Ordination

As Revd John Monaghan joins us as Curate this Sunday it’s worth reflecting on the not so short journey to becoming a minister in the Church of England. Years after becoming a disciple of Jesus and after considerable volunteer ministry in the local church, men and women who feel called to serve in leadership in the church are finally allowed off the coffee rota and go through an extensive and prayerful selection process which includes the local church, the diocese and finally a selection conference for the national church. After selection comes three years of theological and pastoral training which then continues to some extent in the curacy. Next year John will be ordained Priest, which will bring new dimensions to his ministry involving the sacrament of Holy Communion, conducting weddings, and increased leadership responsibility. This weekend John was ordained Deacon, which, quite profoundly, places at the heart of his ministry a commitment to serve the world and to serve the gospel; it is Anglican practice that the servant heart of Christ should  remain before Christian leaders throughout their ministry. Before John was ordained deacon these are the words the Bishop proclaimed over all the candidates:

‘Deacons are called to work with the Bishop and the priests with whom they serve as heralds of Christ's kingdom. They are to proclaim the gospel in word and deed, as agents of God's purposes of love. They are to serve the community in which they are set, bringing to the Church the needs and hopes of all the people. They are to work with their fellow members in searching out the poor and weak, the sick and lonely and those who are oppressed and powerless, reaching into the forgotten corners of the world, that the love of God may be made visible.

Deacons share in the pastoral ministry of the Church and in leading God's people in worship. They preach the word and bring the needs of the world before the Church in intercession. They accompany those searching for faith and bring them to baptism. They assist in administering the sacraments; they distribute communion and minister to the sick and housebound.

Deacons are to seek nourishment from the Scriptures; they are to study them with God's people, that the whole Church may be equipped to live out the gospel in the world. They are to be faithful in prayer, expectant and watchful for the signs of God's presence, as he reveals his kingdom among us.’ 

Please remember John and Alice, Philip, Toby and Clara, as their life and ministry among us formally begins today. It is a privilege to have them among us for this important part of their journey. (Placing bets as to whether Revd Alice or Revd John will be a Bishop first is inappropriate at this stage, but may feature as part of future fundraising at the Abbey.)

GLORY!

Few of us will forget Revd Katie Windle’s sermon from Palm Sunday this year – unless of course you weren’t there. (Don’t let it happen again, please.) In it we had this image to get our head around: our life is a car on a journey, where is God in your car? Some great answers bubbled up all over the place. Few of us were bold enough to say that God was actually driving the car, my life is totally abandoned to God, although we perhaps all recognised the aspiration as good. Some conceded that God sits in the passenger seat, and maybe we talk to him about the scenery and let him suggest a route. Some of us confessed that God needed to shout at us from the back seat, and others came clean and said He’s in the boot except on Sundays when I get Him out for an hour or two. I liked the suggestion that God was the RAC who rescued us from the side of the road, I loved the comment that God is in my wife’s car, and ‘Jesus is my Sat Nav’ surely has potential as a kids’ praise song? And perhaps sometimes we simply turn to God in the garage forecourt and let Him buy the petrol when we’ve run out of everything.

Beneath it all is this, we diminish God. Not literally, of course; omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent aren’t words that we’re going to have a lot of impact on. But there is trap we fall into and make ourselves pretty big, our issues immense, our lives central, and God peripheral and small. Recovering perspective is a Christian discipline – otherwise known as worship. We’re reading the book of Job at our 9am Morning Prayer in the Abbey at the moment, chapter 38 comes next Tuesday; it is a great perspective-giver: ‘Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundations? Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know!’ Nope.

So we ‘ascribe to the LORD the glory due to his name.’ (Ps 29:2). And we recover our humanity when we consider God and give Him God glory; and we recover community when we give God glory together. For when we look on glory we reflect it and become more glorious ourselves. P.S. Worker’s Prayer on July 24^th at 7.30pm will now simply be called GLORY! – an evening of passionate worship and fervent prayer led by Neill, Mandy & John. Join us as we meet with God. 

Music for Autism

On Wednesday June 26th Malmesbury Abbey is working in partnership once again with Music for Autism as we work with children and young people on the autistic spectrum from schools across Wiltshire. For the last two years John Lubbock (conductor) has brought the Orchestra of St John's for a classical concert, but this year our young people will be experiencing jazz with a very special band led by Derek Paravicini, the blind autistic savant with a quite astonishing musical gift.

You can read more about Derek here and here  . There is plenty on YouTube by Derek but you can see a short CBS 60 minute piece here. 

On June 26^th Derek Paravicini will be joined by:Ben Holder (Jazz Violin) Hannah Davey (Jazz Soprano) and Ollie Howell (Drums). 

At 11am there will be a concert for children and young people, than after a lunch break there will be another free concert at 2pm for the over 70s with a special invitation to people living with dementia and their carers. This work during the day will be supported by a gala concert at 7.30pm, again led by Derek Paravicini. We'd like you to buy a £10 ticket from the Abbey Bookshop (even if you can't come!) and enjoy a mesmerising even of jazz classics and requests. There will be an interval during which champagne by donation will be served - all proceeds to Music for Autism.

11am              Concert for children and young people with autism

2pm                Concert for the over 70s and people living with dementia

7.30pm           Gala Concert – tickets £10

Vocation

It’s all about the plastic. Take a good look at the vicar standing in front of you. Somewhere below the chin is the plastic, the clerical collar, the dog-collar. It’s all about the plastic. God is all about plastic. That’s just the way things are.

A month after my ordination in 1999 – yes, last century – myself and a bunch of new plastic wearers in Derby Diocese were on a Post Ordination Training day (which we of course called potty-training) and they were teaching us on faith in the workplace, vocation in the wider world. Who were these charlies, we asked? We’ve just spent the last 20 or 30 or 40 years working out our vocation in the workplace, in the school, in the home, in the community, at the golf club, and in the church, and a couple of blokes who hadn’t set foot outside the Church of England since Cranmer were reminding us that vocation isn’t just for plastic wearers. We knew! We know.

There are different kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit distributes them.  There are different kinds of service, but the same Lord.  There are different kinds of working, but in all of them and in everyone it is the same God at work. Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. (1 Corinthians 12:4-7)

‘To each one.’ It always comes down to the same question in the church: have you got a pulse? Once you’ve established that (and if you can’t find one, please make your way for prayer ministry in St Aldhelm’s chapel after the service) then you’re in the same boat as the rest of us. God loves, God forgives you, God graces your life and God calls you to serve Him in the world, the home, the church – you have a unique and holy vocation on this planet, which morphs as you do. For the next month at the Abbey we are creating some space to work out our vocation, asking what that pulse is for, (Re)Discovering Vocation:

June 9^th          1. Hearing the call to serve God (Isaiah 6:1-8)

June 16^th        2. Finding a place to serve God (1 Corinthians 12:14-31)

June 23^rd        3. Committing yourself to God’s work (Jonah 1:1-17)

June 30^th        4. Revd John Monaghan on his call to serve with us

July 7^th            5. Serving God in the world

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.