to faith and were baptised.

Two weeks ago I hope I mentioned that the Last Word in the Bible is one that the Spirit and the Bride say together: Come! We live with hope today because Christ is coming again. Today, as we enter Revelation 2, we discover both the resilience and the frailty of the early church. Issues far more serious than delivering the wrong DVD were perplexing Christians in the first century. But last week we were left with the mysterious, beautiful, but overwhelmingly encouraging image, that  Christ holds the imperfect church, the seven stars, in his right hand. (Revelation 1:20) Before he speaks to the church, he reveals that he holds it, eternally.

This Generation

Let’s not be a dull and distracted generation, because it seems that there are many witnesses to our worship and our mission.

At a small civic gathering last Tuesday, I prayed a prayer of thanksgiving for a monk. Not a real monk, but the new Monk in Meditation sculpture in Oxford Street.  Presumably he is intended as a traffic calming measure. As I did this I chose a few words from Psalm 145 as a text:

³ Great is the Lord and most worthy of praise;
    his greatness no one can fathom.
⁴ One generation commends your works to another;
    they tell of your mighty acts.
⁵ They speak of the glorious splendour of your majesty –
    and I will meditate on your wonderful works. (Psalm 145:3-5)

When I have spent time with monks they never really strike me as spiritual superstars, and in truth there is no such thing. Monks come across as wonderfully ordinary people, very hardworking, and with an abnormal communal discipline as they devote hours to the reading and hearing of scripture and the singing of the psalms. Their meditation is not an emptying, more a filling. The works of God slowly marinating their souls; the word, a lamp to their feet.

But last Tuesday I also noticed the generational dimension of Psalm 145:4—a reminder of our role in Malmesbury. The sense that we live and serve in a town with an ancient and significant Christian heritage, and that since the 7th century, generation after generation have prayed to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and not one generation has ceased to tell of the ‘glorious splendour’ of God’s majesty to the next. We are helped to some extent by a building that screams of God’s glory to all who drive up the A429, but nevertheless there are ruins and empty churches across our land. Nice stones won’t do the job on their own, it is up to the living stones. (See 1 Peter 2:4-12)

So let’s not be a dull and distracted generation, because another generation is watching us right now to see if we really are consumed by the ‘wonderful works’ and ‘might acts’ of the LORD. Let us be a people hungry to be nourished by God’s word, passionate with uplifted hands and faces in our worship, silent before his holy presence in broken bread and wine, and eager to speak of his glory to a world we work to transform.  If I see that in another, it will cause me to meditate.

Revelation Intro

Here we go. On the first Sunday of August 2014 Malmesbury Abbey will emerge into the ‘I am’ sayings of Jesus found in John’s Gospel. But for the next 13 weeks we read, listen, worship and pray our way, together, through the last book of the Bible; Revelation. Welcome to the most misunderstood and avoided book of the Bible. The book where a large number of Christians have got to the end of Chapter 5 and simply said ‘I’ll think I’ll jump to chapter 21. No harm in that.’ (Thereby missing the Hallelujah! chorus tucked away in Revelation 19.) This blog is a very brief introduction, which includes a number of insights and quotes from Eugene Peterson’s book Reversed Thunder. We’re also recommending Tom Wright’s Revelation for Everybody and Paul Langham’s  Understanding Revelation.

REVELATION?

Yes, a Revelation, not Revelations. The first three Greek words of the book offering us the title: Apocalypse Jesus Christ; a revelation of Jesus Christ. An uncovering, a revealing of and from Jesus. Heaven and earth interconnected through words spoken and written; through the Word. Why wouldn’t disciples of Christ read every chapter, and take time with every word?

65+1=66

There are 66 books in the Bible. Revelation is the last, and it is pretty impossible to read and understand well apart from at least some of the other 65; particularly Ezekiel, Daniel, Zephaniah, Zechariah, Isaiah & Exodus. In the 404 verses of Revelation ‘there are 518 references to earlier scripture.’ Our daily readings in the centre of this news sheet will take us slowly through Revelation with some of the associated Old Testament references. Don’t miss the opportunity to read these.

ESCHATOLOGY

A word that you might hear in the coming months, which simply means the study of cats. Or alternatively the study of the last things. ‘Eschatology involves the belief that the resurrection appearances of Christ are not complete.’ By the time we reach Revelation 21 we should be starting to realise that Easter Day began something unbelievably glorious, transformative and cosmic, which Christ will return to complete. The post-resurrection fish breakfast in Galilee (John 21), the broken bread on the Road to Emmaus (Luke 24), and especially the bread and wine of our own Holy Communions are all eschatological. They point to the end, to the wedding supper of the Lamb and his bride. But that’s Revelation 19; July 20th, at a church near you.

IMAGINATION

G.K. Chesterton wrote that ‘though St John the Evangelist saw many strange monsters in his vision, he saw no creature so wild as one of his commentators.’

He was right. And many pastors and teachers have let an uninformed imagination run hopelessly wild as they led many astray in this book. However the challenge is to allow our imaginations to be alive and our faith to be refreshed as we read Revelation, but to stay healthily connected to the orthodoxy of the other 65 books of the Bible.

BLESSING

When we talk of ‘beatitudes’ most people think of Matthew 5. But there are other biblical beatitudes and you’ll find seven in Revelation. (I wonder if that’s a significant number?) The first is this: Blessed is the one who reads aloud the words of this prophecy, and blessed are those who hear it and take to heart what is written in it, because the time is near. You and I are about to be blessed. Christ is present with the words of this extraordinary book. Our challenge is to slowly absorb this book, and then to keep it within. Blessed is the one who keeps the words  of the prophecy in this book. (Rev 22:7)

  

God crossing the Road

Last week I had the very unusual experience of being rung up by a reporter from The Sun. She was very pleasant and had my phone number because of the Malmesbury Abbey skateboarding events we run each February. I was asked to write an Easter message for 3 million Sun readers. It would be good, she said, if I included the meaning of Easter, something about the local community, skateboarding and maybe make some of Jesus teaching relevant to young people—in 200 words, maybe 300. As well as writing this I had a photographer come a take my picture, for about an hour. (Apparently he struggled to find that good side.) Anyway, I think this might be a first for the vicar of Malmesbury Abbey, so in case you missed it, it’s printed below in the version I submitted. Happy Easter.

‘Life doesn’t always work. People lie, relationships fail, jobs disappear, bills get left unpaid, family get sick. We all get that, young and old. So if Easter means anything at all, it must mean something about that, about reality. It can’t be just a bunch of songs in an old building - although I like the songs, and the building I work in is awesome.

Jesus tells a story about a man, the Good Samaritan, who crossed the road to help a badly beaten up stranger. And on our better days we’d probably give it a go too, because people matter. But the bigger picture is this: Easter means that God crosses the road towards us when we’re beaten up. When life doesn’t work.

Each year in February we put a skatepark in Malmesbury Abbey. Yes, a 21st century load of noise and wheels in a 12^th century Abbey. We don’t do it because we think the world would be a better place if everybody skateboarded – that would be one slightly weird world. We do it because nobody can afford a holiday in the February half term, and because we want to cross the road to young people and families in our community and say Easter means something.

God looks at the mistakes and struggles of our lives and says the story doesn’t have to end there, with the despair of Good Friday. There is hope on Easter Day, because where there was death, now there’s life. And if God can conquer death, God can conquer anything. Easter means God is crossing the road.’

Three weeks

Three great weeks just beginning at Malmesbury Abbey. If you’re reading this on your i-Pad in a holiday cottage or on a Barbados beach, two things: one, we’re sorry that you’re missing so much; two, can I come next year?

We begin this Sunday by playing with the furniture. The Abbey will be stripped bare after the Sunday 4pm service, then on Monday morning we have soft play for parents and toddlers, after which Sandra Chin and her team move in to construct the Labyrinth and the art exhibition arrives. A labyrinth is a maze-like structure, but unlike a maze it has only one path that loops and turns backwards and forwards to the centre and then back out. The most famous remaining intact labyrinth is that found on the floor of Chartres Cathedral in France, built around 1200 AD. Pilgrims used to walk it as a symbolic journey to Jerusalem, with a view to finding Christ at the centre; a spiritual pilgrimage for those who could not afford to travel to Jerusalem. The labyrinth has become increasingly popular over the past 20 years and it can be used as a tool to inspire prayer, to illuminate the  scriptures and to meet with God. The Abbey Labyrinth, for adults and children, will tell the story of Jesus’ journey to the cross and at the same time it invites us to discover more about ourselves and about God. Don’t miss the late-night labyrinth next Wednesday.

From April 10th to April 20th we not only have inspirational worship on Palm Sunday, Good Friday and Easter Day, but also a small festival of the creative and performing arts. Please pore over the brochure, come to absolutely everything, and invite your neighbours and friends. We particularly need everybody in the Abbey to liberate themselves from their sofa and come to Riding Lights on Maundy Thursday; this is part of us supporting mission and discipleship through the professional performing arts.

The Sunday after Easter (April 27th) is Vision Sunday at Malmesbury Abbey. In the morning we all come together to a combined 11am Holy Communion. This is  risky as somebody might be in your normal chair. As part of that service I’ll be interviewing various Abbey leaders about their vision for the year ahead; there will be activities for Junior Church during this. And after a picnic lunch together (please bring one!), at our Annual meeting at 1.30pm we take an hour to pray and get down to business and elect churchwardens and church council members for the year ahead. If you have a diary, please put all this in. Thanks.

Fix us

On Palm Sunday the guest vicar on BBC Wiltshire’s Sunday morning programme will be yours truly. It’s only taken me 10 years to get invited—clearly we’ve gone quietly under the radar recently here at the Abbey. Anyway, as we’ll be busy with an outdoor Holy Communion here on Palm Sunday morning, we recorded my short segments last week. As well as the general conversation flagging up our Easter Eve service in partnership with BBC Wiltshire (don’t forget to get your ticket), I also had to provide a ‘thought for the day’ and select a piece of music. The ‘thought for the day’ was easy; I have way too many thoughts every day before breakfast and simply needed to extract an intelligible one, if available. But selecting one favourite piece of music — don’t they realise how difficult that is for a musician?

My operatic alter ego kicked in, and, although I didn’t for one moment think they’d play one of my old CDs, I thought they might play a track from an old colleague and I could do a bit of former glory basking. ‘No opera’ they said.

That just left me 6 or 7 centuries of classical music to choose from. The Abbey choir know that I have my favourites, and my not favourites, but, just as I was  about to select some JS Bach or Olivier Messaien, and lose Radio Wiltshire most of its audience, I heard the words ‘nothing classical, we want contemporary pop please.’ OK. Now the most joy I’ve had with contemporary pop recently, by a long way, was a live performance of Barry Manilow’s Copacabana. But for some reason I couldn’t get the Palm Sunday imagery and ‘the hottest spot north of Havana’ to work together in my brain; it was all going dancing donkeys. So I went for Coldplay’s Fix You.

I am sure Coldplay had absolutely no intention of this, but I always hear a lot of Holy Week in Fix You. It’s a redemptive song. The cry ‘Hosanna’, save us, is a heartfelt cry from broken humanity, and God’s captive people, to be ‘fixed.’  Coldplay’s lyrics ‘tears come streaming down your face when you lose something you cannot replace’ always suggest to me the devastation of Mary Magdalene at the loss of Christ, ‘Mary stood outside the tomb crying…’ (John 20:10) And the guitars, just over 2 minutes in, are for me the sunrise on Resurrection morning—Christ appearing to Mary and simply calling out her name. The Messiah is come, He knows us by name, and God’s  great plan for humanity is unveiled—He will fix us.

Baptism

The great turning point in my life spiritually was somebody else’s baptism. Three years at a left-wing, modern university and a childhood in the Church of England had convinced me entirely of the non-existence of God. So when Marilyn and I had 8lbs of screaming called Sally Anne Archer suddenly placed in our lives there was absolutely no way the kid was being Christened; in fact you wouldn’t get me into church again, unless you paid me. (And, as I worked as a singer, I was frequently paid to sing in church.)

If God had a plan at this point, and my theological understanding now causes me to believe that He did, it was this: as a general rule husbands do what their wives tell them. So not long after declaring that no child of mine was going to be baptised I found myself sitting in a baptism class at my local church surrounded by horrendous smiling people, in atrocious sweaters, serving instant coffee. In a very ordinary, naffly-carpeted room, a pretty unimpressive presentation of the Christian faith was inflicted on all those gathered and then after a final prayer the victims were released back into the wild. Marilyn turned to me at the end and asked me this question: ‘what did you make of that?’ And her atheist husband looked her in the eye and said: ‘well it all seems true to me.’ Mmmm.

In John 3 Jesus says to Nicodemus you don’t see wind. It comes from somewhere, breezes through you, and blows on. And He says so it is with the Spirit of God. Sometimes the Spirit breezes through and leaves holy chaos in the life of an individual—it’s as if they’ve jumped back in the womb and been born again. Suddenly I believed in the virgin birth, the death of Christ on the cross for the salvation of humanity, the resurrection and the ascension. Suddenly I stopped swearing and blaspheming and gave up my life of crime. (Actually, I had no life of crime, but the story is so much more dramatic that way.) And nine years later I was ordained in the Church of England. That was some breeze.

Today is a really good day, people are being baptised at the Abbey. So a warning to you all—God is in the room.

Holy Week Festival 2014 Preview

In a two weeks the brochures for our Holy Week Festival 2014 will be available online and for delivery. But as I am already getting a lot of questions like ‘Dinosaurs?’ ‘Phantom of the Opera??’ here are a few answers:

During the week before Palm Sunday the Abbey will be dominated by the large Labyrinth where we will each get the chance to make a devotional journey to the cross as we wind our way around concentric circles. This is designed for both adults and children. On the evening of Wednesday 9th April we will have a candlelit late-night Labyrinth concluding with Night Prayer with Plainsong at 10pm.

I met for a couple of hours this week with the A-level art students from Malmesbury School as they make their final preparations to their Stations of the Cross pieces. This really impressive body of work, depicting Christ’s journey from Gethsemane to Calvary, opens Tuesday 8th April, and on Saturday 12th at 10am I get to interview the artists informally over coffee and hot chocolate. Come along.

The truly amazing Josh Flowers & the Wild return on the Saturday evening for a blistering evening of blues/rock/organic folk  supported by the scrumpy & western Wurzel-rapping of Tristan Cork.  Wow! Don’t miss this, and bring friends along who might be allergic to church.

After our Palm Sunday worship Monday gets a little unusual as in a darkened Abbey we project the 1925 B&W Phantom of the Opera with live organ improvisation from Anthony Hammond; and yes, that’s his real surname.

Tuesday night will be an explosion of worship with Glory! at 7.30pm and then on the Wednesday Night the dinosaur man, Mike Taylor, is back to talk about his latest discoveries in God & Dinosaurs 2. He will mess with a few heads as he holds the Bible, evolution, and dinosaurs all nicely together in one Christian palaeontologist’s brain.

Riding Lights are bringing a major Passion Play, Inheritance, to the Abbey on Maundy Thursday. This will be an evening of engrossing drama intermingled with short times of prayer and worship, and will devotionally prepare us for our services on Good Friday, including Fauré’s Requiem with the Abbey Choir at 6pm. 

BBC Wiltshire are recording a special Easter Celebration on Easter Eve at 7pm, this is ticketed and is raising money for the May Moore Trust. And then on Easter Day Bishop Lee is preaching at 10.30am, and we have 4 other services. 

I suggest we all find a corner of a sofa in the café and simply move in for the duration. I will.

Real Lives

Don’t pity me too much, there are many profound privileges to being a vicar. One that never, ever loses its shine is reading the opening of John’s gospel at our Nine Lessons and Carols Service. The service itself is one layer of joy and artistry upon another, but then to stand right in the middle of a candlelit Abbey to proclaim words of such mystery, beauty and light to a darkened world is virtually worth being ordained for in itself. (Not quite.)

John 1 begins with the heavenly identity of Christ, the Word, and there follows over the next 21 chapters many phenomenal signs and wonders which John allows to punctuate the narrative of the gospel to remind of us who precisely we are dealing with— water into wine (ch.2) , feeding the five thousand (ch.6), walking on water (ch.6), a number of significant healings culminating in Lazarus (ch.11), the triumphal entry into Jerusalem (ch.12) and, of course, the Resurrection itself (ch.20). But, just as John portrays Christ’s heavenly intimacy with the Father and the Spirit and the light and life that flows from the Trinity, John also earths Jesus—the Word becoming flesh (John 1:14). John recalls Jesus as he talks with people, and drinks and eats and cooks and weeps and washes feet and dies. The reality of heaven meets the reality of earth. And it is these real lives, normality meeting divinity, that will take us through to Easter in our next teaching series.

Nicodemus, fearful, concealing his curiosity about Jesus at night, and bringing question after question to Jesus to try and work out who this Rabbi really is (John 3). A woman at a well (John 4), who doesn’t understand how her relationships all end up so wrecked, meeting, at last, a man who seems to value her, and know her. Mary, in John 19, not a spiritual super hero, but a mother, watching her son die on a cross. Agonising human loss. Lazarus (John 11) trying to make sense of his heart beating again after it stopped four days earlier. The disciples reeling at the social awkwardness of the Messiah washing their feet. Mary on Easter Day, the first human being to have to try and live in light of the Resurrection. Thomas, wanting hard data, fingers in wounds; show me. And this Sunday, John the Baptist surrounded by a crowd hassling him about who he was, and simply pointing in the opposite direction, away from himself, ‘why don’t you ask Him who He is?’

So this Sunday we’re changing gear from John’s letters. From concepts, ideas, theologies and ethics, to real lives. Our part? To bring our real life to the table.

Reorientation

And now for 40 days of setting yourself impossible goals and beating yourself up (I’m going to read the Bible in it’s entirety before breakfast each day and spend most of my waking hours on Weston-Super-Mare beach, just as Christ was in the desert.) Or, and now for setting yourself ridiculously easy goals and not really engaging with Lent (I’m going to give up asparagus and Christmas pudding, Lent’s a bit of medieval hokum anyway and it seems to last longer than 40 days.) Or maybe, there is a window for spiritual reflection, a holy audit , which might actually be a pretty helpful to yourself, and those around you.

Lent is of the Holy Spirit, or it’s of no particular value, and potentially a bit of distracting religious weirdness. In Luke 4:1 it records that Jesus was ‘full of the Holy Spirit’ and ‘led by the Spirit’ as he began the 40 days in the desert we are identifying with. In Luke 4:14, 40 days later, Jesus returned from the desert ‘in the power of the Spirit’. So we build our desert with God, not with guilt. Jesus’ life was revealed in Luke 4 to be a life totally orientated to God; our 40 days will normally reveal the need for reorientation, realignment. We will see ourselves better, and God better. Some possibilities to consider from this Wednesday, or not:

Feast. Read John in Lent. You’ll find the readings set out on the back of the Morning Prayer leaflet handed out today. Use the liturgy as well if you wish, or join us each day in St Aldhelm's chapel at 9am (or maybe one day a week to help keep you focused.)

Fast. How would your life look if you consumed differently for 40 days, fasting from a food, facebook, TV show e.g.

Live. Like a North Korean. Use the Open Doors material, available today, to pray for the church in North Korea and to allow the life of a North Korean Christian to comment on your own.

Practice Intentional Solitude & Community. Don’t let church and prayer happen in the cracks of a busy life. For 40 days see how it feels to allow Christian community and personal stillness before God to shape everything else.

That other thing. As the 40 days progress allow the Spirit to lead you to put something down or pick something up. Allow ‘your will be done’ to feel a fresh and exciting sentence to begin the day.

Services at 10.30am and 7pm on Ash Wednesday kick off our 40 days together, our reorientation to God. Our Easter Day worship ends it as we celebrate the resurrection of Christ together.

Creating Space

The Times has approximately 400,000 readers of its print version and over 100,000 online subscribers. Metro, distributed across 15 UK cities for free, prints 1.3 million copies each day. You do the maths. Last Thursday a very large number of people saw a very large dramatic picture of a 12th century abbey, somewhere in North Wiltshire, with Chris Coombs, in a pink skaters’ helmet, flying through the air on a skateboard. Times readers were each urged by Phil Williams (Christian Skaters UK) to live life to the full as the Bible teaches us.

Long Live Southbank is a facebook Group with 100,000 members and 12,248 likes (I have no idea what I’m talking about) campaigning to save the undercroft skate area right by the Royal Festival Hall, next to the Thames in London. Scott who posted the same picture from Metro of Abbey Skate 2014 commented: "So a church can open up a half term skatepark but developers want to get rid of the home of British skateboarding? There's something wrong with this scenario." Actually there is something very right about this; God’s people are often doing a new thing with the Spirit, and frequently travelling in an unconventional direction. Our bishops haven’t exactly been quiet this week.

Amongst many visitors to the abbey last week (including a couple who slightly oddly said ‘we’re Roman Catholic but we love this’) I also stood with visiting vicars, youth and children’s ministers, and an archdeacon, and watched them enjoy the space. Not the physical space of the Abbey, which copes effortlessly with a skate park, but the space for imagination and mission that our simple 3-day event creates for other people and other churches. It’s this ‘beyond us’ dimension of MAS 2014 that intrigues me. Why would God want other cities in this land to know about this? How could our vocation and the shape of our mission effect elsewhere?

I remember a children’s song which went ‘be bold, be strong, for the Lord your God is with you.’ It is a song so old that you can find it in the book of Joshua. One of the issues about songs like this is there is frequently very little indeed in the corporate life of the Western church to be bold about. When we travel with the church of North Korea throughout Lent, that will be very different, but for us? However, a church with a holy, fired up imagination and a resilient, biblical faithfulness will always find itself in a place of risk, for the sake of the gospel. I thank God, that he has used us, and MAS 2014, to call others to that place.

Icon

It feels like a familiar friend now. Shifting chairs, carrying boards, carting hay bales, moving ramps, setting up viewing areas, turning up the volume, welcoming visitors, calling for paramedics—Malmesbury Abbey Skate is back and it feels oddly normal to have a 21st century skate and scooter spectacular taking place in a 12th century abbey. This year we’ve even added a hula hoop workshop. (I’ve been working hard on a pun on ‘hula’ and ‘hallelujah’ to go here but as we go to press nothing cringemakingly bad enough has emerged.) One of our churchwardens tried hula-hooping out recently and seemed like a natural. The hula hoop I tried seemed to be a bit of a snug fit for some reason.

Ideas are dirt cheap. In a creative place like Malmesbury Abbey there is a continuous stream of them, not least from my own head. I have a rule of thumb that if one person comes forward with an idea I ask them to come back with 4 people totally bought into the idea before the conversation continues. We’re looking build on what God is birthing in the Body of Christ, not just to do random stuff.So Malmesbury Abbey Skate is one of those rare diamonds of an idea that has be born, and grown, and earthed itself in the life of our church  and our community. And more. Malmesbury Abbey Skate has actually made Malmesbury Abbey more like Malmesbury Abbey (that is a long winded way of saying it was/is prophetic.)

I love our Holiday at Home; I love our Advent Carol Service; I love Creative Response; I love working with BBC History & BBC Wiltshire. I love the soft play in the Café and our Weekend Away and our Holy Week Festival, and I love the possibility of drowning the Archbishop of Canterbury. I love our series in John and my new small group. All of these new things of God breathe new life into me and into the mission and worship of the church. It’s all profoundly good, and of God. But the Icon (Skatepark) within the Icon (Abbey) happens next week.

God is always gloriously doing a new thing. In the 12th century the new thing was the abbey we worship each Sunday. In the 16th and 17th century the new thing was the Bible and worship in the English language which still sustains us today. During MAS 2014, next week, I give thanks that the God who built the Abbey has not left the building.

God is here, God is light, God is love. Bring wheels.

passers-by

The violinist Joshua Bell stood with a 1713 Stradivarius in his hands, lifted his bow, and started to play the Chaconne by Johann Sebastian Bach; composed just seven years after Antonio Stradivari made the particular violin he was holding.  The composer Brahms was so in awe of this piece of music that he once wrote that if he had written it the ‘excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven him out of his mind.’ But for this performance Joshua Bell wasn’t at the Boston Symphony Hall, where two days earlier tickets to hear him went for $100, he was busking at L’Enfant Plaza metro station in Washington DC, to see if commuters bustling by on their way to work would stop. They did, to buy their Washington Post and their daily lottery ticket as usual, but would the beauty and grace of Messrs JS Bach and J Bell cause them to break their routine for a moment, would a crowd gather, would Joshua Bell make enough money to get his cab back to the hotel?  Just a handful of over 1,000 passers-by stopped to listen; the virtuoso made $32.17.

The Old Testament prophet Jonah is not known to have played the violin, but something he said while in the (joshua) belly of a fish came to mind as I read the Joshua Bell story: 

those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs. (Jonah 2:8) 

A secular version of Jonah’s words might be, ‘those who get their priorities utterly wrong miss out on the life they were born to live.’ A preacher’s version of this would be ‘worship the wrong god and you’ll live the wrong life’ - try it in a Deep South accent. Joshua Bell’s version would probably be ‘if you haven’t got time to stop and listen to the music that JS Bach wrote you’ve probably lost touch with the God he worshipped.’

So this is advance notice. March 5th, Lent is coming. No doubt there will be intense chocolate avoidance, and I am currently conflicted over whether I could actually function without fresh coffee (answer, no.) But Lent is actually an audit, a hearing, we stop and listen to our lives, and ask if there is any time in there for us to stop and listen to God. Think about this; from March 5th the violin case is open.