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.