The Rector's Shoe Box

2011-11-17T13:38:00.000Z

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Thursday, November 17th

A massive yellow stone – the Sun Drop Diamond – sold at auction in Geneva the other day for a princely sum in excess of 12 million dollars. No one knows whether the anonymous buyer intends to set the stone as a piece of jewellery or whether he’ll be slipping it into a safety deposit box as a hedge against fluctuating currencies.

It’s just a diamond, though, and diamonds are made of carbon. Perfectly ordinary carbon subjected to the natural processes of intense pressure and heat over time but able to generate much attention.

The value of things is what we attribute to them – how much attention we pay to them. Something which is valuable this year may not be valuable next year. Things which we threw away as worthless fifty years ago now command a high price on Ebay.

My wife, and my children are mostly made of carbon.

As is the new person at my church in Penicuik who I don't really know yet. She's a face I have now seen twice. I said to myself, after she escaped at the end of the service and didn't come to coffee, that I'm going to have to nab her next time before she leaves - to introduce myself – to welcome her to St James’. To say that we’re glad she’s here.

Within communities people emerge – with their talents and their stories – and take their place. Through us – or perhaps even in spite of us - they begin to discern God’s attention which speaks of their innate value - their worthiness.

Jesus is perpetually telling us in the Gospels to look out for the Pearl of Great Price buried in an ordinary field, or the insignificant mustard seed which becomes the greatest shrub of the garden or the sick, the lonely, the needy and the prisoner.

"When you care for them", says Jesus, "you care for me" and therefore – he says - you need to pay attention.

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2011-05-23T10:38:00.002Z

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Monday, May 23rd, 2011

Catastrophe looms. An overlooked character unlocks the secret but no one will listen. And so the worst happens, just as he said. A few folk make it through without being annihilated and existence is strangely renewed as a new day dawns. "Ah" you say, "Harold Camping and his predictions about the Rapture and the return of Christ ".

Well, yes, but also the plot of every disaster movie I've seen in the last twenty years.

Lets start with the obvious. We are still here.

But we were still here, as well, when we left the movie theatre after seeing comets hit the earth or the deep-freeze grip the Globe or an enormous shark consume a bathing beauty off the New Jersey shore.

It was such good entertainment.

To some extent, this has been as well. I am as guilty as the next man of having taken it all a little lightly. Spare a thought for those for whom it was deathly serious.

William Miller predicted such a triumphal return of Christ in the 1840's. What followed was known as The Great Disappointment. Marriages had not been entered into. As the date approached, crops had not even been planted.

The Bible is not the sort of book that easily admits of arithmetical calculation. The threats and promises therein cannot simply be lifted out of an ancient book and applied with sticky tape to contemporary situations. You're welcome to try. Nobody's going to promise not to have a laugh when you do.

The distressing thing about Christian catastrophism is the degree to which its disciples withdraw from the the world. Christ engaged that world with love. He didn't merely leave it to its fate. In the words, more or less, of another 1st century rabbi - Yochanan ben Zakkai:

"If you are planting a sapling and someone comes along to tell you that the Messiah has arrived, first go and plant the tree which depends on you for its life. Then brush the dirt off your hands - go and welcome the messiah".

2011-05-16T13:14:00.002Z

Biting off a lot!

Handling Hume’s Questions:
God, Belief and Miracle
Saturday, June 18th
Holy Trinity, Haddington

Elspeth Strachan, the Ministry Development Officer for the Diocese of Edinburgh has sent around the following note regarding the next Haddington Conference. Those of us from St James' and St Mungo's who've attended the last couple of conferences at Haddington have found them, in the main, well presented and stimulating.

Dear friends,

I would like to draw your attention to a conference being held in Haddington on Saturday 18 June. As a celebration of the 300th anniversary of the birth of the philosopher David Hume, it addresses some of the most testing questions that people ask about the Christian faith - questions about the existence of God, the nature of belief and what we mean by miracles. Speakers are the Right Rev Bishop Brian, Bishop of Edinburgh, the Rev Dr Harriet Harris, University of Edinburgh Chaplain and Rev Canon Dr Mark Harris, Vice-Provost of St Mary's Cathedral. It promises to be a fascinating and topical event and I do recommend it. Please come with your friends, especially those who have questions about Christianity. There is no fee for this conference, but booking is essential. I attach a brochure and booking form and look forward very much to hearing from you.

Warm wishes

Elspeth

nb. the link for the brochure in .pdf format is HERE

2011-05-02T21:09:00.001Z

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Monday, May 2nd, 2011

A few days have passed. Other events are looming large. The Royal Wedding with its solemn processions and daft hats now qualifies as memory.

I got a note on my computer about a minute in from the beginning of the ceremony on Friday - one of our future brides at St James’, Penicuik asking whether she, too, could have trees in Church for her wedding.

I said I thought we could work something out.

What other requests will working clergy now have to field stemming from this very public wedding?

One thing I can say. I’ll emphasize how her marriage, too, belongs to the community and not just to her and her future husband. Every marriage is public property and has the potential of adding strength to the society to which the couple belongs. Their promises form part of the collection of promises which, together, form the basis of that society.

They stand in a community of family and friends. Somebody signs as a witness that their vows have been undertaken publically.

Grandparents wheeled into church. They will not only feel the thrill of seeing somebody they knew as a baby finally tying the knot; they will also be assured that the wheel of life has taken a turn forward. They're now off the hook. Younger people are now entering into a solemn covenant – who will, together, grow wise together through the years of challenge and resolution - whose home will become a safe place for children and their table a refuge for those who need a listening ear. These two people will lend their strength to those around them.

The world’s media won’t be present. But a portion of the world – present and future - depends on those words spoken between them being true. True at the time they are spoken - as rings are exchanged and hands joined and a priest’s stole wraps those hands together - and true decades after the service is over.

The couple being married belongs to the world.

The strength of their union makes the world stronger.

2011-04-17T16:14:00.008Z

Palm Sunday Procession in West Linton

Two village churches in the Scottish Borders - St Mungo's Scottish Episcopal Church and St Andrew's Church of Scotland, along with the churches in Carlops and Newlands put their collective heads together and came up with a dandy all-age village Palm Sunday procession with police escort, branches and Moses the donkey who neither kicked nor bit at any time during the morning although he did divest himself of a large quantity of manure in the forecourt of St Andrew's Church provoking a cheer from the crowd.

Three of the participating churches have a service at 10:00 while St Andrew's generally get together at 11:00. This morning the three churches with the earlier service met at their usual time but truncated their services so that we could all gather on the green behind the medical practice at 10:45 in order to pipe the folks from St Andrew's to their door for a service which started 15 minutes late. People came to their windows and brought their children out to see the parade. Hymn sheets were handed out in abundance to onlookers. There were a few stations along the way where hymns were sung with some accompanying brass to keep folks together on the beat and on the note.

It was a good time had by all and the planning representatives from all four churches are to be congratulated.

2011-04-16T08:31:00.000Z

Palm Crosses

It's coming up to that time of year again. This Saturday morning at 10:00 we're gathering in the Hall with the children and anyone else who feels 'young at heart' to make the Palm Crosses for Sunday. There are several ways of making them and everybody swears by their own method. Each year we gather and the first thing we have to do is remember how we did them last year. Some of the methods involve a single piece of palm. We don't do it that way - we use two.

We use two because, erm, of the two natures of Christ - the divine and the human.

We use two pieces of palm because *thinking.....* of the two Gospel Sacraments - Baptism and Holy Communion.

No? Okay, we use two because that's how we were taught us a few years back and we're Anglicans and when we find something that works we stick with it like tar to an old boot.

So, in anticipation of Saturday's get-together to make palm crosses, I post here the a pictorial guide on the web which illustrated the way we do it. I post it simply as an aide-memoire for myself so I don't look like an utter pillock on Saturday morning.

2011-04-04T12:42:00.000Z

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Monday, April 4th, 2011

The reading from the Gospel which most Christian churches read yesterday was the story of the man, born blind, who had his sight restored by Jesus at the Pool of Siloam in Jerusalem. The disciples wanted first to discuss the situation from a comfortable distance - to understand whether blindness comes about as the consequence of somebody’s sin – this man’s - maybe his parents'.

But Jesus will have none of it. God reveals his power in a situation which simply is the way it is. And he wades right in.

I’m not alone in wondering “why” - there has been so much chaos and dis-ease breaking out all round the globe in the last month. The crust of the earth adjusts itself in the Far East and countless lives are changed forever . The grip of a few reliable strongmen starts to weaken in North Africa and the Middle East and, for different reasons but with similar effect, the dead are counted and communities are displaced.

Much needs to be understood, and done to prevent further suffering. But there's a limit. Sometimes such things simply happen – they are merely wounds in the earth.

As we speak, the pool of Siloam in Jerusalem is being excavated. And there’s a special quality to this corner of an ancient olive grove - it happened here and nowhere else. Aid and comfort was brought to this particular blind beggar

There is too much for any of us to understand. There is too much for any of us to deal with entirely – everywhere. We too find ourselves here and nowhere else dealing with actual situations and with real people – in communities and families – through charities and foundations in which we take a particular interest.

Things will continue to fall on people – the weight of buildings or the weight of political change. No matter how small the community being served or how localized the disaster.

Today – we have an opportunity - here or there - somewhere. To wade in.
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2011-03-08T13:05:00.000Z

Ash Wednesday Services
in Penicuik and West Linton

Holy Communion and Imposition of Ashes

10:30 a.m. St Mungo's West Linton
12:15 p.m. St James the Less, Penicuik
7:00 p.m. St James the Less Penicuik

2011-02-28T11:47:00.001Z

ADDRESS TO THE DIOCESAN SYNOD
26 February 2011
The Rt Rev. Brian Smith
Bishop of Edinburgh

First, some good news and some bad news. The good news for you all is that this is likely to be the last Synod address you will hear from me. The bad news is that as I am still in office for another six months, you will no doubt be hearing from me in other contexts. This is not a valedictory address.

However, it being the last address I shall give to Synod, it prompted me to look back over one or two of the Synod addresses I have given in the past to see whether there are themes I would want to highlight yet again. I do not recommend this as an activity. Looking back on earlier addresses that I have given, is, as I have said, not an enlightening task. It makes one realise that in any addresses one might give (be they sermons or other speeches) the repetition of anecdotes is a necessity, but the regurgitation of old sermons in their entirety is a mistake.

It was apparent to me that on a number of occasions a significant theme has come to the fore – that of conflict. I am therefore very glad that the Standing Committee felt that handling this issue explicitly at this Synod would be something worth doing.

In the past I have highlighted issues of conflict often with reference to works of literature. I recall touching on Dickens’s ‘Tale of Two Cities’ and the conflict between the two perspectives of it being “the best of times” and it being “the worst of times”. I touched on it with reference to Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’ – “All happy families are the same. Unhappy families are unhappy each in their own way”. I recall touching on it with reference to the novels of Neil Gunn, the Scottish writer from Dunbeath in Caithness who looked at the differing aspirations which shaped his life as a boy growing up in his fishing village. From Gunn’s book ‘Highland River’ I took as the text “Ken mumbled and grumbled and kept his eyes shut.” [I hasten to remind you that at that point in the narrative he was not attending the local Diocesan Synod, he was fishing.]

I think it was inevitable that conflict should feature a lot in my addresses. The Anglican Communion itself over the period of my time in Edinburgh has itself been seeking to handle conflict in its own particular way. The Anglican Covenant, mooted in 2004 has attracted attention in many of the forums of the Church. Also, it is inevitable that things that are constantly being brought to the attention of a Bishop involve conflict. Perhaps more than many others in a Diocese the bishop is aware of tensions arising on a significant number of fronts.

All this takes me back, if I may be pardoned an element of nostalgia, to my days as a child brought up and worshipping in the Scottish Episcopal Church. We regularly attended Morning Prayer in the Cathedral, on Sundays, but I would disappear before the sermon, off to Sunday School in the Chapter House with the late Canon Getty. The last of the versicals and responses in Morning Prayer in the 1929 Prayer Book is of course

“Oh God make clean our hearts within us”

to which the answer is given:

“And take not thy Holy Spirit from us”.

These are the last words (apart from Amen) said by worshippers together at Morning Prayer -“take not thy Holy Spirit from us”.

You will have heard me talk before, if I have been referring to the mission of the Church mentioning a friend who went for a job many years ago and was interviewed by the late (then) Sir Arnold Weinstock. I remember him telling me that on interview Weinstock asked him what makes a successful company. My friend began to reply “Sound financial policies, good personnel relationships, good strategy and vision for the future etc etc”.

Weinstock stopped him and said “No, it is having something to sell that the public want to buy”. It is a salutary picture to have in mind when we are reflecting on what makes a good Church. Are our finances in good order? Are our personnel and pastoral relationships right? Have we got our vision correct? These are all vitally important questions, and ones we neglect at our peril. However, we are forced always to ask ourselves the question: Is there something about our life together which we can offer to the world? Is there something about the way we are as members of the Scottish Episcopal Church which has a certain magnetic attraction that wants to draw people in?

Again, you have heard me say before that as a Church we need to offer teaching, particularly about God. The interaction in society of differing religious and spiritual perspectives provides a place where the Church is called to be most fully active. We need to be offering an understanding of God and the world which makes sense for those who hear us talk about it.

We also need to be a Church which encourages within its life good relationships among members – support for friendships and families. Also to encourage an ability in study and discussion to gain a perspective on the complex moral and ethical issues being faced in the world today, and in whatever way we can to begin to address these.

But more important than either of those (very important as they undoubtedly are) I have found myself saying that what is most important in the life of a Church is that it has a right spirit dwelling within it. To aim to be an orthopneumatic Church is almost more important than aiming to be an orthodox or an orthopractic Church.

When I have been speaking on prayer, you have sometimes heard me reflect on Coleridge’s poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”.

You will know the story of the poem. The mariner sets out on the sea and kills an albatross. The albatross is hung round his neck as a great symbol of the guilt he must feel for doing that deed. And as the ship travels on, one by one his crewmen die until he is the only person left on the boat. The ship becomes becalmed and the mariner is there, looking at the bodies of his fellow crewmen on the decks and the strange slimy creatures that crawl on the sea.

He muses,

“So many men, so beautiful!
And they all dead did lie;
A thousand thousand slimy things
Lived on; and so did I.

I looked upon the rotting sea,
And drew my eyes away;
I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men lay.

I looked to heaven and tried to pray;
But or ever a prayer had gusht,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.”

The ancient mariner looks upon the dead men. He looks with contempt upon the creatures that seem to have life. He feels resentment at the injustice of it all and he cannot pray. His throat is as dry as dust.

But then a little later in the poem there is an undefined change that takes place. The moon comes up and he begins to look at the created world in a new way,

“Beyond the shadow of the ship,
I watched the water snakes:
They moved in tracks of shining white,
And when they wheeled (?)
This elfish light
Fell off in holy flakes.

Within the shadow of the ship,
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.

Happy, happy living things! No tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gusht from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware:
Sure my kind saint took pity on me
And I blessed them unaware.

The selfsame moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The albatross fell off and sank
Like lead into the sea.”

A transformation takes place in his life. He is surprised to find the deep resentment and contempt, that shaped him earlier, is gone. He sees the creatures in a new light (in the poem it is the light of the moon). He sees them as the beautiful creatures they are, made by God.

Feeling gratitude for the created world, he finds that he can pray. The spring of love has gushed from his heart towards the world God created, and he knows again that relationship with God that comes through prayer. He knows forgiveness, for the burden of sin, represented by the albatross, falls from his neck and drops “like lead into the sea”.

The Mariner is liberated for prayer when he ceases to have contempt for the creatures with which he shares God’s world.

Very often in our world today attitudes of cynicism and contempt can dominate, and such attitudes are not only destructive for personal relationships one to another, but are also destructive of relationships with God. If a Church is to be a place that encourages the worship of God, it must be a place in which a spirit that works against those tendencies is active. It is at the heart of Jesus’ teaching which asks how a person may love God who is not seen, if there is no love directed to fellow human beings who are seen.

As I have often said, much of the conflict that arises, particularly conflict within the Church is not conflict between a good and a bad person, but a conflict between two good persons, who have become animated by different values, values that in the deep system and metaphysics of the world themselves actually clash one with another. To see this, and to see that there are clashes that we cannot avoid, but must live with, is to me a significant mark of Christian maturity.

As individuals we are shaped by the conflicts that we strive to contain, and the Church too in its life is shaped by the conflicts that animate it in its life. The presence of conflict is not a sign of failure. [It can be the sign of a new way of being dawning.] How that conflict is viewed and handled can be a sign of failure. One of the most insidious features of much Church life, and we finds this in all parts of it in the whole Anglican Communion and elsewhere, is when we become animated by the spirit that will say in the words of the Pharisee in parable, “Lord I thank you that I am not as other men are”.

It is my belief that such a creative spirit does at our best, animate our life together. However, it is also my belief that such a spirit can easily fade. The bulwarks against such fading constantly need to be defended. These bulwarks lie in our life of worship, our study of scripture, and our general sharing in conversation together. At the heart of this is the prayer in Morning Prayer “Take not thy Holy Spirit from us”.

The task of the Church is to nourish and nurture that spirit, also to notice where it is active outside the church, and to let its natural magnetism animate our mission. It is perhaps fruitful as we begin a Synod in which we are considering conflict to remember that well known quotation by James Nayler often cited by Members of the Society of Friends.

There is a spirit which I feel that delights to do no evil, nor to revenge any wrong, but delights to endure all things, in hope to enjoy its own in the end. Its hope is to outlive all wrath and contention, and to weary out all exaltation and cruelty, or whatever is of a nature contrary to itself. ……. As it bears no evil in itself, so it conceives none in thoughts to any other.
If it be betrayed, it bears it, for its ground and spring is the mercies and forgiveness of God. Its crown is meekness, its life is everlasting love……. In God alone it can rejoice.

And so may the prayer: “Take not thy Holy Spirit from us” shape our participation in this Synod.

+Brian
26th February 2011

2011-02-18T10:42:00.002Z

The Bishops notices for this week (in .pdf format) can be found

HERE

2011-02-18T10:03:00.001Z

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Friday, February 18th, 2011

The old adage in Montreal is that a pothole is large enough to warrant fixing when you can put a chicken in it.

London, apparently, has a “pothole gardener” – who runs around potting up potholes with pansies and Johnny Jump-Ups to highlight the need for council workers to get that municipal chicken climbing down into potholes more regularly to see just how big they've become.

Best bets are that the pothole gardener is a cyclist who has ruined at least one wheel rim in a pothole and wants everybody to know that it’s not okay.

Scotland is facing a two billion pound bill for repair of potholes – all at a go - because we’ve not taken the chicken out on more regular rounds.

All sorts of things decay and degrade. I can think of at least two of Jesus’ sayings designed to relay a sense of urgency to those who’ve let their relationships with their neighbours decay and who are bringing their gift to the altar as if everything was fine. Or who are taking the reckoning they must make some day with their Creator too lightly - who haven’t trimmed their lamps so they’ll have light when the darkness comes.

Decay and degradation need to be checked out in a timely manner – decay in a marriage, decay in a congregation, decay in a workplace – even personal decay in terms of our own human connections or our spiritual progress. When did we stop communicating frankly with our families or our spouses? When did we stop talking to God in the way we used to do? Do we imagine that rectifying this is something that we can do at some later and undefined time?

Bad news, given early enough, is never really that bad.

The chicken test, applied in a timely manner, indicates a needed repair rather than a major catastrophe.

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An audio link appears HERE for a limited time. TFTD begins at 1:21.17 - about halfway along the audio bar.

2011-02-06T16:04:00.001Z

So how is the date of Easter established?

We were working out the St James' Social Calendar for the next seven months and a number of people have said more or less the same thing: that Easter is late this year. Following this is the inevitable question "How is the date of Easter established". So here goes:

Taken from the Wikipedia entry for 'Computus'

Easter Day is the first Sunday after the 14th day of the lunar month (the nominal full moon) that falls on or after 21 March (nominally the day of the vernal equinox). For determining the feast, Christian churches settled on a method to define a reckoned "ecclesiastical" full moon, rather than observations of the true Moon as the Jews did at the time. Eastern Orthodox Christians calculate the fixed date of 21 March according to the Julian Calendar rather than the modern Gregorian Calendar, and observe the additional rule that Easter may not precede or coincide with the first day of the Jewish Passover.

Any clearer? No? More of the same here, then (and at greater length). Fill your boots!

2011-02-04T14:03:00.003Z

Bishop Brian has chosen two charities for this year’s (2011) Lent Appeal. They are:

1. Child Survival in Malawi (Scotland)

2. St Columba’s Hospice Rebuild Campaign

Leaflets are in production at the moment and will be distributed with the bulletins shortly.

2011-02-01T16:13:00.000Z

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
February 1st, 2011

I am not Colin Firth.

Hopes that my congregation might start calling me Father Darcy have all been dashed. I remain to them unremarkable and not very glamourous. People in my congregation have, though, been crowing about the recent film "The King's Speech". While there is enthusiasm about the script and the story - much of it has to do with the leading man.

Every generation has its heart-throbs. Often they've been stars of the big screen. The facts about the lives these people lead - either as rogues or as timid and ordinary folks - are unimportant to many of us. There is, I gather, a Mrs Firth who wakes up next to Mr Firth every morning and who knows the real story.

For his admirers this matters little.

Actors get rather a poor rating in the New Testament. The word "hypocrite" which Jesus uses to describe his religious opponents comes from the world of the theatre and means, essentially, an actor - somebody inauthentic who doesn't believe the words he's saying and using.

The fact remains that there are, today, real men and women around the world who stand in the breach, who do battle against injustice, who champion good ideas, who do what they say they'll do and who make sacrifices for others. We tend to be cynical about real life heroes. There's a market out there for books and articles claiming to tell "the real story" behind our heroes and to knock the stuffing out of any person or institution which presumes to stand too tall.

At least some of it is jealousy. We're uncomfortable with our own lack of heroism.

In "The Kings Speech" it takes a failed actor to make a stammering King able to speak to a nation.

In a world filled with troubled families, failing political will, divided communities and crushing indifference, might not the stories of real life heroes do something to straighten our backs and increase our resolve?

2011-01-12T16:14:00.000Z

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
January 12th, 2011

There’s a story in the Book of Acts, where Saul of Tarsus was on his way to Damascus with warrants in his saddlebag against the members of the small Christian community there - a group of people he had targeted before and come to know well in Jerusalem. Along the way he got knocked off his donkey. He had a vision. He saw the light, as they say. The great persecutor of the church ended up becoming Saint Paul – the Apostle to the Gentiles.

Queer how things work out, isn’t it: When people snap – when they change sides? Consider the case of PC Mark Kennedy, the undercover police officer said to have “gone native” while infiltrating one of the more radical Climate Change groups over a number of years.

Personal contact brings with it no end of risks. J. Edgar Hoover never liked to send agents in undercover for any length of time in case they ended up becoming tainted. For “tainted”, read “involved”, “compromised” or even “convinced” – no longer useful, anyway, as a weapon against their opponents.

But as embarrassing as this must be for the police who appear to have lost a case against members of the group because their man wobbled in post, and as distressing as it may be for the Climate Change group to find that one of their number was informing against them all these years, it is nonetheless heartening to know that, in relationships between people over a protracted period of time, we can still be transformed and changed through contact.

I would have a hard time living in a world where people remained so resolute they could not be moved and changed by the power of relationship.

Such apparent weakness may be the key to any number of dreadful situations around the world where people and communities stare across no man’s land at people they’ve been trained or even raised to despise.

2010-12-17T16:17:00.000Z

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Friday, December 17th

I went to a Nativity Play this week at our local Primary School in Penicuik. The annual school or church Nativity wouldn’t be possible without tea towels and cut up curtains and square paste-on beards made of construction paper.

And don’t forget the angels. When extra children show up in church who haven’t been given a part, they can always be draped in a disused choir gown and have a crown of tinsel placed on their heads. Voila – an instant angel- sent up to the front holding on to an older cousin’s hand apprehensively.

Much of the story involves human beings listening to angels - ordinary human beings caught up in trying circumstances or just minding their own business out in the pastureland but then tumbled into some sort of shape and woven into a story by a voice which comes from up in the sky or wells up from within in a dream.

It’s wrapped up with idea of inspiration, revelation and vocation: three words which have their roots in a religious tradition but which now are used in a wider sense- inspiring political speeches, revelations in a gossip column, the vocation we might have for a particular job or livelihood.

But it is the original, ghostly, version of these words which draw us to the story and give it its power. These Nativities are not only intended to enrich the small participants but the grownup watchers as well - we who have seen too much, or compromised too much of our potential or forgotten to look beyond our duties and our obligations.

What the children are telling us, through this story, is that we can change our ways. And, in the midst of our ordinary human lives and communities, such dreams and revelations, such promises of novelty and rebirth, still have currency in the human heart.

2010-12-04T16:18:00.000Z

Pause for Thought

BBC Radio 2
Saturday, December 4th, 2010

When a trench was dug through the ancient hill fort at Megiddo in Israel at the beginning of the twentieth century it revealed 26 individual layers of settlement separated by what were called “destruction layers”. New cities were built on old ruins. From the top you can look out over the Jezreel Valley and imagine the armies massing out there. You can imagine the fear which must have gripped the defenders - at least 26 times.

I could go through a family photo album with somebody of my father’s generation and he would point to pictures which represented moments in his family history when it appeared that the end was nigh. Hopes and plans had been dashed. Efforts had come to naught. He might have felt, at various moments, as if he lived in the shadow of impending doom. When you’re in the midst of it, it feels like the end of the world. You can’t visualize what life afterwards will look like.

If you walk down through the steep tunnel into the heart of the hill fort at Tel Megiddo you see a remarkable thing. You walk by a spring of water, captured and enclosed thousands of years ago by the hill fort – a free flowing spring - the original reason why Neolithic people first chose this little hill to live on.

More often than not you’ll see a small frog perched there by the edge of the water. In such dry and inhospitable surroundings baked by the sun and blown by the wind it’s the last thing you’d expect. But they’ve been there all along.

There’ll be a healthy dose of “end of the world language” in the Scripture readings in Church throughout the Advent season. It helps, though, to flip ahead a few pages and remind yourself that there are both books and history which follow. The germ of something good survives and resurfaces later. Life, with its testament to God’s abiding presence through history, hope and promise survives and endures.

Solomon and Ahab, have come and gone. So have Pharoah Thutmose III and the Canaanite Confederacy, the Ottoman Turks and General Allenby.

The frogs have seen them all off

2010-11-30T16:24:00.000Z

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland
BBC Radio Scotland
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010

Mixed in with undiplomatic comments - by diplomats - may be some top-level secrets amongst the 250,000 diplomatic cables shared by the online source Wikileaks.

The volume of the material means that it will take weeks for commentators, journalists - and even some experts - to know what of the material is just embarrassing or whether dangerous and destabilizing information is now in the public domain.

We’re told that 2.5 million people – employees of the U.S. government – already had access to the secure source where these documents originate. That circle of people, who could be trusted to keep shtum however, didn’t include you and me. It didn’t include the major newspapers.

In every company, or extended family, or voluntary organization there is the truth which is known but is never spoken about. You would be considered naïve or even destructive were you to pipe up at the dinner table or board table and say what was already in the back of everybody’s mind. Someone, though, might be glad that the truth had finally been articulated even if it caused a major ruckus.

Jesus spoke rather a lot of truth about the powerful – like Herod, the High Priest and Pontius Pilate. He also spoke about the weakness of his own followers. His comments made of Jesus the sort of person who spoke the truth outside the inner circle and one who could not reasonably be expected to keep silence about what a lot of people already knew.

We've all got secrets. And they’re not necessarily shameful ones that ought to be known. Some of them are quite useful secrets. We know things – people tell us things – which we keep to ourselves - because the damage done would be worse if the thing were told.

But the balance between discretion and openness is something which must be periodically tested.

To see what happens when the thing is known as, shortly, it may well be in this case.

2010-11-28T16:26:00.000Z

Pause for Thought

BBC Radio 2
Sunday, November 28th, 2010

Some people change their minds a lot. Some people never change their minds.

Some people who never change their minds have a rugged set of opinions that they’ve come by honestly and which have stood the test of time. Good on them for not changing their minds.

Others – well, we’re still searching for our road in life and a few false starts and redefinitions are bound to come our way. Good on us for not being so stuck in our ways that we can’t change our minds.

A couple of years ago I had the occasion to walk along what is probably the very beach on the Sea of Galilee where Jesus called his disciples. The story has it that they were in their fishing boat with their old dad and were about their business – repairing nets and sorting lead weights - when Jesus spoke with them. They left their work and went with him.

The art of putting things in convincing words is called rhetoric. Years ago people knew the rules. It was important who the speaker was. It was important that the speaker knew who his audience was. But what he said was important too – the germ of the message. Without the last of these three it’s possibly only manipulation.

In one of the first black-and-white silent movies to treat the Gospel stories, Jesus approaches fishermen who are casting their nets into the lake. He raises his hands in the air and you see his lips move. The fishermen immediately drop their nets and put their arms out – walking out of the lake toward Jesus more like zombies in Night of the Living Dead than people who have heard something convincing enough to make them change their course in life.

I don’t think it worked like that. I think that he said something to them there on the lake shore which made sense.

If there is no word out there capable of motivating us – no idea that could conceivably seize us then all we’ve got to hand is what we’ve always had.

That, it seems, would be a lonely state of affairs

in a world where we are not alone.

2010-11-25T16:28:00.000Z

Communion on the Moon

Something I missed along the way and did not know.

Buzz Aldrin, the second astronaut to set foot on the moon:

"I unstowed the elements in their flight packets. I put them and the scripture reading on the little table in front of the abort guidance-system computer. Then I called Houston: 'Houston, this is Eagle ... I would like to request a few moments' silence. I would like to invite each person listening in to contemplate for a few moments the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his own individual way.'

For me, this meant taking communion. In the blackout I opened the little plastic packages which contained bread and wine. I poured wine into the chalice my parish had given me. In the one-sixth gravity of the moon, the wine curled slowly and gracefully up the cup. It was interesting to think that the very first liquid ever to be poured on the moon, and the first food eaten there, were consecrated elements."

2010-06-03T13:32:00.002Z

The Bible in the Life of the Church website can be found HERE. It would be worth a look. Any ideas about how we at St James and St Mungo's can take our part would be greatly appreciated.

2009-09-14T13:52:00.000Z

Thought for the Day

Fields of barley are now being cut - with combine harvesters out in the fields late into the evening. The wet summer created sodden fields but, with the tops of the Beech trees starting to change colour, we suddenly have reasonable weather.

Climbing the crest of the hill towards Perth, recently, I noticed all the white fields in the distance. Lots of people have taken a calculated risk and planted barley. They may find their crop fed into distilleries and breweries for top dollar or…. happy farm animals may end up chowing-down on top grade barley sold at bargain prices because there's too much of it around.

Good skills and livelihoods are at risk.

We're moving into Autumn now, with yellows and ochre tones in the ascendant. Plant life is mature – heavy headed, rich and filled with promise. Other generations regarded this time as the crowning glory of the year – not merely the harbinger of winter.

For Episcopal clergy in the Diocese of Edinburgh, November brings our annual Conference in Pitlochry - the forest there in stunning Autumn array. Many of us are in our 50's. We were trained by clergy who were around at the end of the 2nd World War who were themselves trained by the generation that saw the men going off to the 1st.

Quite a chain of experience.

We arrive with our little suitcases and mixed success in our congregations – some "gathering in" growing numbers on Sunday mornings – some in churches where growth has been a challenge. Our skills aren't always valued or understood in the way we might hope –the retelling of Sacred Stories and the proclaiming of hope based on events which took place long ago. Prayer beside hospital beds, school assemblies, timely conversations in village precincts.

What would our forebears have to say?

They'd probably take issue with how we do things.

But they would remind us, at the same time that, like the farmer, we are not completely in charge of how things work out.

We ply our trade in hope and faith and not in complete certainty.

2009-09-07T13:50:00.000Z

Thought for the Day

One of my parishioners showed up for Mass yesterday in his brand new Morris Minor. Brand new, that is, to him. A funny little car - he’s obviously quite taken with it.

His two children seated in the back as they turned into Chapel Brae had what could best be described as a ‘quizzical’ expression on their faces – proud to be riding in Dad’s new car but worried their school chums might catch a glimpse of them.

This next few weeks marks the 40th anniversary of the break-up of the Beatles – Paul McCartney making plans for the future but John Lennon wanting out. George Harrison salvaging some of his own songs for his first solo album – one of them with a chorus line cribbed from the Buddha - “All things must pass – all things must pass away”

There are certain songs, smells and places – stemming from the experience of particular decades - when I’m surrounded by them, for an instant, I am 21 years old again. Young, slim and quick-tongued, although a bit stupid and shallow. I remember the first bit but not the second.

Nostalgia has its highest moment in an appreciation of what is good and what, in its age, was needed to hit the nail on the head – the utility of the thing, the integrity of the idea and its ability to carry people along with it.

Once Eddie had parked his Morris Minor in the lane perhaps with a large stone under its back tyre to keep it from rolling down the hill we gathered together, members of a village church, young and old, optimists and cynics, for the baptism of a baby girl wearing an old family christening dress.

The traffic rumbled down the A702 and the windows in the church rattled.

If you’d been with us, yesterday, you’d have heard ancient words and prayers lifting up a life which was young and newly formed. We recited traditional promises and invoked the Spirit of God over the water – believing, as we do - that on such old foundations God brings forth the new and the unexpected.

2009-08-28T08:57:00.000Z

Thought for the Day

Children are trudging down the lane this week in new school trousers - with back-to-school faces on - at five minutes after eight. Churches are planning to restart Sunday School this weekend, get their choirs back on a practise schedule and publicise their Fall programmes.

You don’t always get a second chance at these things.

You start with a bang or you start with a whimper.

This year we are hoping to break some eggs, stir the pot and open the doors to the possibility of grace, wonder and progress. It’s going to be different this year.

A youngish deacon in the Scottish Episcopal Church is being ordained a priest this Saturday here in Edinburgh.

There he is – another generation waiting for the bell – starting out with great hopes and ambitions. This time it’ll be different

Now listen up: I don’t care if you push that same button for the tenth time. I don’t care. You’re doing what you need to do. In our case, at Church, when there are a hundred on a Sunday or fifty or even when it’s just two or three of us gathered in the Lord’s name - He promised to be in the midst of us even then.

And I don’t care if it’s the tenth time you’ve tried to get a conversation going with your husband or wife about a problem you’ve been avoiding – or whether you’ve already tried to reorient your life out of its negative spiral a dozen times without much success or that you’ve been to detox twice and lapsed twice. It doesn’t matter. The fact that you’re willing to do it again is evidence that the spark of life is still in you – and the possibility of success is no farther away

It’s part of the nature of life, when you look at it through a microscope. Even more so the nature of faith in people such as we are, listening to our radios this morning - we move – we get up again when we’re supposed to stay down.

It’s what we do. It’s who we are. We start again.

2009-06-19T11:12:00.001Z

Thought for the Day

It’s ‘up for grabs’ whether we are 'on the road to recovery' or not. The Chancellor thinks we’re on the right path but news of Scottish job losses makes us wonder whether this rising tide will lift all boats – or not.

Clearly there is some debate.

One of the questions asked by individuals who have suffered a loss - the loss of a job, or a relationship or even the loss through death of a friend or a spouse is 'when will I get better? ' And the only really truthful answer is 'quite possibly never' - if you mean ‘when can I turn the clock back to where it was before’........

.......read the whole thing HERE.

2009-06-15T13:18:00.001Z

Good Audio Alert

Bishop Alan makes reference to a repeat broadcast of a Radio 4 programme on the word Hallelujah. It's available for the next six days HERE. I don't think BBC iPlayer is accessible outside of the UK and I can't immediately see a way of downloading it as a podcast (correct me if I'm wrong). Even for a fan, I found it spent a little too long talking with and about Leonard Cohen but it ends with a very pretty piece of music at the end composed by Jocelyn Pook who is the programme's presenter as well.

The second bit - tho' not exactly seasonal (it's an Advent reflection) appears on the Clifton Diocese website (RC). It represents only one of the audio presentations which have won numerous awards - in this case the Sony Radio Award.

I was a participant in the Churches Media Conference down in Derbyshire just prior to our General Synod in Scotland and had occasion to attend one of the Fringe Workshops led by the podcasts creator, Mary Colwell. The audio is available HERE.

2009-06-12T08:53:00.002Z

The Scottish Bishops at the opening Eucharist of this year's General Synod

2009-06-11T16:07:00.000Z

Thought for the Day

The only time I was called a baboon was when I was 14 years old and carrying on loudly with a group of friends in the street. Evidently we disturbed somebody who opened her window and yelled the insult from the safety of an upstairs room.

Baboons get bad press. They are loud. They have shocking blue backsides. But, according to a news report yesterday, baboons who live in such raucous societies live longer and have healthier offspring than those who pass their years in relative isolation. Their community life – though loud and fractious – does them no harm.......

.........Read the whole thing HERE.

2009-06-07T17:36:00.000Z

Whipman Week in West Linton

The parade marking the beginning of Whipman Week in West Linton was about to start and this small fellow was obviously looking forward to it.

When they say that "the dog is the size of a horse" it helps if the dog is very big and the horse is very wee.

Last year's Whipman was looking forward to handing over to this year's Whipman-elect.

2009-06-05T11:02:00.000Z

Thought for the Day

It may not be our turn this year. We don’t have to resign in disgrace. Or watch embarrassing little tidbits about ourselves tumbling out of the pages of the newspaper one after another in a steady torrent.

“We are not that soldier” as the saying goes! We are not that Minister or Member of Parliament. It’s not us.

Don’t we miss a tremendous opportunity, though, when we merely stand outside the whole situation with a disgusted look on our faces?............

........Read the whole thing HERE

The audio can be found HERE. Thought for the Day begins at 1:20.26 - just a little less than halfway along the audio bar.

2009-04-11T13:15:00.001Z

Tomorrow morning at 5:30 a.m. we're gathering in the graveyard at St Mungo's (Church of Scotland) Penicuik for psalms and prayers. Thence to the high field up beyond St James Penicuik (Scottish Episcopal Church) for the first Easter hymn which is to be sung just as the sun is rising over the Firth of Forth at sunrise (6:12 a.m.).

There are lambs in the field so make sure the gate is closed behind you and leave your dog at home.

Bacon and eggs in St James Church Hall just before 7 a.m.

2009-04-10T20:45:00.002Z

2009-04-08T22:45:00.001Z

2009-04-08T12:34:00.001Z

Rowan Williams' Reflections on Holy Week and Easter

2009-03-26T18:35:00.000Z

2009-03-23T08:42:00.002Z

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland
Radio Scotland
Monday, March 23rd, 2009

There’s no avoiding it.

The story of Jade Goody’s death in hospital yesterday morning is on the front page of every newspaper today.

It was certainly in the minds of the younger women in my congregation at our Mothering Sunday service yesterday morning: that two small children are now without their mother on a day when our children were distributing posies to their mums and grannies in church.

How much water has gone under the bridge in the last few years with the story of this woman’s life? Gallons – tons - heaps, it seems. Whether you were turning the television on to watch a story about Jade or turning the television off when some story appeared you couldn’t avoid being party to it.

We’ve witnessed the “usual celebrity business” of making sure that a name and a face get as much air time as possible. Of late, though there was a very determined attempt on Jade’s part to provide stability and a future for her children which she could not – for a variety of reasons – have provided otherwise - a series of very normal and understandable attempts at putting things in order. She wanted to end her life as a married woman. She wanted to complete her chapter with herself and her children baptized.

In the long run we all end up trying to do more or less the same thing when faced with our mortality. The threat of death has always been a great leveller and a source of accelerated maturity.

We all want to ‘sign off’, so to speak, with our I’s dotted and our T’s crossed – with something in the bank and the education of our children assured. And that is the done thing.

At the end the cameras were excluded from the room and the ‘blow by blow’ reporting ceased. There remained simply an individual trying to make sense of her life and struggling very hard to leave things in order for her children.

And she seems to have managed that rather well.

2009-03-08T08:44:00.002Z

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland
Radio Scotland
Monday, March 8th, 2009

Like the proverbial ‘bad penny’ one of the unwelcome things that comes back is more violence in familiar quarters - trouble at one of the historic ‘fault lines’ of humanity.

News of a terror attack at the front gates of an army Barracks in Antrim brings us back to scenes which belong properly to another decade.

We end up feeling a little sick. We’d hoped to have moved on.

There were 28 people killed in Baghdad the other day: Yet another fault line.

We are not so daft as to assume that the inclination to violence only resides in the souls and minds of people somewhere else. Crime stories on the Scottish News are frequent. It’s one of those things which happens, we say to ourselves……although with greater frequency in certain neighbourhoods.

We’re in a penitential season right now in the Church. In Lent, one of the things we do is to take stock – not of our achievements but of the things that are amiss in our lives and in our inclinations. It’s a time to cultivate some wisdom and realism about the weakness in our bodies and souls. Any inventory of our humanity will lead us, sadly, to conclude that we share an inclination to violence and cruelty.

Men and women who have struggled with drink or with anger or some other problem come to know that while they can learn to live with it, around it or in spite of it – they will nonetheless have to live in its shadow. We can be grateful for the forward strides that have been made in Northern Ireland – grateful for the immense courage shown by notable men and women as well as those whose names will never be known who have either brokered peace or agreed to it.

At the same time we will, please, put aside the foolish whim that we are somehow immune. Peace requires an active commitment to what does not always come naturally. Our ability to live in peace with people who are not of our clan, our language or our persuasion is always under threat.

2009-03-03T11:22:00.001Z

2009-02-24T16:25:00.001Z

Thought for the Day

It’s Ash Wednesday tomorrow. When I finish here in the studio this morning I’ll hoof it over to the church and burn last year’s palms from our Palm Sunday service – then mix the ashes with a little oil in the bottom of a small clay pot. At our three Ash Wednesday Services tomorrow, people will come up to the altar rail. With my thumb, I’ll paint a tiny cross with the slurry of ashes on the forehead of each of them and say the following words:

“Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return”.......

.......read the whole thing HERE

Audio available for a few days HERE on the BBC iPlayer
TFTD begins at 1:22:43 which is about halfway along the audio bar

2009-02-10T16:27:00.000Z

Thought for the Day

Good morning,

A burnt out car in the middle of the street.

A family home reduced to ashes.

Like the visual images of lives cut short in ancient Pompeii by an erupting volcano, these pictures from Southern Australia tell the stories of lives which have been overwhelmed by something faceless and destructive.............

Read the whole thing HERE

2009-01-27T14:36:00.001Z

The Vicar of Baghdad

A story about from Times Online about a remarkable man - Canon Andrew White.

There are still places around the world where the possibility of abduction, injury, instant or even lingering death must simply be absorbed as a possibility and as part of the costs of ministry.

Behind the quite understandable interest in Canon White as an individual, however, you have to think of his family (who have returned to the UK) and. most especially, his congregation at St George's, Baghdad who have less protection than their vicar from those who might wish them ill.

An earlier profile can be found HERE.

2009-01-27T07:17:00.000Z

Thought for the Day

January 27th, 2009

Proposals are afoot at Westminster to deprive drug addicts of their benefits if they don’t sign up for medical treatment. It’s one of those proposals that gets heads nodding in agreement – maybe too quickly.

It is so easy to scold.......

Read the whole thing HERE
Audio available HERE for a limited time.
TFTD begins at 1:22.56 which is about halfway along the audio bar.

2009-01-09T00:36:00.002Z

What Ought We as
Christians to Know?

Date: Tuesday 24 February 2009
Time: 7.30 – 9.00pm

A series of talks and discussion about
God, Humanity and the Church
with the Rt Rev Brian Smith

Tuesdays 24 Feb, 3 March, 10 March
7.30 – 9.00pm

Location:

General Synod Office
21 Grosvenor Crescent
EH12 5EE

Contact:

To book please phone 0131 538 7033, email Elspeth Strachan on adventures@dioceseofedinburgh.org or download a form from www.edinburgh.anglican.org

2009-01-06T08:12:00.003Z

I took this shot while walking with the Murrays on the Penicuik Estate last week. The combination of hard frost and bright sunlight made quite a visual impact all the way along the trail.

2008-12-31T23:12:00.001Z

Sharon's Christmas Prayer

She was five,
sure of the facts,
and recited them
with slow solemnity
convinced every word
was revelation.

She said
they were so poor
they had only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
to eat
and they went a long way from home
without getting lost. The lady rode
a donkey, the man walked, and the baby
was inside the lady.
They had to stay in a stable
with an ox and an ass (hee-hee)
but the Three Rich Men found them
because a star lited the roof.
Shepherds came and you could
pet the sheep but not feed them.
Then the baby was borned.
And do you know who he was?
Her quarter eyes inflated
to silver dollars.
The baby was God.

And she jumped in the air
whirled around, dove into the sofa
and buried her head under the cushion
which is the only proper response
to the Good News of the Incarnation.

– John Shea, The Hour of the Unexpected

Via Tale Spin (via Felix Hominum)

2008-12-30T00:13:00.001Z

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
Radio Scotland
Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

It’s those Christmas cards. They leave us with a series of still images in our heads. Our Lady and St Joseph on either side of a manger, the shepherds looking up into the sky, Wise men standing quietly at the door with gifts in their hands.

Hearing the story read, however, offers a very different perspective. Great changes are promised. Angels appear in the darkest bit of the night to shepherds and announce that the old order is being overturned. The universe is on the cusp of tremendous and wonderful change.

We know what the ‘old order’ is – it’s what we wake up to on Boxing Day - bills to pay - work piling up on our desk. The same damned thing. And the newspapers - filled once again with headlines of another continuance of the bloody conflict on the border of Israel and the Gaza strip. The world, it seems, didn’t change overnight. When is this novel departure announced by the angel going to take place?

People are constantly migrating in the Christmas story – hither and yon. It’s movement and not stasis – to Bethelem – towards the star – away from the sheep - into the town. No matter how much the new thing is God’s thing and is something that God is going to enact himself the human actors have to move in order to witness it and participate in it.

Peacemaking is rarely a case of sitting still and seeing what will happen. We know what will happen on its own. Peace in a poisonous office environment requires people moving together into each other’s proximity. Peace within a family requires time spent at each other’s tables – front doors being opened to people we’ve not been getting on with. All the glimmers of hope in the Middle East in past years have involved travel as well – old enemies greeting each other at the bottom of steps leading down from an aircraft.

We’ll file away those Christmas cards in the coming week. The invitation to make peace and to be active citizens of a new kingdom will remain.

2008-12-25T23:23:00.001Z

Merry Christmas

2008-12-22T08:48:00.002Z

Nine Lessons and Carols right out of the book. With a few added touches à la Penicuik. Lots of old friends. Quite a few small children sitting in a big lump with toys at the back and singing along when they knew the carol. Good participation from other denominations. A "happening", if you will.

The same service a little earlier in the day at St Mungo's West Linton. Informal and relaxed.

2008-12-21T07:26:00.000Z

2008-12-18T15:12:00.002Z

An interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury

John Humphrys' review of the interview afterwards

2008-12-14T15:00:00.001Z

The bass guitar at the birth of our Lord may be an addition by a later author. Nonetheless this morning's (admittedly early) Pageant was a great success with a good crowd and a lot of fun. Everyone got together for breakfast in the church hall at 9 am before the final rehearsal.

2008-12-11T16:58:00.001Z

A plug for the Cornerstone Bookstore

This will be announced on Sunday in our two congregations but I include it here as an extra:

On our "use it or lose it" list must certainly be the Cornerstone Bookstore under St John's Church at the West End of Princes Street. This is "our" bookstore. It offers a full range of gifts, books, christian music and worship resources. What they don't have they can order. Many of our parishioners have opted to shop elsewhere or online and some of you have actually never been there before and this seems a shame. Could you please try and visit next time you're downtown. There's also a cafe/restaurant next door to it so after having purchased a large quantity of books you can then have a nice quiche and a cup of tea and read them in peace.

the URL is HERE

or cut and paste this:

http://www.cornerstonebooks.org.uk/catalogue/index.php

and it includes some "choices of the month" which you might find interesting.

2008-12-04T07:30:00.000Z

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland
Radio Scotland
Thursday, December 4th, 2008

So how do we get to where we’re supposed to be?

My godson is a military policeman with British Forces in Iraq. He finishes his term of service close to Christmas and has a tiny window of opportunity to fly back to the UK and from there to his parents’ dinner table in British Columbia. There may be touch-and-go moments at airports but once Justin is strapped into his seat on the plane he can leave the navigating to the pilots.

Birds seem to find their way by navigating with the help of the stars. And there’s been a story this week of a new theory about how Scottish salmon manage to get from Greenland or Norway back to the exact bit of the Scottish stream where they were hatched. The theory suggests they have a map of the magnetic fields of the earth printed right into their circuits. Not overly clever creatures, salmon, but they know where they’re supposed to be heading.

We don’t all feel so connected to our origins or our final destination either. In December we feel the distance rather than the closeness – distance from other people – and distance from a familiar story of Love and Reconciliation – a star – a baby – a new beginning.

We’ve perhaps just accepted that. It’s the way our cookie has crumbled. But some of us would give our right arm to feel like we were home again - like we were somewhere on the way to understanding that Story –maybe for the first time.

People will come to Church this Christmas seemingly out of the blue. I was always taught that nobody shows up in Church by accident. We are all at the midpoint of some journey. Feeling some longing within us – our perceived distance from our destination we set out to discover our route. We too have a map imprinted deep within our circuits. Or as one African saint, Saint Augustine put it in his Confessions:

'You have made us for yourself, O Lord,
and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you'

2008-11-28T07:30:00.003Z

Thought for the Day
Radio Scotland
Good Morning Scotland
November 28th, 2008

An exhibit on the History of Pantomime opens tomorrow in Edinburgh. All those famous Dames and baddies from across the decades. While Grand-dad might get all nostalgic, the children would prefer you kept the yearly ritual going by dragging them off to a real live Panto this winter.

You’ll be surprised how they know the plot already and what’s supposed to happen next and how they fit into their role as audience like a hand in a glove They know how it’s supposed to work

At the end of the evening when they’ve been pacified and put to bed in spite of all the sugar coursing through their veins – when you’ve finally combed the last of the popcorn out of their hair and you’re alone with your cup of tea at the table you might secretly wish that the plots in life were not so fixed.

Conversion. Recovery. Repentance. Hope. These all involve a departure from what everybody expects.

“I’m going to stop drinking”
- Oh no you’re not!
I’m going to learn to trust the people I work with
- Look behind you!
This new American administration may change the way America is viewed in the world
- Oh no it won’t!
In spite of the financial crisis I’m going to try and make time for my family
- Oh no you won’t!

You can feel it, can’t you - the suspicion that everything must remain the same? The little producer sets his desk up out there in the seats during rehearsals and keeps yelling at you:
- Yo, Twankey, keep to the script, dammit”

But isn’t that why the people gathered on high ground to hear Jesus speak. Or why the Hebrews agreed, grudgingly or not, to leave Egypt and walk East through the desert to the promised land?

Because some day the script could be different.
Because the force of habit is not one of the laws of nature.
Its grip on us may not be legitimate.

Men and women can be better than they thought,

They can be freer
than they’ve been told
they are allowed to be.

2008-11-25T16:45:00.000Z

The Archbishop of Canterbury's reflections for Advent

2008-11-19T22:45:00.001Z

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland

Radio Scotland

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

When I was the port chaplain in Montreal I sat around with a Filipino crew who described the precautions they had had to take against pirates in the Straits of Malacca.

I’d thought pirates were a thing of the past.

Right now there is a standoff taking place on the East African coast where an immense oil tanker has been hijacked by Somali pirates. It’s being anchored off a coastal region which has now become dependent on piracy and its by-products. Houses are being built, children are being schooled and infrastructure developed based on one single industry – the seizing of valuable goods and the ransoming of the lives of seafarers.

Many of Jesus’ parables are stories about human need. An outmatched king is forced to negotiate with an opposing army. A poor widow loses a valuable coin. A man walks through a field and discovers a hidden treasure in the ground that is his for the seizing. Rich and poor – there’s something we need and for which we will expend tremendous energy to either gain it or retain it.

Any parable written about this act of piracy would doubtless link three needy groups of people: the seafarers, first of all, not knowing what will become of them in all of this. Then there are the ordinary people of poor and war-torn Somalia who had long watched the riches of the world passing in front of their shores just beyond their reach.

The third group of desperate people? That would be you and me. Much of the optimism of the last twenty years has been based on the idea that the world is one big market and that all our lives are bettered by global prosperity.

Well – it seems not to work that way. The rising tide hasn’t floated all ships. Quite naively we have paraded our wealth in the face of crushing poverty and then wonder why somebody would simply seize what comes within their grasp. This bit of history has reminded us how needy we are too and how fragile our way of life has become.

2008-10-19T17:24:00.001Z

A Sermon for Sunday
the 19th of October, 2008

Proper 24

Exodus 33:12-23
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
Matthew 22:15-22

Wouldn't it be grand if everybody wished you well.

It doesn’t always work out that way. The more we engage with life – the more we open our big mouths – the more we stand up and make ourselves counted the greater the possibility that we will develop a group of people around us who don’t fancy us in the least.

With some of them you can come to an understanding. You can keep out of each other’s way. Others are not so easily persuaded. They’d just as well see us take a dive and if it ended up that they were the ones who gave us a little push well then so be it. It’s like that in business. It’s like that on sports teams, clubs and associations. I wish it weren’t so but it can be like that in community organizations and churches as well. When I was the chief executive of a charitable organization in Montreal I developed a few foes on the board of directors. I remember my father patting me on the back and saying that I’d finally ‘arrived’. If you don’t have a few enemies, he said, you must be doing something wrong.

We are at a point in Jesus' ministry – in this morning’s Gospel reading – where opposition to his ministry has finally crystallized. He now has opponents and they are waiting for one wrong move on his part which will allow them to pounce. They continue to take part in discussions he is having with disciples and enquirers. They are there on the sidelines. Their questions are not designed to enlighten or inform. There is no genuine information being sought out. They are questions designed to trip Jesus up and embarrass him. We see such questions asked in political debates – questions which have passed through a committee before one candidate ever gets to ask them of the other. Questions designed to be unanswerable without cost. We see such aggressive questions asked in civil court as well. In this case the question is asked about the payment of taxes to the occupying Roman government. Is it permissible to pay taxes to your political and religious opponent and still remain faithful? In order to answer the question Jesus asks for a coin to be handed to him. Everybody waits for his answer – much will depend on his answering the question correctly.

I have such a coin at home – a silver denarius. It’s surprisingly small – smaller than a UK penny. My coin has the head of Trajan on it. The coin which Jesus was handed would likely have had the head of the Emperor Tiberius stamped on one side. Printed around the head would have been a few letters – abbreviations, really – which read “Tiberius Caesar – Son of the Divine Augustus”

And so Jesus is being asked here whether or not a piece of propaganda used to proclaim that Tiberius was the son, if not of God, then of 'a god' could be used by Jews, disciples, followers of Jesus or not followers of Jesus to pay their debts. A trap, certainly. What sort of trap is it?

Jesus has been proclaiming the imminent reign of God – the presence ahead of us, around us and within us of the Kingdom of God. It’s something which pious Jews had been expecting in the future but which Jesus proclaims as something which is already being revealed in tantalizing tidbits. It’s within us, or among us or around us but it is definitely present whenever and wherever Jesus is present. But Kingdom is a loaded word. Herod the Great initiated a massacre because of the rumour of a king being born in Bethlehem. When Pilate is asking Jesus whether or not he is a king he has a clipboard out with a piece of paper on it with a question and two little boxes – one of which should be ticked by the questioner: Does the accused claim to be a king – yes or no. At this point the Pharisees are losing patience with Jesus and their relationship with him has passed some sort of threshold a few chapters back. They are no longer his friends and are wanting to set up some situation where he will be either revealed to his own disciples and followers as a fraud or to the authorities as a risk. Much is at stake. Tax revolts were not unknown and the Roman response was swift and deadly.

If taxes can be paid to the emperor using a coin with the emperor’s head and a phrase denoting that the emperor is the son of God or at least the god Augustus then the religious life Jesus must be promoting is a privatised sort of thing which intersects only lightly with the real world. Believe in God and follow me, Jesus might be saying, but let life go on as it usually does. Jesus could then quite rightly be accused of trying to promote a hobby – something which let life go on largely as it did before and his positive answer to the Pharisees’ question – yes, everybody should pay taxes, even my disciples - would reveal this to be the case. Let’s see if he answers yes, say the opponents, and then we pounce.

But if he says no – my followers should not pay their taxes with a coin that declares the Emperor to be the son of God then he’s gone the whole hog with the idea of kingship. He’s like the radicals who have gone before and who have led the nation into disastrous conflict with Rome. His followers are members of a kingdom which is not part of the Roman Empire. Their allegiance belongs to God alone and to the Kingdom of his Christ and not to Tiberius Caesar. We can pass his name on to the relevant authorities. He can be arrested in the night as a tax rebel and a dangerous character. Either way we win. Either way he’s finished. We’ve got him

Jesus hands back the coin. Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, he says. Render unto God the things that are God’s.

It’s a trap cleverly avoided. But it’s not merely clever. Our children respond with clever phrases. I said I would do my homework but I didn’t say exactly which homework I would do and when. I said I would clean my room but I didn’t specifically mention the part of my room which is under my bed. Jesus is not merely being clever. He is not merely ‘dodging’ the question.

Jesus has always maintained that the Kingdom is like seed cast into a field. It is like yeast hidden inside a lump of dough. In like manner his followers are cast into the world – are part of village life – are part of the world’s life - unconformed to it but living within it. Eventually, to Pilate’s great frustration, Jesus will tell him that his Kingdom is not of this world. It is not Kingship as the world understands it – neither the authority of the reigning King or the rebellion of a pretender to the throne. Jesus wants no standards, no armies, no coins printed with his face. It is something other.

In this ‘other’ understanding Caesar’s coin will be returned to him to pay for roads and navies – returned freely as something owing him. You will pay your taxes though you are a follower of Jesus and a believer in God. And – in 2008 you will avoid the temptation to withdraw into the close confines of the sect. As Christianity may well have reached Great Britain in the person of Roman soldiers who were Christians so christians from your church will serve as elected councillors in local government. The Christian will wheel out his bins on a Tuesday morning shoulder to shoulder with the neighbour who is not part of the community of faith. We understand not only our responsibilities to the larger civic community around us we understood that it was intended that it be this way – that we be sent forth into the world to bring the message of God’s salvation into the marketplace, the school we attend, the workplace we frequent.

No clever dodge whatsoever on Jesus part but an explanation as much to the disciples as to his opponents that we are more than rebels. We are disciples.

2008-10-12T22:36:00.001Z

A Sermon for Sunday
October 12th, 2008

Proper 23

Exodus 32:1-14
Philippians 4:1-9
Matthew 22:1-14

What do the mice do when the cat’s away? “When the cat’s away the mice will play”. In the French version of the same saying it seems that the mice “dance”. You get the drift. They move the tables and chairs off the floor, put up streamers and turn the stereo on nice and loud. They can’t be trusted.

Any substitute teacher knows what will happen when he leaves a class and wanders down to the office with some paperwork. He can hear the voices begin to mount in the classroom as he takes the first steps away from the door and knows that he’s got only seconds before his class erupts in chaos. If he’s clever, he’ll time the day so that there are no gaps – one activity will follow the other like clicks on a metronome. Keep the children busy and you’ll keep the children happy.

Delay and you’ll only create a vacuum which nature itself or human nature abhors. William Golding’s novel ‘The Lord of the Flies’ shows how in the absence of order and structure new hierarchies will develop among children left to their own devices. We’ll always fill in the gaps. We’ll always make accommodations. We hate to wait.

In our story from the Book of Exodus, which we read this morning, Moses was off on a mountain speaking to God and the people of Israel were left alone. Moses was away. God seemed remote - an idea - a memory. There was absolutely nothing to hand. An agreed common history – brutal though it may have been – had slowly begun to redeem itself in the memory. Where were we, in Egypt? Slavery, yes – but was it so awful, after all? There was food, there was a place to sleep. And the future - what can we say about that? We’re told there’s a land somewhere out there. It’s where we’re going. It’s filled with milk and honey, don’t you know. Milk and honey? Here we are - barely able to find our way and we’re living in the shadow of a promise, an idea, a possibility – something which an invisible God said to a man who isn’t here today. He’s gone and we’re alone. Now there’s a gap which wants filled.

There’s a lot to be said for filling gaps. There’s a lot to be said for accommodating one’s self to reality. We do it all the time. Accepting something less than we once wanted might just be a sign of maturity. Taking stock of where you’re standing and squinting slightly until it begins to look better is one of the things that we find ourselves forced to do. Adapting. Accepting something less with a shrug. As my grandfather used to say: It may be an ugly dog but it’s my dog.

Accommodation. If you can’t accommodate you won’t stay married for long. If you can’t accommodate you’ll never find a church you’re happy to settle in. I know plenty of people who’ve don’t join a church as much as they camp in a series of churches for six months or a year. They’re looking for something grand and they end up with real people with real foibles and a pastor who’s merely human and a roof that leaks. They can’t do it - they refuse to accommodate and so they move on.

You wake up one morning next to the snoring tousled person you married and you reflect how this was not part of the daydream you had. Living with the reality of your marriage, your church, your work – living for that matter with the reality of who you are and have become – requires a degree of accommodation. You jostle your expectations a bit. You make do. You go to work anyway. This is your job. This is your husband – your wife. This is life. It may be an ugly dog but it’s my dog.

But are there limits? Yes I think there are. I think there are dreams, which we need to rediscover when we’ve accommodated too much. When we’ve accommodated ourselves endlessly to a life grown small and stunted. It’s possible to accommodate too much.

The people of Israel out there in the desert go about building their own god. They melt down their jewellery. They make a veal calf out of it and bow down to it. We might not understand that. It doesn’t have a lot of analogues in our own experience. It’s just a thing. It’s the same gold you could fill teeth with or make wedding rings. Like Isaiah says: a man takes a piece of wood and cuts it in two. With one half he builds a fire and warms himself. With the other half he makes for himself a god. Isaiah repeats the same thing three times in case we don’t understand. It’s just a thing. It’s no god.

We have appetites. We cling to groups of like-minded people. We scream at the other team. We are Scots, we are Canadians: we have political or national affiliations. We have preferences in music and art. We’re members of families. We live for our children, we live for our art. We buy lottery tickets. We worry about our health and try to keep ourselves fit. It may not be God but it’ll do in his absence.

There are a lot of things which feel like Grace and which feel like God.

Sometimes we know we’re following the wrong track – sometimes we don't. We may have wrapped ourselves up with the lives of our congregations – with their intrigues and the particular web of relationships and institutions. Churches have a life of their own. "We’re doing our part for the Kingdom of God", we say. There are only a few of us on the Vestry or the Session. Somebody needs to do this. But maybe we forget that our church points to something beyond itself. Beyond the actions and the hymns, beyond the execution of good liturgy, beyond the sermon and the young people’s group, there is the presence of God within and around us. Kneeling there at the altar rail, vulnerable and face to face with the reality of a God who loves us and nourishes us we might need to be reminded that none of these tasks and responsibilities is an end in itself but simply a means. That’s what it’s about. So take your place in the life of the church, fill your shoes as part of the property committee or the altar guild but don’t forget what stands above and beyond all that – remember the invisible reality which underpins all of that and don’t ever let the contingent things of life replace the Eternal things. We’ve accommodated too much – our boredom is showing - and it’s time we raised our sights. We need to look beyond the things that are to hand.

Anxiety and impatience: that’s what drove them to it out there in the desert with their Golden Calf. We live in an anxious and impatient age as well. The smouldering sense of dread is seeps out of our newscasts every evening. We’re meant to believe that this is an age where humans have outlived a personal God and have evolved beyond the revealed religion of earlier ages but what we see is tremendous hunger. We will go to great lengths to fill the gap with something – anything. Genuinely hunger for a relationship with a living God deserves to be satisfied. The tragedy out there in the desert occurred because the people would not wait and allowed something less than God to take his place.

Lift your eyes higher. Be hungry a little longer. Be satisfied with nothing less than the real thing which alone will satisfy.

2008-10-05T22:38:00.000Z

Sermon for Sunday the 5th of October

Exodus 20:1-4, 7-9, 12-20
Philippians 3:4b-14
Matthew 21:33-46

Krzysztof Kieslowski made a series of ten one-hour films for Polish television. The series was entitled simply ‘Dekalog’ and each episode took one of the Ten Commandments and told a story loosely based upon it.

In the episode ‘you shall not covet…’ two brothers inherit a valuable but incomplete stamp collection from their estranged father and become obsessed by both the wealth they have inherited and the fact that the missing stamps in the collection are owned by other people’

In the episode based on the commandment “you shall do no murder” – the brutality of a disadvantaged killer is contrasted with the cold efficiency of the state in its preparations to take his life on the gallows.

In the film ‘honour your father and mother’ a child’s relationship with her father becomes complex and muddled when she discovers that he is, in fact, not her biological father.

I can lend it to you if you’re interested and are over the age of 18.

One of the critics notes rather innocently, that viewers should not take the connections to each commandment to be literal but rather that they are used as a reflection upon the complex nature of moral decision making. 'Please take this as art' – he seems to be saying – 'and not reality – because this is complex and not simple'.

But – we want to cry out – Life is not simple! Moral decisions are made in complex relationships – rarely are things simple and clear-cut.

Complex and not simple: If we keep to the simplest reading of the ten commandments then we will admit that it possible to keep all ten of them.

I, for one, expect to end my years not having killed anybody – I regard that as a reasonable hope. I would expect my family and members of my congregation to be genuinely surprised and dismayed if it were ever revealed that I had committed murder.

Surely there is no necessity to stray from the marriage bed. People remain faithful to each other within the covenant of marriage quite regularly.

I would even go as far as to suggest that with a certain degree of childhood formation in both humility and generosity that it might be possible to fulfil the plainest personal meaning of not coveting your neighbour’s goods.

And I have met folks who do, in fact, say ‘Darn, Shucks, or Fiddle when they bang their thumb with the hammer.

And so, for example, when the rich young ruler announces with cheery self-assurance to Jesus that he has kept all these commandments from his youth we have no reason to suggest that he is either a lying toad or some rare breed of human. It is within the realm of reasonable discipline to keep the Ten Commandments in the simplest and most ordinary way that they can be read.

Now if you were really cheeky you might interject that we are not all equally advantaged when it comes to law keeping. Some of us have stronger drives than others and straying from the matrimonial bed is easier. Some of us were raised with very little and so coveting the goods of others is harder for us to avoid than it is for you who were raised with much. Some of us are quick-tempered or live in violent communities. Raising our hand against another man is not so great a stretch.

So what about that one over there on his donkey with a cheery face talking to Jesus: is he a law-keeper merely because his drives are low and his needs met?

But that’s sort of a side-line, isn’t it? We were saying that it is possible to end one’s life having kept the Ten Commandments.

When Jesus launches himself into his ministry after the death of John the Baptist he finds himself constantly bumping into the Pharisees. These were men who had taken up the challenge of teaching ordinary Jews how to keep the law and affirm their identity as God’s people. Not only Jews living in Jerusalem but as was more often the case living in the midst of Gentiles – in the homeland but also abroad – in Asia Minor or Egypt - ordinary Jews living complex lives and not simple ones. And the law they were to keep was not merely the Ten Commandments but the whole of the Levitical law as it governed food and marriage, work and religious observance.

But the Pharisees believed it could be done and they also treated this as a reasonable hope and intended to be successful in what they taught.

We’re used to thinking of the Pharisees as Jesus’ opponents but they were practical and often very popular teachers. It might have even seemed to them to that the failure of partnership between themselves and this new rabbi was a great tragedy. For their part they initially looked on Jesus as one of their own – a teacher of righteousness who was gathering disciples around him. They showed genuine interest and unfeigned offers of fellowship - though somewhat tinged with curiosity because of the sorts of people who Jesus was beginning to gather to himself.

Jesus will part company with the Pharisees on this point – taking both a greater and lesser emphasis on law keeping. The Sabbath was made for man – he says – and men and women can be healed on it. God desires the return of his people and God’s servants must maintain contact with lawbreakers. There will be no shunning of sinners but, rather, contact and engagement. And yet the commands of the law are even greater than we imagine.

If you could only see – Jesus tells his disciples – that murder is not merely doing another to death but is a part of the whole cycle of anger which we cannot and regularly do not avoid. Adultery is part of lust and exploitation. It begins in the heart and not the bedroom. Bearing false witness merely the promotion of an unwinnable point in the face of much evidence.

We might call it spin! We’d pay someone to do it on behalf of our company or our government.

Ultimately the law will tell me what sin is. The deeper I look the more I will find myself implicated and culpable. And I will come to recognize the violence that is within me when my anger boils over.

The law will tell me what sin is and I will begin to recognize that the half-truths I speak are covered by the heart of the commandment relating to false witness.

So what will I do? This is the question which is ultimately asked in plaintive tones by the disciples when Jesus gives them some home truths about the full weight of the commandment. 'Who then, can be saved', they ask.

In the long run I shall not ask for a certificate of my compliance from my Creator. I will not say that I have done all these things from my youth because I have not. I will not begin to pretend that I have fulfilled the demands of honesty which the law truly requires or that I have kept myself completely apart from the network of exploitation that is part of our world.

I shall not presume to have fulfilled the law’s demands.

I will do what the law of God and the judgement of God give me no alternative but to do which is to ask, ultimately, for grace and for mercy.

-------------------------------------

2008-07-14T15:24:00.001Z

Not just because he's Canadian!

......but because it's a really good thumbnail sketch of what takes place at the Lambeth Conference. Canadian Primate, Fred Hiltz

2008-07-08T10:42:00.001Z

Rowan's Sunday Sermon

The Archbishop of Canterbury's sermon which he preached at York Minster on Sunday can be found here.

2008-06-07T21:43:00.000Z

Matthew 9:9-13

A Sermon for the 4th Sunday after Pentecost

“There must be some mistake”,
the Pharisees thought,
“he’s started out on the wrong foot”
So they asked the disciples
“Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners”?

We will never know if the critics thought they were being polite
by asking the disciples instead of directing the question to Jesus himself
or whether they were being nasty and trying to undermine his support.

But the question is asked nonetheless

Why indeed? Why does a teacher of righteousness not seek out the righteous
- people he has a natural affinity with?

I have ministered in many small towns
– places where people have long memories.

I have heard young people
compared unflatteringly to their grandparents
in such a way as to suggest
that their behaviour
and their fortunes
were something quite predictable.

Coming into any settled community as a stranger
one is struck by how inter-related everybody is.

There they are at the village fete:
rich and poor,
clever and not-so,
powerful and powerless
respectable and less-so.

It’s like watching a machine
seeing all the parts inter-related
one part meshing with another.

Everyone has his place
we know who to love and who to hate
who the teams are.

We learn this from a young age
We’re sent out to school as small children
knowing who to avoid.

Even in our families we have our appointed places.
I’m the capable one.
My big brother is such a worry to our parents.
He’s aged them, he has.

Or I’m the failure of the family.
I have to work hard to get ahead.
I’m not as clever as my brother.
Everything he touches turns to gold.

When the minister or priest is called to a parish or a congregation
there is a tacit understanding (sometimes)
that he will reinforce what everybody already knows
about what’s right and wrong, what’s good and bad,
who is on one side of the line and who is not.

It’s all so simple.
Why indeed would a teacher of righteousness not seek out the righteous?
Why would a pastor not stand behind his core parishioners
when a dispute arises in the congregation?
Why would he not share the quite natural grief and disappointment of parents and grandparents and siblings
with respect to a child who has strayed from her appointed path?.

The Gospels as you know
tell the story about the Good News of God shown to the world in the man Jesus.

The Gospels record the effect he has
upon the lives of men and women who had pretty well decided for themselves
where they were going
or upon whom the judgement of society had been pretty solidly passed.
He has a term for these folks: He calls them the ‘Lost Sheep of the House of Israel”

And the part of the story which we’re reading this morning
the calling of St Matthew
is not set as it might have been later in the Gospel
in the great city of Jerusalem
where a man might go and lose himself in the crowd
but in one of the small towns of Galilee
where the eyes of all are immediately fixed
upon a stranger walking into the village square
and where everybody knows everybody else’s business.

And so the question must be asked at the outset by us
the readers and observers of this story
as well as by the local Pharisees:

What will he make of this town
this teacher of righteousness,
this prophet, this holy man?

Will he come to know what we already know but quicker?
Surely he won’t need to have watched the slow downfall of this man.
He’ll know him to be a rascal from the outset.
He won’t need to carefully mark down how this one tarts herself up for the fellows.
He’ll see that right away.

And he’ll reveal his superior insight by wanting to associate with gentler folk.
He’ll seek out the city fathers.
He’ll plant himself at the feet of the Pharisees
who are people, after all. of his own kidney and his natural allies.

But that’s not how it works out.

And so the story of the calling of Matthew the tax collector
somebody who in the popular mind had made himself a pariah
by standing against his own people and entering the employ of their oppressors
is not so much about Matthew’s decision to follow Jesus
as it is about the whole mechanism of Jesus’ ministry to the outcast
and his ability to bring into being what was fortold about him:
that valleys would be exalted.
Mountains and hills laid low.

And so Matthew leaving his tax table to follow Jesus
is part of the same tradition
where his colleague Zaccheus climbs a tree in order to see Jesus
and finds himself hosting Jesus at his own dinner table
while Nicodemus – a member of the Sanhedrin
must steal away in the dead of night to hear Jesus –

part of the same story in which the woman taken in adultery
sees her accusers turn away
and those who were about to stone her to death
drop their fist-size chunks and rock and wander away
leaving her alone with Jesus
while in another story the ‘rich young ruler’ rides away on his donkey.

When Jesus is ushered in to a stable situation fortunes appear to change.
People receive a gracious welcome they had not expected
and find themselves in the light once again.
Some who expected to have an automatic hearing
find they do not.

The Gospels as they are read, preached and proclaimed,
remain an agent for change.
We are on the receiving end of this story this morning.
Who are we?

As they are read, preached and proclaimed
the very same Jesus extends the same invitation
– this time to man and women sitting in Church in West Linton
or listening on their radios.

We could remain observers of a story
about nasty Pharisees and lucky St Matthew
were it not for the fact that the Jesus proclaimed and preached in the Gospel
is a living Lord who speaks to us.

And we are men and women who have settled in our minds
who we are
and who our neighbours are.

We can draw a map and place ourselves,
for better or worse,
in a particular place.

So where are you then?

Are you a lost sheep
and do you suffer under the cold gaze of your betters?
Have you even grown comfortable with the diagnosis
that it’s just the way you are –
that life has dealt you a few unfair blows
and you’re now too old to change?

That would be the better news.

Because you could assume yourself
to be Jesus’ first choice in dinner partners
and have, therefore, become part of the problem
and not part of the solution.

There has been no mistake.
Jesus is set about the raising up of valleys
and the bringing down of mountain ranges.

The comfort of remaining firm
in the knowledge we think we have about ourselves and other people
is cold comfort
and no new news.

He prepares a better place for us all
if we will stay and listen
and, ultimately, be changed.

2008-06-02T09:04:00.001Z

St Patrick's Breastplate
(sort of)

2008-06-01T09:18:00.002Z

Matthew 7:21-29

A Sermon for the 3rd Sunday after Pentecost

We all stop working when the bell rings.

Not the sharp little bell indicating that a client is at the counter looking for some attention. Not the bell that announces the end of the day or time for lunch but that constant droning bell designed by some bright person to be able to cut through background noise and cause us to straighten up and pay attention which indicates that the fire alarm has been pulled somewhere in the building.

A mistake? Possibly. A drill? Were we to expect one – was one announced? You look around the office and everybody has stopped work. There are a few weak smiles. Your colleagues shuffle their papers on the desk. It’s possibly nothing. But we are on the seventeenth floor. There’s a long way to go before we can leave the building.

When it is all right to alarm somebody? When your children are playing outside you’ll hear one of them cry out because they’ve fallen. They cry. It’s nothing, you say to yourself, and you just hope they don’t come in sniffling and requiring too much attention because you’re in the midst of a conversation. But there’s a different sort of cry which gets you up out of your chair. It’s the real thing. Somebody’s hurt.

The reading from Matthew’s Gospel this morning is alarming. It is intended to alarm. It’s not just a general call to vigilance. These words were meant to alarm particular people. They were not spoken, remembered and written down in order to alarm those who have never made a profession of Christian faith. They were not intended to provoke someone who’s never given the Gospel a second thought. So they are not a fairly aggressive evangelical thunderbolt aimed at those outside the Church (because, after all, words to the stranger on Jesus’ part are generally words of invitation). No – these words are directed to us – to people who may never have allowed the thought to pass through their heads that they might be on the wrong track.

We are, after all, members. We are card-carrying Christians.

What would it say on your card? Maybe you actually have a card. If I dug around long enough I’d find my card. I filled one out at an evangelical crusade some time back in the seventies. It had a space for your name and a space for you to write down the date and a prayer which you were supposed to say. I think I’m supposed to be able to recite the date – tell you which evening it was that I made a commitment to Jesus Christ but I can’t be that specific. Maybe you don’t have an actual card but if you did, what would it say? That you were born here – that these pews and that Sunday School room were home turf for you – that you were raised in a Christian home, that you attended this or that Church, were part of the Sunday School and the Youth Group. Maybe you were part of the Christian Union at College.

Now none of us are the sort of folks who believe that the book of life is just a collection of parish rolls from all around the world. We know more than that – there’s something which comes from the heart which is counted for more than our names on any piece of paper. We know that or we think we know that and so to supplement our sense of well being and ‘being at home’ in the Church we will recount the times that we have ‘felt’ something like God in the midst of our services or the times we have ‘resolved’ to be better Christians than we are. We can tell the story of our own lives and can underline the parts where we believed we drew near to God and He to us.

How safe is that story – safe in the sense of it being an accurate telling of men and women growing gradually closer to their Redeemer over the course of years?

After all – any story can be told in the best possible light. And we do have some investment in telling our own story like that. We belong. We reassure ourselves in moments of doubt that we belong.

The tale Jesus relates is that of two houses - one which is built upon rock and another which is built upon sand. It’s not a complicated image. We might be familiar with it as it was retold in the story of the Three Little Pigs.

I live in a frame house in Penicuik which was built on fairly inadequate foundations back in the late sixties. It’s a great little house – purpose-built as a rectory with the office and a large entrance allowing people to come and visit without dominating the whole place and which leaves the family adequate protected space to carry on their lives. But I’ve seen cracks in the wall which indicate to me that there is movement going on. I know that eventually these cracks will widen. This is not a rectory which will survive a hundred years. The choices made back in the late sixties about expenditures and construction costs will eventually come back and haunt us.

What can be done? Nothing much really – the place is nicely tarted up. Every time the place is painted the cracks have been plastered. That’ll do it for a few years. But they open again and show themselves. There is a problem.

Most church basements in Montreal see at least one twelve step group in the course of the week. Narcotics anonymous, Alcoholics anonymous – gamblers maybe. They shuffle in – from all walks of life – and they tell of the years in which they patched up the cracks in their walls until eventually the walls gave in. They will recount – sometimes quite dryly and dispassionately – the lengths to which they would try and convince themselves and others that they really had no problem at all – that every man has the right to a drink or two at the end of the day – that a few pounds spent on the horses really didn’t amount to anything – that other people consumed much more cocaine than they ever did and managed to hold down a job and stay out of the hospital. These lies eventually cost them jobs – it cost them their marriage – it pushed them into activity which may have ultimately cost them their liberty.

They may even count themselves the luckiest of people the wall came tumbling down because it was footed on a tissue of falsehood and that when it came tumbling down they found themselves owners of the only thing they had left and the greatest gift of all – time. Time to rebuild. Time to take stock and form an accurate assessment of their situation.. Time to make amends. Time to come to know their ‘Higher Power’.

When will we be honest? One thing that stands out in the Gospel is that Jesus does not abide fakery – will not remain silent as those who find themselves privileged proceed to tie heavy burdens upon those around them. He does not defer to the religious leaders of his day. He finds strength in people who others have given up on and he finds deceit and untruthfulness in people who ought to know better. “You are a teacher of Israel” he says to Nicodemus, “and you do not know these things” “Woe to you, Scribes and Pharisees” he calls out “blind guides”.

We could get agitated about this. The reading begins this morning with a word of doom

Depart from me you evil doers - I never knew you!

spoken to a group of people who claim to have done great things in Jesus’ name but who have not been formed by his words nor have they done what these words require – they have only ‘spoken them’. With these words men and women have felt special, honoured, included. With these words men and women have differentiated themselves from the others – from the great unwashed – they have forged identity – Christian identity – with words such as these. But the inside has not matched the outside. The truth has been kept secret – the lonely existence of men and women who should have been alarmed but weren’t has finally been revealed for what it is. A sham – a show. As with so many things – a good dose of bad news early enough can be the best thing that has happened to us and the one who faces us up to the mirror only feels like our enemy.

We have heard this story. It was written for us. It was designed to place within us a germ of self doubt – a pebble in our shoe. Faith is tried and proved in adversity. How do we do in adverse conditions? Love is tried and proved in those circumstances where love is required by somebody not overly loveable and may prove more difficult a commodity to find than we ever thought. How do we measure up in our gift of love to those around us?

And you have heard this Gospel story read, preached and proclaimed on the morning of June the first, 2008. It was remembered and written down for us – not merely to reflect on the fact that we are probably doomed but with adequate time on our hands this morning to reflect on whether the inside looks like the outside and whether the story we would tell about ourselves resembles in any way the true story of who we are.
------------------------------------------

The recording was made as part of New Every Morning - BBC Scotland's Sunday morning service and is used with their kind permission.

Follow this link to 'listen again' to New Every Morning or any of Radio Scotland's shows.

2008-05-27T13:49:00.000Z

Thought for Today

Good morning

News this last few days of a series of dramatic photographs from the polar region of the planet Mars. At one time Mars was simply a reddish disc which transited across the night sky - early photographs of the planet reveal a mottled red blob.

Not so these days. I have a photograph on my hard disk taken by one of the Rover land vehicles in 2005 of a Martian sunset behind a ridge of rock. It’s crystal clear. So clear, in fact that one could almost imagine a silhouetted figure leaning on a stick watching the sunset - perhaps with his faithful dog seated beside him – something of course which can never be since the atmosphere is primarily carbon dioxide and the planet spends most of its time clutched by temperatures which would make the South Pole look summery. We will continue to accrue accurate knowledge about and even more stunning photographs of a place where we can never live.

Jesus' parables are also glimpses into a world which seems unfamiliar to many of us. It's a place where you gain your life by losing it, where forgiving those who have wronged you makes sense and where worrying is a waste of time. It's a world where you do not need to fear those who can kill the body or nick all your stuff. Much of what we spend our life doing, or fretting over or being outraged about makes no sense in Jesus’ world – many of our desires and even our sense of justice and retribution would wither and be strangled in the atmosphere of the Kingdom of God.

And yet its alien logic is put forth as the key to tremendous courage in the midst of this life and gives rise to love and renewed purpose and happiness. The man (with or without his dog) can live in such a world - in fact he won't be truly happy and whole unless he does.

2008-05-25T19:50:00.000Z

Matthew 6:24-34

A Sermon for the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost

We’ve all known folks with a light touch on life – given to making major changes in the midst of life, not overly careful with their money, spontaneous and maybe a big glib. They can be grouped into two categories – those we felt were foolish and irresponsible and those we have admired and who completely amaze us.

In the first group are all the mad children we ever knew. The ones who went off to Europe with their boyfriends at a scandalously young age – the ones who used the entire inheritance their grandparents had left them to invest in something which was not a sure thing – most of the class clowns we went to school with who would open their mouths and say the most outrageous things and who didn’t seem to care who was listening or what their permanent records would look like at the end of their education.

Someone – we might have thought – should sit that person down and give them a few home truths – let them know the importance of building up credits for themselves – both personal and financial. A bad credit reference – well that can follow you for years – as can a bad reputation. Living for today will not see you through until tomorrow. There’s that little fable about the grasshopper and the ants - it might do them a world of good.

“Is not life more than food” says Jesus.

"Yes", we might reply, "but when you are hungry everything looks like food".

We will always be able to find counter-examples – sufficient in number to defy anybody who would take this passage from Matthew’s Gospel and these words of Jesus as promoting carelessness in personal life or denial about the reality of poverty or hunger.

We said at the outset that there were two groups of people with a light touch on life. The first group leave us thinking how thankful we are not to have ruined our lives through indiscipline, laziness, carelessness and irresponsibility. The other folks, however, are the graceful ones. They leave us wondering whether we’ve missed the point somewhere along the line. When we think of them we look in the mirror and feel suddenly very old and frightened.

They did something very well. They were bold – they took risks in order to do it and they seemed to do it without effort – gracefully. An opportunity arose and there was simply no question. It was the right time and they found themselves in the right place and they seized it. Surely they must have had occasion to wonder whether there was a safer option. Surely they sweated for a moment or two. They must have stopped at the top of the cliff before diving into the water and marvelled at the distance they would need to dive before they hit the water. They must have stopped to think that they were risking rather a lot and stepping out beyond the known into uncharted territory.

The first group would have done well to worry a little more. We are not unhappy in having been that little bit more careful and having established our trajectory and the credits we needed. But we – at least some of us anyway – have a deep rooted suspicion that there is no point at which we could stop being so careful. There’s no sign post on the road that says ‘you’ve been careful long enough”. “Stop now”. Now is the time to kick over the traces and gain for yourself a sense of adventure. “Take a few risks here before the next bend”. It’s not as if we’re alone. Everybody wants to play safe these days. I don’t need to tell you how full the newpapers are of good advice on safety and security. There are plenty of doomsayers: our lawyer or insurance agent would advise against anything untoward.. There is no governance board which will ever advise a chief executive to stop compressing and economising. That’s the problem. Playing safe becomes such a habit. It goes on for ever – and ever – unless a decision is made to stop.

When Jesus travelled through the communities of Galilee in the early part of the Gospel account he entered these communities as complete and pure opportunity. Opportunity. His words were words of invitation – words which attracted some and repelled others. One is taken and another is left. One rises from the boat and follows. Another gets back on his donkey and rides away because the risks are too great.

Opportunities. We’ve had ‘em. We think of the paths we have not taken – the forgiveness we have not granted because the risk of being hurt and compromised all over again was too great. The love we did not discover because the risks to our independence seemed too severe. The truth we did not speak because it might have alarmed the stockholders and driven down the share prices.

Reasons to worry don’t go away. Not when we’ve made a habit of hedging our bets. . If you’re looking for reasons to be prudent, or, as T.S. Eliot put it to ‘measure out your lives in coffee spoons’ those reasons can always be found.

It’s a wonderful word – worry. Our fears are given to us as part of our animal equipment – part of the natural man. They keep us at a distance from large predators, they equip us to differentiate between friend and foe. They spur us on to fill our larders before the first snow falls. We worry for a reason – there is much worth worrying about. Apart from its habitual use to describe the sort of anxious fretting we engage in at the prospect of some dimly perceived future it also describes what my Labrador retriever Clio does to one of her stuffed dog toys. She sits in the corner and chews it – she worries it until it is nothing but a pile of threads and polyester fluff.

We can worry ourselves like that. We can worry ourselves sick. We worry about real things and we worry about rubbish. We worry ourselves small, we worry ourselves into corners, we worry ourselves out of community – we sorry ourselves away from opportunities – away from love – away from value.

Membership in the Kingdom of God, which draws near every time Jesus draws near, requires the response of free men and women..

2008-03-31T17:24:00.000Z

Thanks to Scott Gunn for this

2008-03-31T14:15:00.004Z

A nice day in Penicuik. We haven't had overly many of these and one takes advantage of the very moment the sun is out because it won't be in an hour or so.

2008-03-30T20:04:00.004Z

There was something about the Richardsons

that marked them out as readers of the Good News Bible

Stolen from Fr Kenny in Dumbarton

2008-03-28T17:03:00.000Z

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
Radio Scotland
Friday, March 28th, 2008

Good morning

"Why are you looking for the living among the dead?"

That’s the question the two angels asked the women who came to the tomb to anoint the body of Jesus? It changed their world even though (or maybe because) the question is not easily answered. There’s no box to tick, no first, second and third choice. The question is meant to excite and provoke – to change what we think we know about life and death and the world and usher us beyond our disappointment and beyond the small world we inhabit.

In 1995 the Quebec nationalists were exhausted and embittered after their loss in the second of Quebec’s two referendums by the smallest of margins. Everybody limped home. The leader of the day promised the populace that he wouldn’t hold another one until he was sure he would win. Until there were, as he said, ‘winning conditions’. You can’t always predict winning conditions so you want to go into a referendum with the right question. If a referendum ever goes ahead here we in Scotland can expect a lot of discussion about what sort of question should be asked. Unionists will want a tough question that makes independence look like a jump from a very tall building onto broken glass and snakes. Their opponents will want a question that makes independence sound like it has few risks or consequences.

When the questions are proposed by either side they’ll have been created with a marketer’s professional skill – to be the sort of questions which ordinary voters will vote on with predictable results – because that’s just the way we are – that’s just the way we are inclined.

Forgive me if I stay a while longer in the glow of the Easter candle where angels and even the risen Christ himself asked folks like me the sorts of questions which push them beyond the particular street they were already inclined to be walking down.

2008-03-26T18:33:00.001Z

No question but that we remember things better when we sing them.

2008-03-12T00:09:00.005Z

Thought for the Day
Good Morning Scotland
Radio Scotland
Wednesday, March 12th, 2008

Good morning.

The former Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith is proposing that an oath taken to her Majesty the Queen by high school students would deepen the sense of 'Britishness' and the degree of social cohesion in the country.

I'm a Canadian. I'm not Scottish and not English.

But I started every school assembly as a boy singing God save the Queen. When I was ordained a deacon and then a priest in the Anglican Church of Canada I signed an oath of loyalty to the Queen. When I received my Commission as an officer in the Canadian Grenadier Guards I signed a similar oath of loyalty.

I've taken more oaths to the Queen that most of you have - oaths which made us feel very......Canadian.

But most importantly - and this is my point - they made us feel as though we belonged to something greater than we were alone - they joined us to Jamaica and New Zealand and the rest of the Commonwealth.

When the Commonwealth Games came to my home town we cheered all the competitors - especially those from small countries or particularly poor or troubled nations whose membership in the Commonwealth tightened their links with the larger world.

I have other even greater loyalties as well. I am a Christian. I belong to a Church which is, itself, a part of Christ's Holy Catholic Church and so I am a brother to people around the world who gather around tables or altars on Sunday morning and celebrate Holy Communion. People whose language I may never learn and whose country I may never visit. I am also a human being. My connection to the complete stranger who may live in the same city as I do – my committed curiosity about his life, his religion and his well-being is something which should be valued.

If the taking of such an oath in this country were to drive us inward - in upon ourselves - knit us to a particular clan, to a particular piece of real estate floating off the west coast of Europe then nuts to such oaths.

Our oaths should carry us beyond our selves and make us bigger than we are alone.

2008-03-09T22:13:00.003Z

Palm Crosses

It's coming up to that time of year again. This Saturday morning at 10:00 we're gathering in the Hall at St James to make Palm Crosses for St J's and St Mungo's. There are several ways of making them and everybody swears by their own method. Each year we gather and the first thing we have to do is remember how we did them last year. Some of the methods involve a single piece of palm. We don't do it that way - we use two.

We use two because, erm, of the two natures of Christ - the divine and the human.

We use two pieces of palm because *thinking.....* of the two Gospel Sacraments - Baptism and Holy Communion.

No? Okay, we use two because that's how Frances McLean taught us a few years back and we're Anglicans and when we find something that works we stick with it like tar to an old boot.

So, in anticipation of Saturday's get-together to make palm crosses, I post here the a pictorial guide on the web which illustrated the way we do it. I post it simply as an aide-memoire for myself so I don't look like an utter pillock on Saturday morning.

2008-03-07T14:22:00.006Z

I'm not sure why we have a picture of St Thomas Aquinas as a large part of the stained glass window at St Mungo's Church in West Linton but we do and it stands out. Today is the Feast Day of St Thomas Aquinas and I didn't think it should go unmentioned.

Saint Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274), Doctor of the Church, Priest, Friar, Poet (brief biography)

Eternal God,

who enriched your Church

with the learning and holiness

of your servant Thomas Aquinas:

give to all who seek you

a humble mind and a pure heart

that they may know your Son Jesus Christ

as the way, the truth and the life;

who is alive and reigns with you,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, now and for ever.

Amen

For the Epistle: Wisdom 7:7-14

The Gospel: St Matthew 13:47-52

2008-03-07T00:55:00.000Z

Each of us has a name

2008-03-05T22:09:00.002Z

The University of Edinburgh Gifford Lectures

"Because it was he, because it was I" - Friendship and its place in life

Alexander Nehamas from Princeton University

10, 11, 13, 17, 18, 20 of March

all lectures begin at 5:30 pm

Playfair Library, Old College, South Bridge, Edinburgh

more details and a lectures abstract available here

2008-03-05T21:48:00.002Z

Derek Olsen has an article on Episcopal Cafe about a near brush with death during Lent.

2008-03-04T11:13:00.001Z

The Coming

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look, he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, a river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.

On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The Sky. Many people
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.

~R.S. Thomas (1972)

2008-03-04T10:59:00.004Z

This month's Rector's Letter from Outreach

You rarely see pure colours in nature. The colour of the sea on a sunny day or the brilliant hue of a bird’s breast - look closer and there’ll be a fleck of this or that mixed in – the patch of bright yellow turns out to be more gold. The blue is more greeny than it should be. The same applies to shapes – there's a dearth of Platonic solids out there in the forest – not very many perfect cubes or octahedrons - although a few bits of pollen come close.

Where exactly do perfect forms, colours and measures exist? Will we see them when we die? Will heaven be filled with perfect forms, colours and musical notes? We know they exist within the minds of the people who’ve worked out the mathematics of what a perfect form would have to look like.

When I was a child my teachers told me about a room somewhere in Canada’s capital city of Ottawa where the government kept a lump of lead which weighed exactly one standard Imperial pound and it was kept there, locked away, so that it could be compared with what the grocer was pretending was a pound of whatever product he was selling. I remember wondering if a queue of shoppers could appear in front of the locked door in Ottawa holding bags of what they believed were deficient amounts of sliced chicken breast. Probably not. They wouldn’t want the Standard Pound to get greasy but the idea was the same. There was out there somewhere – a perfect measure by which normal daily measures could be judged.

There’s a little church just north of Montreal which has the Ten Commandments painted in large black letters on the east wall of the Nave – five a side on either side of the opening to the Sanctuary. Anybody committing adultery or coveting in that congregation finds themselves reminded weekly of what they’re doing. They won’t be able to say they didn’t know. We could possibly identify a parent, grandparent or mentor whose opinion on matters had sufficient gravity that it has never quite left us – we still find ourselves in the full flower of our maturity being judged by that standard. Their voice still echoes in our head.

The yearly Lenten exercise! It could be a time when we parade out the sickly little budgerigar of our own life and place it next to an idealized statue of the American Eagle and wonder how we will ever make the one look like the other. We suspect we won’t and so we choose some small portion of the task and work on it. We quit smoking. Or we despair ahead of time and think of something else. Or we find ourselves negatively affected by the deficiencies we perceive there. We get gloomy.

The Pharisees were quite positive about the ability of men and women to fulfil the Law’s demands. There were exercises you could do – a program you could sign up to. They had earned the respect of many for this sort of ‘practical’ approach to the problem of how an ordinary Jew could live righteously in Rome or Corinth or Jerusalem. These same Pharisees had rather hoped that Jesus would be their ally. Any number of individuals approached Jesus with an admirable frankness asking more or less the same thing of him that they would have asked of the Pharisees. What must I do to be saved and is what I’m doing more or less the right thing to do? Could you tell me the secret – can I sign up to the program?

Jesus’ response, rather than finding a way of making an end-run around the Law or easing the way to fulfilling it is to sharpen the offense: you’ve not avoided adultery if you have a lustful thought about the woman who runs the Tavern on the corner. You’ve not avoided murder if you’ve said in your heart ‘What an eedjit our Rector is’. As a strategy for winning adherents among those genuinely interested in making a success of law-keeping it was hardly a success. One must conclude that there is a process of heightening anxiety rather than lessening it.

The existence of perfect forms, laws and measures serves two purposes. It shows us what a kilogram should weigh but it judges all earthly kilograms. If you think you’ve got a perfect kilogram of halibut from the fishmonger just get yourself a more accurate scale and you’ll find you haven’t. If you think you’ve avoided murder, just look to your rages or your ability to gossip and you’ll find you haven’t. The Law functions to remind us that we are failures and that we haven’t been able do what its precepts command. Among those of us who are not prepared to give up it provokes us to ask for help, salvation, deliverance, support and love in spite of who we have proven to be at the end of a long process of weighing and measuring. So we stand there in the midst of life, or at the end of our lives, saying simply – “Lord, I have not measured up”.

The life of faith of Christian people is lived in the light of God for whom the revealing of Law was not the high point of the story. The high point of the story came in joining himself to our humanity and suffering for us – even in our stead. Jesus is clear in saying that he comes to save the lost and that the “lost sheep of the house of Israel” are those who know they are lost. The quickest way to find yourself heading away from Jesus on your donkey is to begin to list the ways in which you have done what the Law requires. You don’t have the right scale – that’s all. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find something else in your character.

It falls to Saint Paul to flesh it out further. He does so by reminding his readers of what Abraham accomplished. What Abraham accomplished, in the days before there was a Law was ‘belief’. According to Paul, Abraham’s “faith was reckoned to him as righteousness”. And didn’t we know, he says, that this was exactly what Jesus was telling us?

This is what we will be able to say on the day we stand in front of his throne: Our study of Tetrahedrons has simply shown us that our pyramid is lop-sided. We played middle C on the piano and realized we were singing out of key. We came to realize just how angry a person we had become in middle-age and that when we turn around quickly we realize that our adult children are constantly rolling their eyes. We regret the myriad ways we have poisoned our lives and the lives of other by these shortcomings. But we have come to know as well is that God knew this already and that it was to bring ordinary and sinful people like ourselves back into community with him that he sent his son.

And so we ask for help – in doing what we cannot do ourselves.

2008-02-29T09:51:00.003Z

The recent 'Wedding Show' at the SECC in Glasgow has the participation (I gather for the very first time) of the Scottish Episcopal Church. It was somebody's good idea. No doubt next year there will be stalls manned by representatives of other denominations but it was our idea first. Our own Ruth Innes from Portobello was there, as was the Communications Officer for the SEC. It was Kelvin Holdsworth, however, the Provost of the Cathedral in Glasgow who really got himself involved.

Every company needs its captain. Every platoon needs its point man. It's a tough job and he acquitted himself admirably. Let nobody think that clergy who go off to conferences are just having fun. We may not be in our office but we're all hard at work in the fields of the Lord.

2008-02-26T17:13:00.001Z

Canadian Sermon Types

Pastor Neil Young (what else!) who is the minister at Erindale United Church came up with these various styles of sermon common in the Greatest Nation on Earth. Thanks to the blog Out of Ur for these:

The Maple Syrup: Boils source material down to about 1/50th its starting volume.

The Mountie: When it's most dressed-up, it doesn't arrest anybody.

The Igloo: Goes 'round and 'round until a final capstone is dropped in.

The Curling: Kind of incomprehensible, but everybody seems to have a good time.

The Lacrosse: Fast, hard-hitting, and it's hard to see the points as they're made.

The Hockey Fight: Staggers unsteadily, swinging wildly, but lands a punch or two.

The Canadian: Overly apologetic.

The Snowmobile: Loud and a bit obnoxious, but takes you places you otherwise wouldn't go.

The Beaver: Dams everything in sight.

The Maple Leaf: Has 11 points; always ends up falling to the ground.

2008-02-20T15:17:00.000Z

A Lenten Exercise for Progressive Clergy

2008-02-17T17:38:00.004Z

So how is the date of Easter established?

Taken from the Wikipedia entry for 'Computus'

Easter Day is the first Sunday after the 14th day of the lunar month (the nominal full moon) that falls on or after 21 March (nominally the day of the vernal equinox). For determining the feast, Christian churches settled on a method to define a reckoned "ecclesiastical" full moon, rather than observations of the true Moon as the Jews did at the time. Eastern Orthodox Christians calculate the fixed date of 21 March according to the Julian Calendar rather than the modern Gregorian Calendar, and observe the additional rule that Easter may not precede or coincide with the first day of the Jewish Passover.

Any clearer? No? More of the same here, then. Fill your boots!

2008-02-14T17:56:00.000Z

What happens when we step back from the daily grind?
Think Lent - think Sabbath!

2008-02-11T09:30:00.000Z

Andrew Brown has translated a chapter of a novel by the Swedish writer Tove Jansson which seemed very appropriate and very Lenten and which I recommend to you. It's to be found here.

2008-02-10T12:45:00.001Z

40

Found this during Lent last year. Thought I'd repost it. The comics are by a cartoonist named Simon Smith. Music by Joseph Arthur.

2008-02-10T12:41:00.000Z

I hope that before taking the any editorialists at his word about what the ABC actually said, you will take the time to read the speech and then the interview.

If you'd like to read what I think is a very balanced and reasonable report on the controversy you might do well to read this article by Simon Barrow in Ekklesia.

In what amounts to a rather sad indictiment of 'truth telling' Andrew Brown in yesterday's Guardian tries to give Rowan Williams a few 'home truths':

The archbishop may despise the media and we are often despicable. But we are the only instrument with which a sculptor of public opinion can work and the moment he decided to go on the World at One he put himself in our hands and should have known what would happen. It's no use being an elitist if you don't understand the constraints under which an elite must operate.

To put the matter at its simplest, there are certain things which may very well be true, and urgent and important, but which no archbishop can possibly say.

This will not go away overnight, I fear.

2008-02-06T13:51:00.000Z

Some of the Scottish Episcopal Bloggers have gotten together and put together a Lenten Blog called Beauty from Chaos. Take a look when you've got time. Kimberly Bohan, Rector of Dunoon, is the organizing force behind this blog which goes online today.

2008-02-05T21:13:00.000Z

Lent in Penicuik and West Linton

February 6th - Ash Wednesday
A service of Holy Communion
with Imposition of Ashes

Saint Mungo’s Church (undercroft) 10:30 a.m.
Saint James the Less 7:30 p.m.

* * * * *
Wednesday Evenings at the Church of St James the Less

Saint Paul On His Travels

By land or by sea, Saint Paul did an immense amount of traveling - He established churches and supported churches established through the ministry of others. His preaching of the Gospel as well as his words of encouragement or rebuke were given at the end of long voyages using the means of travel available to a man of his age. We will examine the nature of those travels. Begins on the 13th of February and continues for 5 weeks.

7:00 Soup and Cheese Supper
7:30 Lenten Study

* * * * *
Thursday evenings at St Mungo’s Episcopal Church, West Linton

- A dramatic group reading of ‘Everyman’ – a 15th century ‘mystery play’ dealing with sin and redemption – 2 sessions. Funny voices and dress-up box (optional). Begins on the 14th of February and continues for 5 weeks.

- A guided reading of ‘The great Divorce’ by C.S. Lewis – 3 sessions

Please bring a bring a relatively up-to-date translation of the Bible and a notebook with you to all sessions.

2008-02-05T14:15:00.000Z

Acts of Faith II

Padre Mickey down in Panama has a very good article (not sure whether it was written by him or by somebody else) on the Martyrs of Japan. Their feast day is today.

2008-02-05T13:59:00.001Z

Acts of Faith I

A longish article worth reading about the sinking of the Dorchester in WWII and the four chaplains who were aboard. Thanks to T19 for the reference.

2008-02-01T14:26:00.000Z

A particularly good cartoon by Dave Walker this week on absenteeism (from Church). You might click on the cartoon to get a slightly larger and more legible version.

2008-01-16T14:06:00.000Z

Thought for the Day

Good Morning Scotland

Radio Scotland

Wednesday, January 16 2008

Good Morning

I was sitting in a small boat, ten days ago, in a mangrove swamp in Senegal in West Africa looking at another traveler from Scotland enjoying the fine weather. It was an Osprey - many Scottish Ospreys spend the winter in those mangrove swamps - fishing in the inlets and creeks which make up that part of the world.

They wouldn't survive if they couldn't move around and follow their food. God gives to such creatures the world and all its treasures. Human borders mean very little.

There's no counter where a Scottish Osprey gets his passport stamped.. Nobody tells him he must return to Scotland or that snow and sleet in January are merely his lot in life. Nobody calls him an economic migrant or proclaims that Senegalese fish are for Senegalese birds.

As it is with animals so it has been with people. Our language bears witness to the waves of migrants and invaders who arrived on this island. The passes through the Alps, the ports of the Med have seen communities of men and women escaping wars, feuds, famine and poverty. The Scots among my ancestors came to Canada simply because they were young and bored and the grass was greener on the other side.

Monday saw the announcement of further tightening of our borders – new procedures for "holding newcomers to account". We are told that "the public wants tighter borders". Okay. Well and fine – such controls are necessary in order to maintain a certain level of order and structure within a modern western society.

But don't forget that the movement of people across great spaces and the conflicts which ensue from this are the rule in world history and not the exception. The early heroes of the Old Testament were nomads. The Christmas story itself is filled with movement, exile and the abiding presence of God leading and providing for the traveler.

Remember this, and there could be perhaps more tenderness and understanding - less fear and loathing.

Good news for Mike and David

2007-11-12T09:24:00.000Z

Church music does in fact lead to new and exciting careers in pop music videos. Anthony Rozankovic was our organist at the Advent in Montreal a number of years ago. He and I collaborated on a few pop songs once upon a time. His career seems to be picking up!

2007-10-10T08:49:00.000Z

Beeslack Woods Litter Cleanup

Passed to me by Chris Leavy. Beeslack Woods Cleanup! Saturday the 27th of October from 9:30 am until 12:30 pm. Meet in the Community Lounge at Beeslack High School. I participated in the last cleanup. I shall try and make this one too.

Appropriate clothing, wellie boots and work gloves are a good idea.

Contact Delia Stewart
01968 678060

2007-10-05T10:45:00.000Z

Yesterday (October 4th) was the Feast day of St Francis of Assisi. The painting above is Caravaggio's representation of the Ecstasy of St Francis. A relatively brief but informative blurb on Francis' life can be found HERE.

2007-10-04T12:37:00.001Z

2007-10-02T09:55:00.000Z

There are only three nuns left in the Santa Clara Convent in Bari. They've been there a while - none of them is exactly a spring chicken. It appears, however, that a fist-fight has broken out and that two of the nuns have been moved to other premises leaving one die-hard sister barricaded inside the convent.

Pity the poor Archbishop, who has been given the task of figuring out what to do with a spacious covent containing exactly one angry nun. He has apparently written the Vatican asking for permission to close the convent. The aforementioned nun does not concur. She's refusing to budge. The article ends with a final complication to the Archdiocese's negotiations with the embattled sister

...since she is devoted to her vow of silence it is not that easy to reason with her.

2007-10-01T09:19:00.000Z

My friend John Beach, that most excellent of Episcopal priests serving (with his lady wife Denise) as Rector of Emmanuel Church in Geneva, Switzerland (part of the American Convocation of Churches in Europe) has written a letter to his friends about a man named Hiram Bingham. John's letter is reprinted here with permission.

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Dear ones,

Denise and I were at a conference in Nice last weekend and were struck by the beauty and soothing climate. After the conference, we attended the Chagall museum and were moved by the paintings of this French Jewish painter. It was in this museum, that I came upon the story of Hiram Bingham (for his biography you can look at his Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiram_Bingham_IV).

Be certain to read about Hiram Bingham the IV, for there is a long line of impressive Hiram Binghams.

Anxious to limit immigration to the United States and to maintain good relations with the Vichy government, the State Department actively discouraged diplomats from helping refugees. Bingham disobeyed his directives and issued between 2-3,000 visas over the course of the next year. Many of these were hidden in the American Episcopal church in Nice before they could be given transport.

When his superiors discovered what he had been doing, he was immediately fired. His family, however, was very influential, so he was given another post in Buenos Aires (then considered a hardship post) during which time he was instrumental in locating Nazi war criminals after the war. The state department become so fed up with his insubordination that he was fired from this position and moved to Salem, Connecticut where he disappeared into obscurity (I am told that Salem, Connecticut is an excellent place to disappear into obscurity). He arrived in the U.S. at age 44, and was never able to get a job for the rest of his life.

He tried several attempts to start small businesses, all of which failed. He died in Salem in 1988.

No one in Salem (not even his own children) were aware of his heroism until they were contacted by the Holocaust museum 5 years ago who wanted to commemorate Bingham. His own children were astonished when, over the course of 2001-2002 several memorials and a postage stamp were issued in his name.

Among the many people given visa, was Marc Chagall who was able to spend the war years in the U.S. Upon his return to Nice, he painted a series of oils paintings depicting the Exodus. I spent an hour looking at one in particular the Chagall museum on Monday. It shows the sinister forces in dark grey tones representing the Egyptian army chasing the Jews towards the Red Sea. One of can make out one person in the grey mass who is a bit separated from the rest, who has a yellow foot (the only bit of color on that part of the canvas). There is an ancient Midrash which states that the son of Pharaoh continued to think of Moses has a brother, so that his heart would not allow him to join in the genocide. The yellow foot was meant to represent the son of Pharaoh. It was also meant to represent Hiram Bingham. Chagall wrote in a letter found in Bingham’s attic where his confused children sought for documents for the holocaust museum. In it he stated that even in the hearts of those who are the beneficiaries of cruelty and injustice, a shred of human decency emerges and we can see that the darkness is not completely dark.

He referred to Bingham as a “bureaucrat par excellence”.

I spent a good while meditating on that yellow foot.

Love
John

2007-09-29T13:38:00.001Z

The Feast of St Michael and All Angels

Today is the Feast of St Michael and All Angels. Padre Mickey from Panama has a really good page on St Michael the Archangel with lots of general information about St Michael and his Feast Day.

He also includes a Poem to St Michael in the 'celtric tradition' which he's found somewhere.