On Monday I was with a friend and we had just set off to go out for her birthday lunch from her house. We stopped at the top of her road, ready turn right so we could turn around in the side road and head back the other way. My friend was waiting patiently as a man with a dog slowly crossed the side road. The man got to the other side. As I thought we were going to turn I heard a noise; the distinct sound of a motor vehicle's engine running. It got louder and louder and louder. The seconds went slowly, and my immediate thought was "there must be a motorbike and it's being stupid and is going to go round us before we turn". I trust my friend who is a great driver (I am a nervous passenger so it takes me a lot to say that) and knew she'd wait as the motorbike went past. However, the next thing I knew was that the 'motorbike' didn't go past, and instead, because of the swift and effective actions of my friend who had seen the approaching vehicle in her wing mirror, we ended up in the (very helpful) hedge. And as I looked around at her, and then looked where she was looking, I saw a huge tractor with a trailer full of earth that was facing into the side road with the wheel half off. I don't remember the impact where the tractor hit our backside, and I was surprised to be in the hedge, but I do remember that sound that I swore was a motorbike....
I heard what I wanted to hear. I have never expected to be shunted by a tractor, but I have had motorbikes overtake me. I never expected a tractor to get so close I could hear the workings of the engine as it arrived not far from where I was sitting in the passenger seat, so my instinct was to believe in what I thought was possible. I heard what I wanted to hear, and sadly, for my friend's car, it was not what it was. My friend and I are OK (a narrow escape). The car is no more. The tractor owner fixed the tractor at the roadside and later drove home. The motorbike was always and only in my head. How many times do we do that? Do we hear what we want to hear, because the consequences of it being what it actually is might leave us sitting in a metaphorical ditch with our bonnet in the hedge. How often do we only hear what we expect to hear and miss what is actually coming our way? My choir MD sometimes will say "sing what you hear, not what you think you hear". Expect the tractor, not the motorbike perhaps. If we go through life only expecting to hear what we think we know is right we will miss so much. We find ourselves in a bubble where the only truth we hear is one that is comfortable to our own bubbly existence. We get angry when anybody suggests that our bubble might not contain all of the answers we might like to think it does, and as we hear only the voices we want to hear we continue onwards with blinkers that miss the real picture. As we continue to battle at the moment with what is true and what is fake, then it is so easy for our ears to get muffled by our self made limitations that we fail to look beyond personal experience to see that what we need to hear is not necessarily what we think we hear. I don't need a hearing test, as one friend suggested when I said I thought it was a motorbike, but perhaps I do need to expect more (although I'm trying not to expect that a tractor will ever crash into me again). Perhaps I need to expect more as I listen out for God's voice. Perhaps we all need to expect more. We won't see or hear what God is doing in the world if our expectations are limited by our own bubble. What can be true will become a smaller subset of truth if we are not open to being challenged. Sing what you hear, not what you think you hear. Search out and believe in actual truth, not what you would hope the truth would be. Expect beyond your experience - because what you think is small could be something far bigger. Try not to get hit by a tractor. "This is what the Lord says, he who made the earth, the Lord who formed it and established it - the Lord is his name: Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know." Jeremiah 33:2-3
I love my dining table. When I bought my first (and only) house, it was almost the first piece of furniture I bought. It's actually a desk, but too beautiful to be covered in paper. It's glass and it has a black design on it with flowers and butterflies. When I bought it I got everything else in my dining room to match - from pictures to chairs it matches. I bought lights to put under it so that when the main lights were dim, the lights would project the flowers and the butterflies onto the ceiling.... but they're long gone now because the batteries leaked and I couldn't find a screwdriver to get them out. I enjoy inviting people round to sit at my dining table (impractically small though it is, and despite the green carpet in my current house which really doesn't go....). I enjoy cooking for people and eating with people and talking to people and sharing with people and generally being round the table. But right now my dining table looks like this.....
And that's not unusual. It's an easy dumping ground for washing before I get round to folding it and putting it away and despite the promising chopping board in the middle that is calling out for beautiful crusty bread to be dipped in homemade soup, it doesn't seem like a dining table anymore. My table is full, but not with food to feed others - it's lost its purpose, its focus, its meaning. I can't have anyone round to eat now. The table is too full. A huge barrier to building community - which we can do so beautifully by sharing with others round the table - is when our tables are too full, or we don't make space for a table at all. Our busy lives mean that a quick bite is all we can manage and the less people around for the quick bite the better. Our schedules mean that we don't get to the room with the table at the same time, so we eat alone, or just with those whose schedules match ours. Our aim for perfection means that nobody can come round until we're tidy and we've got the time to cook our best food, otherwise they'll judge us, holding up Come Dine with Me score cards that shame us to never invite anyone again. We worry that we won't like the food and our hosts would be offended if we brought our own. We fill our lives with stuff so we don't have to do the things that are of most value. But why?
I passionately believe that's not how it should be. Community is built through trust. Community is built when we learn to live and eat alongside one another whether we have tidied up or not. Jesus regularly ate with all sorts of people. He invited himself to Zacchaeus' for tea (I wonder if Zacchaeus panicked about all the piles of money on his dinner table). He went to Mary and Martha's, and Martha tidied and fussed so she didn't have time to sit at Jesus feet (her own pride and expectations piled up on the table). And after he was raised from the dead he sat and cooked breakfast on the beach for the dirty, smelly, tired fishermen who were his closest friends (I suspect they didn't even wash their hands). If we're serious about being part of a community where trust and friendship that is like family comes naturally, where we learn how to live in a way that reflects our faith and values and where people can be welcomed whoever they are, then we need to clear all that stuff off our tables. And eat. And talk. And laugh. And let go. Because when we eat together, good things happen.
(and just to note - my table will be cleared next week, and even before its clear, if you drop in, I'll feed you and if it has to be on the living room floor, then I'll give you my best cushion to sit on).
I live in Bury - I don't normally say that because Ramsbottom is one on its own - it's a unique and sparkly bohemian enclave of surprises - but it's in Bury (despite what some people might like to argue and think). Bury as a borough is diverse, and in Bury town centre that diversity comes together in all its sometimes bizarre, often confusing, always beautiful, glory. I rarely leave Bury having not been surprised by what I have witnessed. Last weeks visit did not disappoint, as I walked up from the car garage, leaving my car to be serviced, I had the chance to spend more time there then I normally do.... with the slightly off key x-factor wannabe on the main street and the arrival of a new building to draw attention away from the shops left empty because of the aspiration of a town that tries really hard. Bury is famous for a couple of things. It's famous for its Black Pudding and it's also famous for its market. World famous actually. Sitting at the back of the second nicest shopping centre out of the two in the town, it stands proud as signs point to the coach pick up point where coaches gather to wonder why this trip is taken by so many from extreme parts of the country to this market in this town where things you could buy in most other small towns just like Bury (apart from the black pudding of course) can be bought. As I had a bit of time of unknown length last week to shuffle around Bury I thought I'd give it a go. For the second time in six years I entered the market. I shifted myself away from the meat hall and the fish hall (I've always avoided fish halls in markets) and I wandered, taking it all in. And as I wandered I wondered... what is it about this market that everyone loves? It's no different to the markets I grew up with. The clothes are the same. The shops with the biggest bags of sweets you've ever seen are the same. The stalls selling random gifts and velcro slippers and trainers with one letter changed in the name... they're the same. There is a nod to changes in the world as the phone case stall shines out with its jewel backed cases and the Christmas novelty wine jumpers of 2017 have pride of place at the front of the stall.... But nothing has changed..... so what is then the attraction of the world famous market? It tells of a time that was. As the world moves on, the old school weighing and measuring, the paying in cash, the sounds and smells of the market, it reminds us of how this country used to be. It reminds us of a time when it was simpler - when there were two TV channels and it was rare to have a home phone. It reminds us of the golden age that we look through with our rose tinted glasses and elevate higher than high can be. Nostalgia is not a bad thing, because the past is our story, the past is what makes us, the past is how we became the people we are today. The movement in the past helps influence us in the future. But when nostalgia leaves us in a place where the world famous market is as good as it gets....? When nostalgia becomes a bubble where we're dropped off at the entrance and picked up after a walk round, not daring to leave the world famous part just in case the bubble pops..? As I reflected on love of the world famous market, and how it would have once been the centre of Bury life, I thought about church, and our love for the nostalgia of church as centre of society and how that influences the way in which we do many things. If we do this, people will come.... why? Well, we're world famous. But we're not, we live in exile, so often only turned to for nostalgic coach trips at weddings and christenings and as visitor attractions and quickly left behind with a bag of goodies (well not even that) to sustain on the journey home. As church sits on the margins of society, then just like it will with the world famous market, it is going to take out of the box thinking and imagination to journey into the future. Good job we worship a God who is a God of out the box thinking. This is God who didn't defeat evil with force and strength, but with vulnerability and death. This is God who brought fire in the upper room and gave the disciples the ability to talk in other languages so that they could spread the message to the world who didn't understand the words they spoke. This is God who is world famous because he made and saved the world. This is God. This is God who calls us to listen, and to leave everything behind and follow him. As the market continues to be world famous and separates itself as a museum in itself, continuing to be what was and will continue to be, and as we continue to hold it up high as how things shoulda-oughta be, we need to keep reminding ourselves to stop and look around and imagine and wonder..... Because how things have always been cannot be how they forever continue to be.
Imagine if.....??? Imagine if life was different to how it is now? Imagine if we weren't held back by bureaucracy and form filling and finance. Imagine if we weren't held back by our own hang ups and ideas of how things should be...... Imagine if we could see beyond the obvious to dream of the non-obvious to something better.... Imagine if we could look at a dry patch of ground and picture what it might become. Some of us can do that.... some of us find it much harder..... but imagine if....? Imagine if we launched ourselves out of our comfortable place into something new.... who knows what might happen? Imagine if...... Yesterday at our church meeting I began the meeting my reading a story called Not a Stick . I came across this story in a session on change at college in September.... It's a story of imagination, of dreaming, of seeing beyond the obvious to something much more exciting and bigger. It tells the story of a pig who has a stick..... The pig is told to 'be careful with that stick', 'watch where you are going with that stick'....... And the pig keeps telling the narrator 'it's not a stick'. The stick is more than a stick.... its a fishing rod, a sword to fight dragons, a spear.... For the pig, the stick is really these things, their imagination dreaming of so much more than is there straight on. As I read the story at our meeting three of the children who are part of our church family were playing with a big box in the overflow room at the back of the worship space. As I led the meeting I watched their imagination run wild - making windows and doors.... a chaotic crazy (what looked like a) mess becoming something new and 'not a box'. It was coloured and altered and thrown around...... pens were used as scissors and the glitter left over in the box from Christmas was thrown everywhere..... In that 'not a box' moment the children were living out 'not a stick' for real at the same time we were all dreaming what were quite big dreams about the future of our church community cafe. If we are to enter the kingdom of God like a child (Matt 18:2-4), then maybe like a child we too should dream 'not a box' and 'not a stick' dreams as we see how much bigger God is than what we can see right in front of us. What's God asking us to do? What's God saying? Are we missing it because we are being very careful with that stick and missing its not-a-stickness? Imagine if...??? "See, I am doing a new thing! Not it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland" Isaiah 43:19
I recently went to visit Tatton Park for the first time. I've been reluctant to visit because you have to pay for the car park (if you trace my ancestry back I come from both Yorkshire AND Scotland), but it was worth it - a beautiful place to visit. What made it even more worth it was an exhibition called 'Guardian Angels' by the artist Cristina Rodrigues. Rodrigues is a Portugese born, Manchester based artist and a lecturer in Architecture. Her art installations use objects that were simply functional and sometimes obsolete and she gives them an artistic identity. Her art tells the story of and celebrates the role of women as keepers of cultural traditions. The art tells the story of those women, interwoven with her own stories. The art installation at Tatton Mansion was inspired by the room in which each piece stood - where the stories of the people who lived in the mansion were in conversation with the modern day stories that had inspired the artist. One piece that fascinated me was called 'Dining at the Heart'. The table was donated by an Iranian family who had replaced it with a table from Ikea. The description of the piece explains how it is reflecting on the fact that we now spend less time gathered round the table which once stood in the heart of our homes. The red ribbons are like blood - energy lines that bring life and tell a story. The ceramic hearts connected by the ribbons show how we connect to one another. The piece was in the kitchen of the mansion - the kitchen as the heart of the house making the house a home.
I'm currently thinking about what to do for my MA dissertation, and whenever somebody asks me I often reply 'something to do with food'. It's not because I love food and cooking (which I do, clearly) but because I believe that gathering around the table with food is vitally important to the building of Christ-centred community and is a practice that began with the early Christian communities we read about in the New Testament as they gathered, broke bread and shared lives together. I've seen how food draws people together. I've seen how food inspires us to talk. I've seen how eating together before our church meeting enhances the conversation. I've seen that gathering intentionally together with a brew (how Lancashire am I now!?) and the offer of cake to explore life and faith can bring deep conversation and open up channels of faith exploration that have been avoided for fear of saying the wrong thing. I've been looking back and going through my post it notes I'd left in 'Slow Church'* and I found again a whole chapter on 'Dinner Table conversation'. Smith and Pattison write that "eating together and conversing together are both vital practices of slow church community...." because we learn the language of the family at the dinner table. To build community we should make it a priority to eat and relax with our neighbours - yet so often we eat fast and we move on. I've made it a rule before our Sunday church meetings that we can't have soup until 12pm, when everyone is able to gather, so we are not rushing from service to meeting without pausing to be family together. It felt forced at first, and I think people thought I was just being stubborn, but now it's becoming habit, and it makes a difference to what we say and do in our meetings - and we leave later - not because the meeting goes on forever, but because the meeting begins around the table, with food, where we gather and we learn what it means to be the family of God. Encouraging slowness in community sometimes needs to be intentional and often counter-cultural, but in that intentionality, slowly, slowly the community begins to become more beautiful as it takes time to realign and centres itself on Christ. *Slow Church by Christopher Smith & John Pattison. I blogged about it here
A paper clip floats... sometimes. If you lay a paper clip gently on top of the water and get it just right it will float. That's because of surface tension. If you look closely you can see the surface of the water embrace the paper clip and hold it in place. If you get it wrong or upset the tension then the paper clip sinks to the bottom. That's one thing I was reminded of this summer. I went with my Godsons to do some science and we did all sorts of things I've done before but had forgotten that feeling of ooooo when something you are not expecting happens. I've been on pause. I've been in between. In that time I've lost the words 'In training' from the end of 'Minister'. I'm not a different person, I don't even really have a different job (although I'm hoping it feels a little bit different), but I've transitioned, from one to another. I'm at a different place on the journey. Over the summer I've been trying to understand myself a bit better and how I relate to the world around me. The last four years has been chaotic as I've been thrown deep into a new life as minister of a church, occupying a different place in society, with totally unexpected challenges to who I am and where I am. As I have been exploring who I am and reflecting on life, I've been looking to see what lies beneath. What makes me think this way? Where is God in what I do and where I go? I finished my holiday by going to Barcelona and went to visit the Sagrada Familia. An amazing building, still under construction - the dream of Gaudi who died before it was even started and an iconic landmark on the Barcelona skyline. I went on Sunday morning to see this beautiful building with all the different coloured light streaming through the nature inspired, mathematically constructed nave of the building.
Round the back of the altar are smaller chapels which are set aside for quiet prayer and contemplation (it being a church and all), despite the very loud video of the history of the building going on in one of the chapels, it was a bit less busy and perhaps a little bit quieter. The apostles creed was hung up in different languages, marking what unites Christians across the world. In the middle of the chapels, below what must have been the altar area of the main sanctuary, were some windows that looked down to the crypt. When you looked down you saw a worship area (which is, I found out afterwards, the local parish church). Down beneath the beauty created by Gaudi being photographed by many tourists was the beauty of a congregation worshipping God. I watched as they shared the peace and I wanted to be with them, not with the tourists who were jostling for the best position to take a photo.
At the core of the building was faith. The crypt was there before the rest of what is described as a 'temple' was built. In that crypt a faithful group of followers resisted the urge to look up at the tourists as they worshipped God. Although the beautiful temple spoke very deeply of the glory of God, and it, I'm sure, is an amazing place to worship, it was in that crypt that the true beauty of God was displayed; where gathering together to worship was a regular routine of faithfulness, and where the peace of God was shared in a community centred on Christ. It's too easy sometimes to focus on the surface - on looks, on what's happening now, what's making me happy right now, but what I've been challenged on over the summer, a reminder and a nudge, is that what lies beneath that is most important - what creates the cushion that holds the paper clip up, what sustains faith community in the middle of a commercial tourist venture, what holds me...... it's the deep deep love of our creator God, demonstrated so starkly on the cross through Jesus who died for me, and the assurance I have that there is always hope in him. Buildings crumble, life changes, paper clips sink, but God's love is eternal.
There are times in this crazy minister in training world I inhabit that I wake up and declare 'it would be easier if I was still a maths teacher'.Other teachers might argue 'no it's not' - but don't get me wrong, I'm not saying what I am doing now is harder, it's just that it's differently hard for me and affects me in ways I could never imagine. I was the kind of teacher who was able to separate out my maths teacher life and the rest of it. Relaxing, reflecting and getting away was easy. I was efficient. The nature of maths as a subject meant that a lot of the marking and planning could be done on auto pilot - delving deep into the beauty of the subject, but keeping it simple because maths - well - it just is. I was never called to be a maths teacher for ever - throughout my teaching life I knew I was only doing this for a time, that I would need to move on..... But sometimes I wake up and say 'what if I was still there?' I've been listening to a sermon preached by Jeff Lucas this morning called 'Breakfast with Jesus' (see video below), that just at the right time challenged that feeling when I woke up this morning and declared to God 'it would be easier if.....'. It was based on the passage at the end of John's gospel where Jesus meets the disciples on the beach and they have breakfast together. Peter and Jesus then have their famous interaction where Jesus challenges him 'Do you love me more than these'. Peter, the fisherman, who had given it all up to follow Jesus was fishing after Jesus' death. His life as a fisherman was easy. He may have not always got the catch of fish he wanted. He may have worked in the dead of night. But..... it was familiar, autopilot, what he was good at. "Do you love me more than these...." fish..... maths lessons...... those things I do that make me feel comfortable and efficient and good and....... Jesus says 'me or the fish?' Faith or fish? Jeff Lucas talks about how once you've entered the Kingdom of God you will never be satisfied with just surviving. If I was still a maths teacher I would survive. I could be mardy when I wanted to be mardy. I could take out my frustrations on the pupils who irritate me (no teacher ever does that, honestly), I could throw a strop with my colleagues and not have them raise their eyebrows at my ridiculouslessness - my 'un-Christian' behaviour, I could go wild (in an introverted, restrained way), I could choose the people who I have in my life and avoid the ones who irritate me. But I wouldn't be the person who God created and called me to be. I'm not meant to be a maths teacher (some people are, and in serving God in that role, may wake up in the morning and say 'it would be easier if.....') but I'm meant to be living right now this crazy, sometimes mind blowing, life that God has called me to. Faith or fish?
