Hedgehogs

My "Nature Notes" piece for the month ahead . . .

Early one morning during the summer, I was delighted to see two hedgehogs snuffling about in my back garden. I went out and photographed them. They did not seem too concerned about my presence, and later shuffled off into the wood behind our garden. A few days later, neighbours also reported what I assume were the same two hedgehogs, and one evening I encountered a hedgehog snuffling along a footpath near our home as I wandered along in the other direction.

I mention this because the general feeling is that we are seeing fewer hedgehogs than we used to. There may be a number of reasons for this. Many are still killed on our roads, of course, and hedgehogs may be falling prey to the growing badger population. Impenetrable barriers (at hedgehog-height, anyway) between gardens don’t help, though, and where gardens have been paved or turned into parking areas, to a hedgehog that’s a desert. Excessively tidy gardens are unlikely to produce the insect and invertebrate numbers a hedgehog needs for food, and hedgehogs are very vulnerable to the widespread use of slug pellets.

Our hedgehog is one of fourteen species native to Europe, Asia and Africa, with the cute looking African pygmy hedgehog gaining popularity as a pet species. Hedgehogs are insectivorous, with insects, worms and some slugs and snails making up about three-quarters of their diet. They have a fair bit of hunting to do to get enough food, so they need to travel from garden to garden, and “your” hedgehog is likely to be one of several different hedgehogs visiting your garden. Hedgehogs are mostly nocturnal, so you will only see them in daylight just after dawn or just before sunset. If you see a hedgehog at midday, something somewhere is wrong.

At this time of the year hedgehogs are starting their winter hibernation, and I’ll repeat the annual warning to check bonfires before lighting them - to a hedgehog this looks like a cosy place to bed down for the winter. Hedgehogs need to have put on a bit of weight before their winter sleep; late season youngsters or adults that haven’t done all that well may need some help putting on the ounces, and garden feeding can help.

People traditionally used to put our bread and milk - but we now know that milk is in fact very harmful to hedgehogs. They like it, but can’t digest it properly and it will cause serious stomach upsets. Cooked meat leftovers, pieces of mild cheese, catfood if meat based (not fish) are all good - hedgehogs have only very small teeth, so it’s important that food put out is minced or chopped very small. Proprietary hedgehog feeds are available at garden centres, pet shops and on line. Raisins, sultanas and peanuts are also acceptable (not, of course, salted peanuts).

Finally, hedgehogs are really woodland animals. Gardens with shrubs and trees and  some untidy bits and shelter will attract and suit them. Piles of branches and leaves will be both a good nest site, and a possible supply of insect food.

A Sermon on Today's Readings

Preached at Middleton and Chirbury . . .

One of the mildly insulting words people use about those who go to church is "God-botherers". We are (they say) people who bother God - which implies that God would much rather be left alone, and that when we pray or go to church we’re wasting our and God’s precious time. I’ve always assumed God would be more bothered by my absence from church than my presence there. But I suppose our prayers could bother him. It bothers me when people chase after me with questions and complaints and lists of things for me to do.

A few weeks ago I was watching the birds in my garden, and a group of three sparrows were pecking about under the feeders - a mother bird and two more or less fully grown children, who were still chasing about after her, wanting attention and demanding to be fed. For a while the parent bird put up with their fussing; but then something snapped, and mum rounded on her kids and sent them packing. I have to admit I do recognise that emotion.

Would God recognise it too? Let’s think about the story Jesus told about the unjust judge. I think we can all sympathize with the widow who pursued him demanding justice, and I’m glad that in the story her persistence paid off. Whether that would have happened in real life I don’t know, though; a judge that bent might well have used his legal powers to get the woman locked up; he’d have shut her up and got her off his back without any need to respond to her demands. But that doesn't detract from the point of the parable, which is that persistence pays off.

And while human justice may be deficient, and human judges unjust, and corrupt, God is eternally just, and we can rely on him to hear our prayers and respond to them. In other words, Jesus is telling us that it's always worth our bothering God, it’s what he wants us to do.

But I can think of times in my life when it doesn’t feel as if my prayer’s been heard; when I ask but don’t seem to get an answer. Or perhaps I should really that God hasn’t answered my prayer in the way I wanted him to. And that’s why Jesus told this parable - to encourage his disciples to persevere, to be persistent in their praying, to go on doing it even when they'd begun to feel disheartened, started to wonder what was the point of it all. Even those first disciples found it hard to keep praying.

And I know I do. My main problem is discipline and commitment: the lack of those things. I don't plan as well as I should, and even when I do plan my prayers for a regular time each day, I can still be racing through them with one eye on my watch, so that I’ve finished in time for tea. Well, I tell myself, when you’re as busy as I am, something has to give. I think it was John Wesley who described himself as “too busy not to pray”. That’s a perspective I lack, when I think about it. It’s not that I need to make space for prayer in my busy life; more that I need to make prayer the central pillar around which my busy life is built. I know that, but I don’t do it well; it’s all too easy for prayer to become the optional extra that gets squeezed or even missed out altogether. I should think about the widow in the parable, for whom nothing was more important than her campaign to get justice. She was round the judge's house morning noon and night, bothering him all she could. Shouldn’t my praying be just as important?

There’s an issue about how we pray, and when, and why. If all I do is read other people’s words, with perhaps a sort of shopping list of things I want God to do, my prayer life is sadly deficient. Think about it - if I only speak to my neighbour when I want something off him, and if when I speak to him I don’t use my own words but read someone else’s, I can’t claim to have much of a relationship with him. Faith is about relationship with God, and that relationship is expressed, and indeed made, in the way we do prayer. In the way I do prayer.

So my prayer should strive to be conversation, communication, communion. It should include space for me to be aware of what God wants to say to me, how he wants to prompt me. My prayer needs to be honest, and therefore confessional; I should be facing up to things, saying sorry, when I pray. But when I pray I need also to be praising God and thanking him; and I should be committing myself to do his will. Prayer is a sacrificial thing: each time I pray I should be offering myself afresh to be of use in God’s service. And none of that will happen as it should if I’m rushed and I skimp my prayer. The number of words I use isn’t all that important, nor how good they are; but the place and the time I give is. And to be full and complete prayer needs practice and planning, and to be grounded in scripture.

I usually do say the Lord's Prayer when I pray. But when I do I’m maybe not thinking too hard about the words. They’re so familiar. But there are four words in the Lord’s Prayer that are vital to all our understanding of prayer, and they are these: 'thy will be done'. There is the essential heart of our praying.

Not long ago I was in the Oxfam second hand book shop in Aberystwyth, and I looked through the “religion” section, as I usually do. I picked up a book that had a title that looked interesting, and was disappointed to find it was actually not a book about Christian spirituality but something rather new agey hat seemed to include spells and incantations. Since the next book along the shelf was a book of Celtic prayers, I suppose whoever arranged them had decided that the two books were more or less the same. But in fact, they couldn't have been more different. Magic, as I see it, is to do with seeking power, so the elemental forces of the universe can be bent to serve one’s own needs and desires. And if that might at first sound a bit like the widow banging on and on at the unjust judge, really it isn't.

For at the heart of our praying is this: that, whatever we may ask of God, we bow our own selves to his will. Prayer isn’t about bargaining with God or trying to bribe him, saying, "Do this for me, God, and I'll give you that in return". Or it shouldn’t be, anyway. Even if sometimes that is what we do.

I’m reminded of the story of the man who always began his prayers by saying: "Now, God, if you could just manage to see things my way." What about seeing things his way? Think of how Jesus prayed, think of him in deep distress in the Garden of Gethsemane on the eve of Good Friday, with the guards already on their way to arrest him. The last words of his prayer were "Even so, thy will, not mine, be done." And we should say the same.

Magic spells are a declaration of power and control, but prayer is a declaration of trust and humility. Thy will, not mine, be done. Our own vision when we pray is restricted: by our own mortality, by our own circles of friends, of desires, of where in a worldly sense we belong, by the limits of our human understanding; but we are praying to the one who is eternally faithful, unlike the unjust judge. God’s faithfulness endures from generation to generation. And so Jesus tells us, as he told those first disciples: don’t give up; keep praying.

Prayer won’t be a short cut to all our hurt and sadness instantly being magicked away; but it is what God desires of us, as any good parent wants from his or her children: that we keep in touch, that we tell him how we feel. Our offering of prayer rises to him like sweet incense, so scripture tells us; and the relationship is made and remade as we pray, between we his children and he our heavenly Father. And when we persevere in prayer we will find in that growing and vital relationship the strength, insight, vision and love we need, not for an easy life but to get on with things - as pilgrims and disciples in this world, and as citizens already of his kingdom. Amen.

My last harvest sermon for this year . . .

I can well remember one of the very first harvest sermons I preached as a young curate. I was preaching at our monthly family service so there were quite a few children there, and I decided to tell the story of a loaf of bread - looking back from the loaf itself all the way to the planting of the grain. The children enjoyed being brought out to the front to play the parts of all the different people involved: the shop assistant, the shelf stacker, the van driver, the baker, and so on, back to the farmer and his seed drill. I remember it because it worked so well, almost too well in fact - by the end of the story we had nearly all the children in church that day and several of the adults as well in a rather crowded line across the chancel steps. The point of the story of course was that at harvest we are celebrating not only things - fruit and vegetables and so forth, but lots of people on whom we depend for lots of things, people we perhaps don’t think about.

Like it or not, we are interdependent. Town and country may not always understand each other, but they do need each other.  We are interdependent internationally, too, taking our share of the world harvest, to be honest maybe more than our share. Take a look through your kitchen cupboards and count up how many countries are represented there. If the pound continues to fall, we might be paying a bit more for some of that before too long - but we’ll still buy most of it, because these things from halfway round the world are part of our staple diet.

I engage with harvest festival in two ways, I think. I value the tradition of harvest festival - the old hymns, the smell of chrysanthemums and apple pie: it’s a rite of calendar passage, marking the shortening of the days, as the year turns as it must away from summer and toward the winter. As we sing, “All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin.”

But also, much as I like the traditions of harvest, I’m also aware of the message harvest festival still has for our modern world. It isn’t just about the world of corn dollies, harvest loaves and morris dancers. Things are different today: all may be safely gathered in, but probably the new crop is already in the ground and growing. We farm more intensively and we live faster than our ancestors did. Harvest festivals today need to add to the traditional celebration a chance to reflect on the world as it is too. Our lives connect with people across the world the fruits of whose labour are on the shelf at Tesco. There are inequalities to think about; not everyone has a rich harvest, but we all share one world.

Traditional and modern are both important in harvest. Our lives are greatly impoverished if we lose touch with tradition - it’s too easy just to pour scorn on the ways of the past, and to claim that the hymns our parents and grandparents sang are now boring and outmoded and no longer needed. Myself, I love them all, and hope we never stop singing them. And I am reminded of the truth in George Carey’s comment when he was Archbishop of Canterbury: when a people lose touch with faith and tradition, they also lose their sense of who they are.

But faith has no point or meaning unless it is lived; its test is its relevance to the real issues and demands of the day. So it’s right that harvest celebrations should each year include God’s urgent call to action in the cause of his creation. That’s actually nothing new as a harvest theme. In the Old Testament the Israelites of long ago were told when they entered the Promised Land that they must honour the land and the Lord who had given it to them. How? By sharing its fruits, not only with friends and family but also with ‘the stranger who lives among you’, and with the weakest and most vulnerable members of their own communities.

None of us lives as close to the land as the people did then, even those of us who are every day on the farm or in the garden, and our lives are no longer devastated by a bad harvest as they might have been in the past. We fill our larders from supermarket trolleys, more than from our own plots of land. But the principle’s the same, however much more we understand about the science of things, however much more horsepower we have, and however sophisticated our lives and our lifestyle choices may be: the land that we think of as ours is also God’s. That’s what the Israelites were told when they first entered Canaan. Their land was also God’s land, their world was God’s world. So the harvest of the land was theirs not only to celebrate and enjoy, but to use and share.

Tonight’s celebration should really be called harvest thanksgiving, and it should be more than just a nod in the traditional direction of God,e a chance to reflect on what it means to live thankfully. I counted how many times people said thank you to me the other day. I’d had quite a busy day, held a few doors open, shopped in a few stores, so the number was actually quite impressive. But if I only counted the thank-yous that came across as genuine, maybe that might have been a much smaller number. Some thank-yous were for form’s sake, and some because that’s what you have to say when you’re serving a customer. Some even sounded as though they really meant “That’s enough of you, then, off you go!” Still, I suppose that any sort of thank-you is better than nothing. But the one or two thank-yous that sounded heartfelt and heart-warming - well, when people say thank you like that it makes your day, and I did have a few of those, which was nice.

What does it mean, to live thankfully as God’s people? We show our genuine thanks for God’s gifts at harvest when we value them and the land that produces them by using them according to the mind of the giver. A former colleague of mine (not a minister, I ought to say) used to write against various sections in the agendas of meetings we attended “SEP.” “What’s that stand for?” I asked. “Someone else’s problem”, he told me. Real harvest thanksgiving never writes off things that sadden the heart of God as SEP, someone else’s problem. It is our problem if we are leaching the earth of its resources and poisoning our environment. It is our problem if people are going hungry while others have more than enough. It is our problem that millions of people are refugees, living in tents in the desert or huts in the mud of any number of the world’s transit points, because other people are firing at each other using weapons we may well have made. Time is too short and our world is too precious and our God is too great for us to leave these things to others.

Individually there may be little that any of us can do about the big inequalities of our world, but there’s always something, and small things add up when people get together. We can support campaigns, give to charities and missions that really do the work as it needs to be done, just be more aware of the issues and not just go along with the general flow of what everyone else is thinking. Aid across the world gets a bad name and a bad press, and a lot of government aid is used poorly and often wastefully. But aid charities and Christian missions work in a different way - with partners on the ground, by listening to stories, by helping people make small but worthwhile improvements to their lives. Many small things added together can make a big change. So as we give thanks for harvest tonight, may it be both celebration and commitment: for true thanksgiving requires both of these.

A Harvest sermon for this week . . .

Thank you once again for inviting me to come and join you for Harvest Festival. Harvest Festival has always a favourite time of the year for me, ever since I was very little. Back then I think it would have been the best attended service of the entire year in our village church; maybe less so now, but still always a lovely time. And because everyone held their harvest service (and supper) on a different day you got to go to all of them if you planned well, unlike, say, Christmas when everyone’s service was at more or less the same time.

So thank you; I’m glad to be here. And I’ve brought this with me tonight. It’s an arpillera, which I was lucky enough to be given a few years ago when I was visiting Peru in South America. An arpillera is a sort of picture made from patchwork scraps of material, and they’re traditionally made by Peruvian ladies - a sort of traditional folk art. Many arpilleras depict bible stories, or else, like this one, scenes from village life. So here you can see a colourful market place, with the houses of the village behind, then beyond them the distant mountains, the high Andes which are so important to the life of Peru, because that’s where all their water comes from. It’s a very busy scene, with a full harvest of fruit, including oranges, grapefruit, lemons, limes, apples, squashes and melons; and there are green vegetables, and baskets and attractive woolly hats.

My Peruvian arpillera can be a reminder both of abundance and God’s provision, the myriad different fruits of the earth; and also of the international dimension of our modern harvest, which we can quickly see on a stroll round the aisles in Tesco, or even by looking through the cupboards in our own kitchens. We give thanks tonight not just for the harvest of our own land, but for the harvest of many lands.

But another thing about this arpillera. It’s traditional folk art, as I’ve said - rural art, but in fact this arpillera was made not in some small village but in the dust and smog of metropolitan Lima. The ladies who made it did maybe once live in a village and work on the land, but they’ve now done what so many in our world are doing, they’ve migrated to the city, perhaps because the land is no longer as good as it was, perhaps because they were enticed by rumours of streets paved with gold.

Our world is increasingly an urban world. In fact over the past few years a significant milestone has been passed, in that since the turn of the century, and for the first time in history or pre-history, most of the world’s population now lives in towns and cities. In the UK and in the more developed parts of the world, the trend is to move out of the cities and into the countryside, though it has to be said that many of those who do so continue to live lives that are relentlessly urban, and to complain that in the countryside there’s mud all over the roads, a shortage of street lighting and far too many people driving tractors. But in most of the world, the human flow is resolutely in the other direction, into the rapidly growing cities. Sixty years ago about 500,000 people lived in Lima. When I visited that figure had risen to some eight million.

So in that case my arpillera could express a yearning for the simple village life its urban creator had lost. And maybe our traditional harvest festivals do the same. I was told not long ago that harvest festivals are on the decline in the country-side, but in the cities more and more people come to them each year. I don’t know if statistics bear that out, but if they do it might be about people in our changing and complex world longing for the simplicity of bygone days.
 
But we can’t go back there, and I doubt we’d really want to. Harvests vary; some years they’re good, some years not so good. But in past times a bad year for harvest wouldn’t just be disappointing, it would be disastrous. People would have starved. We’re still at the whim of the weather, but it’s not like it was centuries ago.  Technology, mechanisation and internationalisation have seen to that.

In past times the thanks of the people for a good harvest safely gathered in would have been truly heartfelt, literally a matter of life and death. But not today - so is harvest festival now just a charming and gently fading tradition? I think to celebrate harvest is every bit as important as it ever was, maybe more so. It reminds us of our interdependence;  that we depend on the harvest of others, and they depend on ours. We gather to celebrate not just our own harvest, but the world’s – and not just the harvest of farms and plantations, but also of factory and mine and quarry, and of the sea.

And it reminds us that for all our sophistication and technology, the opening words of the 24th Psalm remain true: ‘the earth is the Lord’s, and all the fullness thereof.’ The people of ancient Israel knew that. They had been led by Moses to a land promised to them; and so the land they farmed was not only their land but also the Lord’s. And at harvest they expressed their thanks to God, and committed themselves each year to use well what he had set into their care.

We’ve heard the story Jesus told of the rich fool, who hoarded up his crops and filled his storehouses and barns and dreamed of a future of self-indulgent luxury. He forgot the Lord’s claim to the land and its produce. He’d cut God out of the picture, and he’d cut his neighbour out as well.
But he was to discover that no-one escapes the march of time, no-one escapes the reality of their own mortality. The fruit of our labour is also our sacred trust from God, to be used in ways that please him. And at harvest we honour God in our concern for our neighbour, in our care for the land, and our readiness to work in ways that honour him as our Creator.

That’s why the ancient Israelites brought the first fruits of their harvest to lay before the altar of the Lord. That very first portion of what that earth had given was rightfully the Lord’s possession - but so was all the rest of it, and all of it, they promised God, would be used with care and shared with compassion, so that everyone could share in the rejoicing of harvest. As each gift was presented, the one who had brought it would remind himself that without God he himself was nothing, just a wanderer in the desert. God had made them a nation, God had given them the land they worked.

Like the ancient Israelites the people who made my arpillera have served their time as wanderers in the desert. It was a surprise to me on arriving in Lima to find that this sprawling bustling city is in fact a desert town, in which rain almost never falls. The shanty towns I visited were built on dusty hillsides where there wasn’t a blade of grass. One I visited was called El Trebol, “the Clover Leaf”, but there wasn’t a leaf to be seen. Interestingly, there were ducks, though. Why? Because the local churches had developed a project to help these new arrivals get a foothold on the ladder and make their own way in the city, by training them in how to look after Muscovy ducks (which happily need only a bit of water to splash about in, since they certainly weren’t going to find any ponds). They would learn how to look after them, feed them, sell the eggs . . . and then they would be given a hatching of ducklings to start them off.

It was a good news story, and after I got back I spent time raising money to support the project from churches and schools I visited. Then about eighteen months later, I received from Peru some pictures of the next stage in the project. For ducks don’t only produce eggs from the rear ends. They can also be a good source of manure, and the brown dust of El Trebol was getting greened over. The pictures showed a band of smiling ladies, some of whom perhaps had helped make my arpillera, standing in a brand new garden made out of the dust of the shanty town.

In small ways, something similar is happening in lots of places around our urban world. People are being given back a harvest of their own. With help from local churches, charities and co-operatives, local people are finding space and resources and inventive new ways to grow what they need to feed their families, and hopefully to have a bit left over to take to market. To me the greening of that desert scene on the edge of Lima was a profound and lovely image of what God’s kingdom is really all about. New hope for the very poor, and a garden for those who live in the desert.

So may God the great Giver bless us and ours this harvest festival; and may a harvest blessing be shared widely in our world through our own fruitfulness in God’s service, and in our own striving for God’s kingdom.  Amen.

Sermon on today's readings . . .

. . . preached at Newtown and Geuffordd :-

My old parish church of Llandrinio is well worth a visit, for those who are interested in history and old stones. Changed and rebuilt several times over the centuries, it’s like a detective story in stone, as you trace the way the building has been altered, from Norman times to the fifteenth century when Llandrinio lost its market and much of its status after the founding of the Cistercian Abbey of Strata Marcella just up the river, to the new works done in the 17th century when the then Rector became the first Bishop of St Asaph after the restoration under Charles II, to the inevitable restoration in Victorian times. Some of the fabric dates back to before the Norman Conquest, and Llandrinio was one of the first places in the area to hear the Gospel, preached there by Trunio, who was one of the band of evangelists brought to this part of Wales by St Cadfan.

Among the older bits of surviving masonry is a narrow window by the side of the altar. It seems very likely that in early medieval times this window would have been used to give communion to people who had leprosy. Leprosy was not uncommon at that time, and of course no leper would have been allowed into the church itself; their disease excluded them from society, and they were, to all intents and purposes, non-persons.

We can in fact cure leprosy - or Hansen’s Disease as it’s more correctly known - fairly easily these days; but it’s much harder to put right the physical and emotional damage done to those who've lived for years with the disease. It’s a sad fact though that many people in our world still live with leprosy. To me that’s a major blot on the face of humanity, that we’ve failed to get this disease cured and done away with, when it seems we can easily find all the money we need to supply bombs and tanks and missiles to whoever wants them. Perhaps it has something to do with the way in which lepers are still seen as being unclean and unworthy today. Perhaps they are still non-persons.

Hansen's Disease is a particular disease with a clear diagnosis and a specified treatment. But in Bible days almost any chronic skin complaint could be labelled as leprosy, so that people with a whole range of skin diseases would find themselves excluded, banned from entering towns and villages. They would band together and live in the open country, until such time as - just maybe -they could prove themselves to be clean, with unblemished skin.  Interestingly, leprosy is not in fact very contagious. But it is fearful and in its effects extremely unsightly. Lepers lose their sense of touch and therefore easily injure themselves, so are frequently disabled as a consequence of the disease.

Imagine, then, what things were like for the lepers in our two readings today. That word ‘leper’ says a lot in itself. We still use it to label those who are despised and turned away by others, for whatever reason. This was a disease that labelled you, defined you, you were no longer a person, a citizen, you were a leper. And it was no respecter of person or privilege.

Naaman, for all his high office, had become a leper: think how horror stricken he must have been to see the tell-tale white marks on his skin. Imagine being one of the ten men who came to beg healing from Jesus. One of them at least was a Samaritan, under normal circumstances he would have had nothing to do with Jews.  But these men no longer had status or citizenship; as non-persons they were bound together by their shared misery and degradation.

Leprosy is more or less extinct in modern Europe; it's a disease of poverty, in countries around the world. It still disfigures and damages those who get it, and forces them into a kind of internal exile, to live in leper colonies or villages away from family and home. Church agencies are among those trying to put things right, using multi-drug therapy to cure the disease and corrective surgery to put right some of the damage caused, and helping those who are disabled to earn their own living and not have to beg.

I can almost taste the fear and anguish of the lepers in our stories as I read. Naaman clutches at straws, desperately hoping that the things his slave girl has told him might be true. The ten lepers have maybe heard that Jesus is someone special - though maybe they’d have made the same appeal to any travelling teacher. In most cases they'd have been sent away still unclean.

But in our stories what happens next is miracle. "Dip yourself in the Jordan," Naaman is told. He wasn't impressed - surely a man like him deserved a personal audience with the prophet! And the Jordan was hardly more than a marshy stream, it couldn’t compare with the great rivers of his homeland. But of course, as we’ve heard, when he does go and wash in the Jordan he's instantly made clean.

All Jesus says to the ten who came to him is 'Go, show yourselves to the priests.' You couldn’t re-enter society until a priest had certified you clean. And it was just as easy as that; perhaps they were grumbling as they turned away; there hadn’t been any special incantation or healing prayer. But then, all of a sudden, they found that they were clean, their skin pink and healthy like that of a little child. Imagine them jumping for joy and dancing off down the road to see the priest.

Naaman had some making up to do after his healing. He’d been in quite a huff about the poor reception he’d had, and the fact that the prophet hadn't come out to speak to him. His servants had had quite a struggle to persuade him to follow the simple instructions he'd been given. But now we see the newly healed Naaman not only healed but also converted. There is a God in Israel. He goes straight back to the prophet's house to say thank-you, and to promise his praise and worship to the God Elisha serves.

And that’s the most important part of this story, and the story of the ten who came to Jesus. I’ve talked a lot about leprosy, but really these stories aren’t about leprosy, which, when all said and done, was just a fact of life in those days. They’re about thankfulness. The thankfulness we see in Naaman; the thankfulness we see in just the one out of the ten who came to Jesus. They were all amazed and thrilled to be healed - but only the one came back. The other common thread in these stories is that both these thankful people, Naaman and the Samaritan leper, were foreigners. Not the people you might expect to lead the way in thankfulness to the God of Israel. 'Your own faith has cured you,' says Jesus to the Samaritan who came back to him.

For me a theme of our readings is the link between faith and thankfulness. One thing that reveals our faith is that we know to say thank-you, and we know who to say it to. Thank-you is a word that lies right at the heart of the Gospel.

Paul wrote that he’d been set free from the tyranny of the Law. As a Pharisee, he had believed that to get to heaven he had to keep every word of the Law (and indeed, he thought he was managing to do it - but he was wrong). If you want to earn your way into heaven, nothing less than perfection can ever be good enough. But Paul’s life had been completely turned round. He’d encountered Jesus, and he had encountered the grace of God. He’d been showered with undeserved, unmerited grace, discovering the wonderful truth that we are loved by God despite ourselves, despite our sin. What Paul could never manage to do by trying to keep the Law had been already done for him on the cross of Calvary; where he and we are healed and set free from the deathly power of sin. The cross stands as the sign of a spiritual healing that is simply there for us, gracious and freely offered. Even before we confess our sins we are forgiven; even before we notice the scars we are healed of the leprosy of our souls.

So the life of faith, for us as Christians, as for Naaman and the Samaritan who came back to Jesus, is a life of thankfulness. For Paul, every aspect of his life in Christ was a thank-offering for what he had been so freely given. His great theme is that now he belongs to Christ, that now Christ lives in him; all that he had lost is found, all his failure is redeemed, in the one man Jesus Christ, crucified in our stead and raised from the dead. So have we freely received: and we should freely give, in praise and thanksgiving for God's redeeming love.

Fill thou my life, O Lord my God
in every part with praise
that my whole being may proclaim
thy being and thy ways. Amen.

Read at the funeral of Annie Holloway

These are the words, adapted and rewritten by me from an anonymous original, read at the funeral today . . .

What matters, when we measure a life?

How can we assess its value?

What matters is not what you bought, but what you built,

not what you got, but what you gave,

not what you owned, but what you shared.

What matters is not your success or fame, 

but the care you showed,

not what you learned, 

but what you were able to pass on and teach.

What matters are the acts of integrity, compassion and courage  

by which you enthused, enriched or empowered others.

What matters is not the memories you held on to,

but the memories you made that live in the hearts of others. 

Living a life that matters doesn't happen by accident,

it is a matter of choice, something we set ourselves to do.

Choose to live a life that matters.

Rain, Diaries, Duty and Harvest

A harvest address based on the Gospel reading for the coming Sunday . . .

5 The apostles said to the Lord, ‘Increase our faith!’ 6 The Lord replied, ‘If you had faith the size of a mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and planted in the sea”, and it would obey you.

7 ‘Who among you would say to your servant who has just come in from ploughing or tending sheep in the field, “Come here at once and take your place at the table”? 8 Would you not rather say to him, “Prepare supper for me, put on your apron and serve me while I eat and drink; later you may eat and drink”? 9 Do you thank the servant for doing what was commanded? 10 So you also, when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, “We are servants and of no account; we have done only what we were required to do!” ’  Luke 17.5-10

The reading we’ve just heard may seem a slightly strange reading for a harvest festival service; it is in fact the set Gospel reading for this Sunday in the church year. And as I sat in a rather grumbly mood looking out at the rain last Monday morning, it occurred to me that the theme of duty that is in that reading is in fact a harvest theme (and of course the servant in the story would have spent his day ploughing or shepherding – so that’s all right too).

I was grumbling because I don’t like it when my planned schedule gets disrupted, by rain or anything else. There were lots of things I could have been doing, and they all required a dry morning. I’ve a shed needs painting before the winter, my lawn needed a mow – and plenty more besides. I had my day nicely planned out, but instead I was sat there watching the rain. People wandered past on the street outside; they all looked grumpy too. But rain’s a good thing really; without rain, our bit of the world would be a desert – water is the basic essential of life, very special stuff indeed. So I shouldn’t moan when it rains. I still did, though.

And plans and schedules are important to me; I’m not sure how I’d get through the week without my diary. If I don’t look at my diary, or if it’s gone walkabout as I’m sure it does, all by itself – I’ll miss things and forget things, and things won’t get done and completed as they need to be. And given my great ability to put things off or else lose interest and not complete things, my diary has also a very useful and important role as a means of self-discipline.

In our reading today the disciples ask Jesus for more faith. Jesus responds by chiding them for the smallness of the faith they have, and then goes on to talk to them about duty. You’re not performers on some stage expecting to be applauded at the end of the show, he tells them; you’re servants with tasks to complete, and all you’ve done at the end of the day when those tasks are complete, is your duty. And as I know very well from my diary, when one task is complete, there’s always something else to do – even on a rainy day.

We don’t earn our way into heaven; salvation is God’s gracious act, and however small our faith, we can trust in God’s love, as real, personal, special to each one of us, and the source of our life. Now the Greek word doulos that in the reading I used is translated as servant, could also means slave. Servants in those days would be literally owned by their master. Think of yourselves as servants, as slaves in God’s service, says Jesus. Why should you get some special reward just for doing something good? Or why should you feel you can take time off just because you’ve completed one task? For a servant, there’s always something more to do.

Well, we know that’s true. On the farm or in the garden, finish one task and there’s always something else to get on with. For the Christian disciple as for the household slave, this is true: that you’re never off duty.

That’s not to say we should feel guilty about getting the wellies off and sitting in front of the fire after a hard day’s work. We need our rest, and the world’s there for us to enjoy as well as to work in. But maybe today’s reading reminds us that as stewards of God’s creation and labourers on God’s farm we’re never off duty. And the work we do is work for him, as well as for ourselves.

In Old Testament times, the people of Israel – when they first settled the land God had given them – understood that the land they held and farmed was not only their land, it was also and remained God’s land. The way they used it, the way they used and shared the produce of the land, needed to be a way that did honour to the Lord. For that reason, at harvest time they would take the very first fruits to present at the altar to God – and that not to say “Thank you, Lord, that’s your bit, now we can do what we like with the rest,” but as a sign that all the harvest was his, and that all would be used in a way that honoured him.

That tradition is part of what lies behind the modern harvest festival; but we no longer bring the first fruits, for our harvest is also the harvest home, the celebration of having got everything done, of having completed the task. “All is safely gathered in,” as we sing in one of the harvest hymns.
All may be safely gathered in, but that’s no reason to put our feet up. The work goes on. These days fields are prepared for the next season, and the seed is sown, almost as soon as the harvest has been taken. Harvest festival is thanksgiving and celebration, but also a time for committing ourselves to a task that is ongoing. The harvest and the land are both ours and God’s; and under God we have a continuing duty of care: for one another around the world, for the environment and for the myriad forms of life with which we share it.

So one harvest is complete, but the work continues. We rejoice but we also recommit ourselves. “The earth is the Lord’s, and all the fullness thereof; the round world, and all who dwell therein.” Thus we read in one of the psalms, and at harvest we recognize our interdependence, the way in which we both serve one another and are served, the way in which the fruitfulness of the land requires care and balance and vigilance. And we know that while we have a harvest, others do not – and our thanksgiving includes a recognition of our duty to our neighbour, wherever and whoever he or she may be.

Not as an optional extra, but a duty. Not as something we may or may not choose to do, but as part of the programme in our diary, if we’re serious about saying and believing that “the earth is the Lord’s”. We pray in one of the harvest prayers that we may use the harvest we have “to the glory of God, for the relief of those in need, and for our own wellbeing.” All three of those: thanksgiving is expressed not only in what we say, the hymns we sing, but in the direction of our lives, the things we do. In saying, “What is mine, Lord, is also yours.” In seeing harvest as opportunity, opportunity to serve.
For we ourselves are also harvest. Jesus told the parable of the sower, and you’ll remember the seed that didn’t grow, or didn’t grow well, or got choked by the weeds that grew around it. But some, said Jesus, grew and yielded fruit – and that should be us, fruitful in God’s service, and glad to serve the greatest of all masters, the one in whom we find life, the King of Love.

It was still raining as I finished writing these words, but I didn’t feel quite so grumbly. And water is the greatest of the Biblical symbols of life, nothing else would work without it. So I’ve revised my schedule, and all I need to do will still get done, so long as I’m serious about doing it.

Song and Season

A good, if tiring choir practice tonight with the Guilsfield Singers. We are, of course, already singing Christmas music. By the time Christmas comes - or at least our pre-Christmas concerts - we are either hopelessly in love with what we're singing or else we absolutely hate it. Usually both are true, for different parts of the programme.

Meanwhile, the world around is still very summery, or it has been today anyway. On a visit this morning to a suburban street in Oswestry I was amazed - and delighted - at the colourful displays in the gardens, which seemed more redolent of June than of the very end of September.  It's sad how many front gardens have disappeared under concrete or tarmac, and become car parks. For the most part that hadn't happened on this street, and it was a much brighter and better place for that. An attractive front garden is a gift to the community, I think. We're more likely to spend time in our back gardens, but a flowery and bright front garden will add a bit of happiness to the lives of those who pass by.

Michaelmas summer or not, we are on the run down to Christmas, though. Strange on a bright day like today to think that in three month's time the festival will be finished - or at any rate, we'll be in that strange period between Christmas and New Year. I find it really hard to visualise the bare trees and hard ground of winter when all around me is leafy and green (and, when winter does reach us, I shall find it equally hard to visualise the world in its summer clothes). The usual forecasts of an arctic blast are being aired in the newspapers. Out of interest, I looked to see what one pundit had said a year ago. Exactly the same as this year, I found . . . polar bears on the frozen Thames, that sort of thing. Bound to be right some time, I suppose . . .

Let's Dance

Another new poem . . . maybe not quite where I want it yet, but I'm happy to share it as it is . . .

Today finds me standing at the mere’s edge,
where trailing branches of willow and ash
play tunes in the clear water. Fish with silver scales
and red fins are patrolling the shaded pools;
occasionally one breaks the surface to seize a fly.
Each splash chimes a broken chord,
and everywhere around me there is birdsong.

Yet my sense is that the music I hear
is only the smallest hint of the music that really is.
We are surrounded by music,
and we are also, wonderfully, made of music.

For I claim music as my deepest self;
music sings within me, the music of atoms and molecules,
of dancing, spinning electrons;  music finds its rhythm
in the constant motion of my blood,
in my breathing out and in, in all the circles and cycles
of existence. So it is because I am music
that I can hear and interpret the music of today,
in the calling birds, in the splash of water on rocks,
the rustle of the leaves, the laughter of passers-by.
It is because I am made of music
that this music becomes part of me.

So today I feel, and say, and insist that all of life is music;
music is my best explanation
of what it means to be alive, and
of what we should do with our lives.
Let’s dance.

Between The Meres

This is a poem started yesterday, and that I've been working on this morning. I'm not sure whether it's quite finished (but then again, I never am), but I think it's ready to be viewed . . .

Pausing between the meres on his homeward journey
he looks at the yellowing leaves
as if seeing them for the first time.
Somewhere a buzzard is mewing.
Late afternoon in early autumn, with a sharpening breeze
to usher in the shorter days.

Leaning on the gate to recover his breath,
he is startled by a cascade of swallows;
they appear as if from nowhere,
but these are not the skimming, dancing birds of summer.
Now each bird flies with solemn purpose and direction,
for they are heading south, they are heading home.

He notes their passing, shakes his head.
So, where am I headed, he wonders, what refuge for me?
He has seen too many autumns;
each time it seems harder to take,
the yellowing of the leaves and the flying of the birds,
the closing down of things.

Suddenly, close by, a robin begins to sing,
her notes falling through a minor key
like ice crystals gently forming in the air. He looks up:
the sky is certainly clear enough for frost,
but maybe not quite yet, there’ll be
a week or two more of hanging on, he thinks.
He kicks his boots against the gatepost
to clear the mud of the mere bank from their treads.
And as he sets off up the lane, a single swallow
flips and curves back across the hedge; this one at least
seems happy to stay a day or two more.

So, we’re not done quite yet, he decides.
He whistles a tune to match the robin, makes for home.
Sunshine filters soft and low through the alders, while
ahead a rising plume of smoke speaks of
welcome hearth and comfy chair.
No need for now to reflect too deeply on
the yellowing of leaves, the ice in the air,
and the shortening of days and of breath.

Wet Weather

Well, a proper wet day today, the first for a while. We've had some heavy rain over recent days, but nearly all at night. I had a nice walk down to the pub though, for the poetry evening. An excellent guest poet, and a couple of decent pints of Adnam's, and good company.

Walking home, it's marvellous how just a couple of pints can propel you uphill so that you hardly notice the steepness. Wet nights, though - where the path is well lit, that's all right, but where shadows fall across it, or a street light is out (thank you, Powys County Council!), you tread carefully. I hate the sudden crunch which means (usually) that you've trodden on a snail - or even worse, the slimy squelch that suggests a slug has met its doom. On a wet night like this, they are out in force. I think I missed most of them.

On Dives and Lazarus

A sermon for tomorrow, at Welshampton and Coedway . . .

We’ve just heard the story of Dives and Lazarus, maybe the original rich man in his castle and poor man at his gate - to borrow from the verse of All Things Bright and Beautiful that we don’t sing any more. The rich man doesn’t have a name in story in fact; the name we give him, Dives, really just means ‘Rich Man’.

Those who first heard Jesus tell this story would have thought that to be a rich man was proof of God’s blessing. Surely God was smiling down on people like that. Some people of course became rich in bad ways, like the tax-collectors who worked for the Romans and were cheats and anyway outside the Law and out of God’s favour; but so far as we know Dives wasn’t like that; he probably did all the right things - kept the feasts and fasts, went regularly to the temple and the synagogue, prayed at the proper times each day. I think Dives was a man other people looked up to.

And when Jesus went on to tell his disciples that it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, they’d have been staggered to hear him. A pious and obedient rich man who lived according to the Law was surely already on a fast track into heaven. Everyone could see such a man was richly blessed.

Not so, says Jesus to them. The problem is that things we think we own can end up owning us. A rich man can be made short-sighted by his wealth, so that his wealth becomes an end in itself; so the wealth of Dives and the comfortable life it bought him had made him blind to what was really happening in the world around him. Blind to Lazarus begging by his gate. The way I see it, a man like Dives, who was surely very conscious of his civic and religious duty, he’d have tossed a coin or two to Lazarus there at his gate if he’d seen him. But he didn’t; he was too wrapped up in his own affairs to notice him. These days such a man might sweep past in his stretch limousine with its tinted windows, not seeing the bums begging on the street. No limo, but otherwise it was much the same back then.

Maybe Jesus told this story to help his disciples tackle an issue that must have been nagging them: why it was that while people abandoned and rejected by the religious elite came to hear Jesus preach, pious and godly people other folk looked up to hardly gave him the time of day, and often briefed and plotted against him. Surely a teacher of God’s word should be heard gladly by holy folk like the Pharisees, so why, instead, were these people constantly trying to catch Jesus out, and trip Jesus up?

In the story both Dives and Lazarus die, and Lazarus is carried into the bosom of Abraham, while Dives ends up in the flames of hell. At first read that sounds like karma in Buddhist or Hindu thought - a sort of payback time, where the unfairnesses of this world get set straight. The wealth and success Dives enjoyed in this life has destined him for a next life full of torment. But in fact it isn’t for his wealth that Dives gets punished: to be wealthy is fine. But Dives had allowed his wealth turn him blind, he’d allowed what he owned to own him instead.

And he finds himself in an unreachable place where no-one can even get across to soothe his parched lips with a drop of water. So Dives says, even if you can’t help me, then at least don’t let my brothers go the same way - send someone to warn them. But they’ve been warned already, he’s told. It’s all there in the scripture you read every day, the word you hear expounded every Sabbath in the synagogue or the temple. But, says Dives (as I imagine him, anyway) you can’t expect them to listen to that - that’s just the stuff we get in church. I mean, I always went, and I sang the hymns and said the prayers, but you know, it was always mostly so I was seen doing the right thing. I never listened all that hard to the sermon so I don’t suppose my brothers have either. So please, do something big and flash so they can’t help but notice. Hey! Send Lazarus back, that’ll do it - they’ll surely pay attention if someone comes back from the dead!

It’s then we hear that chilling phrase: "If they’ve not listened to Moses and the prophets they’re not going to listen; they won’t even listen if someone should rise from the dead.”  There’s none so blind as those who will not see; there’s none so deaf as those who stop their ears to the word. The summary of the law, all the Jewish law and prophets rolled up into one, is this, and we know it well: ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength; and love your neighbour as yourself.’

So what might that mean for Dives, and maybe for us? To love our neighbour we must first seek out and find our neighbour; our neighbour isn’t just the person who happens to come our way or knock on our door or live down our street, though of course to be generous to them is important. Our neighbour is anyone we could help, and some of those people don’t present themselves well, they may be hard to like, they may be hard even to see. Dives never noticed Lazarus. If he’d noticed him, he might have helped him. He didn’t though - they just didn’t move in the same circles.

Then we’re to love our neighbour as we love ourselves. It’s OK to love ourselves; it’s fine to enjoy life; we don’t have to wear hair shirts all the time. God made us, and he made us to be beautiful, both inside and out; God made the good earth and its fruits, and he wants us to enjoy them. Religious folk don’t need to be solemn and sour-faced, we’re allowed to have fun. Jesus himself loved a good party! What’s wrong is when we enjoy the earth at the expense of others; and when we squeeze charity down into “what we do with the stuff left over once we’ve spent all we want on ourselves”. That’s when we lose focus, lose the Jesus touch. My neighbour may be no more important than me; but they’re certainly no less important.

For all the our Brexit worries, we still live in a prosperous part of the world. We’re blessed with more than others have. Some of those others are beating at our doors, are floating across the Med or trying to board trucks in Calais. We could feel threatened, even besieged; many people do feel that way, but what about us?

For the person of faith, wealth carries with it responsibility - Dives may not have realised that, but we should. So it’s not just a sign of God’s favour upon me, the fact that I’m not too badly off; it’s an opportunity to do something useful, it’s a chance to be of service. Put simply, what God gives me remains his, even though it’s also mine. As we approach the season of harvest, in Church we remind ourselves again that God is the giver of all good things, and that we should use and employ what he gives us in the spirit of the giver. And in doing that, give a lead to others. God loves it when our eyes are open to see as he sees, so we interpret and respond to what we find there with compassion and love. God loves it when we recognise our neighbours, and when with generous hearts we set ourselves to provide for their needs, as well as for our own.

Harvest Festival

The HF season comes round again . . . this is my sermon for Corndon Marsh, Chirbury, Montgomery PC, Wattlesborough MC and Cefn MC (I think that's the full list for this year!).

At a recent service I attended at Welshpool Methodist Church, the minister got us placing missing pieces - we’d all been given one each - into a jigsaw puzzle of Noah’s ark. Her theme was jigsaws rather than arks, but I couldn’t help but notice that one of the beasts waiting to enter the ark was a giant panda, and that felt sort of wrong; surely the animals Noah brought into the ark would have been ones that were actually present in the Middle East at that time, which doesn’t include pandas. Of course, the Bible does say that Noah brought two of every sort of animal into the ark; but the logistics of getting every animal in the world into one boat left my head spinning. Having said that, though, the giant panda is a very potent symbol of endangered species, and of our impact on what is a very fragile environment and ecosystem; so if the jigsaw picture was not so much about Noah back then but where we are today, I guess the giant panda should have been there after all.

There are only about a thousand giant pandas left in the wild today, along with maybe another hundred or so in captivity, and scientists are very concerned about how viable a population that small can be. Loss of habitat is a big concern, as it is for many other species; a habitat may not be completely destroyed, but quite subtle changes can unbalance things in ways that affect particular species. Scientists are noting huge falls in frog populations all around the world, from Australia to Central America. No-one really knows why they’re disappearing so fast. Maybe global warming. Maybe a build-up of chemicals like pesticides in the environment. Maybe places that used to be wet are drying out. Maybe there’s more than one reason, it could be that frogs more sensitive to change than some other creatures. I was reading an article on the subject that suggested that by the time we know for sure why frogs are declining, it’ll be too late to do much about it.

I trained long ago as an environmental scientist, so these are issues that will always interest and disturb me. Countryside birds that used to be common – lapwings, corn buntings and even house sparrows – are on the decline, and again, it’s hard to know why. The natural environment is complex and sensitive, and changes in the way we do things, changes in farming, in lifestyle, in trade, may happen too quickly for the ecosystem to cope. We so much power, maybe too much.

So if the minister’s jigsaw that day was as much to do with conservation today as a great flood back then, it reminds us of the need for modern day Noahs. I remember singing a song in school assembly that begins “The world is a garden you made.” I think it was written for the Worldwide Fund for Nature. It does all begin with a garden if you look back to chapter 2 of the book of Genesis. Adam and Eve are placed in the Garden of Eden, where everything’s in harmony, and the sun sparkles on the morning dew.

When Adam was the gardener there, he didn’t need to do much gardening. It’s only when we read on into the next chapter, with the serpent and the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and then Adam and Eve thrown out of Eden - that’s when he has to start doing real gardening, the kind that gives you blistered hands and an aching back.

Harvest Festival prayers often speak about us as being stewards of creation. But creation wouldn’t need any stewarding if it wasn’t for us human beings and the way we mess things up. Things in the natural world would roll on quite nicely without us; but with us, so much is vulnerable and there’s a need for conservation and care. Maybe the giant panda could represent the many species that might well be better off if we weren’t around.

But what would be the purpose of a world like that? In Adam and Eve and their descendants, people to till the ground, to blast the rocks, to invent and make all kinds of things, a new phase of creation begins. God’s creation becomes conscious of itself and of its God. Through human beings what God has made, like moulding clay on a potter's wheel, ceases to be inert and thoughtless and can choose and reason - can reach out to its creator, or not, as we choose. We’re free agents, we can worship or we can ignore the hand that shaped us.

Last week my daily paper informed me that we human beings have only twice as many genes as the fruit fly, and many of them are just the same. Scientists use fruit flies a lot in genetic research. They are smaller and simpler and arguably a rather less intelligent than us marvellous men and women, but like us, they are also (if I may borrow some Bible words) fearfully and wonderfully made. They are made of the same stuff as we are. Scientists tell us that, but so does the Bible. In Genesis chapter 2 we find that we and all other living things are formed from the dust of the ground.

And fruit flies too have their place in the order of things, just like pandas, frogs, sparrows and for that matter blue whales and three toed sloths: each one of them the outworking of God's creative love, each one of them precious in his sight. And so are we, of course, as the cross of Jesus must always remind us. But unlike pandas and whales and sloths, we know that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and we know that they are too. Knowing that confers a responsibility upon us; Harvest Festival is a time to remind ourselves that as stewards of what God made we should make sure our earthly home has space and food not only for us, but for the myriad living things that Adam once gave names to, and that our Lord created out of dust and love.

I’m really glad to be with you tonight, because Harvest Festival is one of my very favourite times in the church year. And as we sing our harvest hymns let’s not only pray for the land around us and all who work on it; and let’s not only give thanks for the fruitfulness of the harvest we’ve brought in, but let’s take the wider perspective in which we see how it all links together; one harvest of all the world, in which the skill and labour of all kinds of people near and far helps keep us fed and clothed and provided for.

But there’s more than that. Harvest isn’t just stuff, it’s also people, souls, lives. We ourselves are harvest, and we’re right to think tonight about the harvest of our souls, the harvest of our faithful response to God. Thankfulness is expressed not in what we say, or not only in what we say, but in what we do; our actions are what make our words credible, and those who are truly thankful will show their thanks in sharing and using well what they’ve been given - using the gifts of harvest in a way that honours the giver. Our prayers today will touch on those whose harvest is poor, and who may suffer or starve without our help.

Harvest Festivals look forward and look back; back to those who worked this land before us, to the old harvest hymns and to traditions we don’t want to lose, stories of past faith and service. But also forward to those who inherit this earth from us - they need to receive it in good order, so that they too, future generations known and unknown, can have a secure and plentiful harvest. It’s been well said that we don’t inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children. And Harvest Festival should also look outwards; so we think not only what we can have and own and use, but of pandas and frogs and sparrows, as well: how poor the world would be if there was not also a harvest for them.

Fixed on the Cross

I wonder if the parable of the Unjust Steward raises issues for you, as it’s tended to for me? Ever since I first read it, I’ve wondered why Jesus should be praising a man who’s cheated his employer - and, in the process, recruited other people into his conspiracy. And how Jesus can possibly want his disciples to go and do the same, as he seems to. Jesus also says we should use our worldly wealth to win friends for ourselves; what does he mean by that? It sounds a bit like bribery, it doesn’t sound like how I’ve always assumed Christians should live.

But maybe that’s the reaction Jesus wanted. Jesus didn’t only say nice easy things, often the things he said shocked people. His teaching was fresh and different, and sometimes that meant puzzling, even alarming. I think that when Jesus told this story, he wanted his disciples to sit up and pay attention. So if they were startled by what he said, if they were wondering “Where’s he going with this?” - well, that was all to the good.

But look a bit closer at what he said. It isn’t Jesus who commends the dishonesty of the unjust steward, it's the steward's master in the story who does that - a man who'd probably made his own wealth by the same sharp practice and cheating. He’d surely have been angry at what his steward did, but even so I reckon he couldn't help but admire the speed of the steward’s reactions, and the sharpness of his wit. In fact, he probably ended up thinking: "Goodness, I didn't know he was that good!  Perhaps I can still use him, after all."

So what does the story say to us? Not that we should be dishonest in the service of our Lord, but that we should be quick off the mark, not letting opportunities pass us by: chances to win friends, to change lives, and to use in creative ways the resources God gives us. You’ll know the saying "so heavenly minded that he’s no earthly use." Well, that shouldn't be us: we’re to be - like the unjust steward - clear-sighted and quick-witted.

I no longer need to go to clergy training sessions; but a year or two before I retired I was part of the planning team for one. Our main speaker was a man called Art Gafke, who if I remember rightly was a Methodist minister in Las Vegas. We were lucky I think to get him - Art was a guy with a wealth of experience, a great sense of humour and some good stories to tell. His theme was about how by understanding ourselves and our situations better, we become better able to set aside our own agendas to co-operate together, to use our personal resources more creatively as people of God, and to become more effective ministers for Christ.

And that, he told us, requires us to think outside the box. Not to do what’s always been done before just because it's always been done that way, not to do things the way other people tell us they should be done, and not to let ourselves be hemmed in and limited by what other people expect. We need to work in a way that’s appropriate to the strengths and abilities we have, appropriate too to the world we’re working in. The message as he delivered it came across as new and fresh, but really it's the same as the message Jesus had for his disciples.

For he told them to use every means at their disposal, and he tells us the same. That might mean doing things differently from how our forebears did them. For the Gospel to be heard in today’s world, e must tell it in ways and language that today’s world understands. That’s led to churches that don't fit the traditional model: churches that look more like cafes, or like one I’ve heard of that meets in a gym, while people are training; or festivals of one kind or another - a friend of mine’s just got back from his first Greenbelt, and he’ll certainly be going again; or virtual churches on the internet. Four young clergy from Lichfield Diocese (and one slightly older one behind the camera) have started something called the TGI Monday Show, a little ten minute slice of discussion filmed in north Shropshire that you can watch on the web. Fresh expressions of ministry, so called, may not be for everyone, but mission within a mixed economy means we can no longer say if we ever could that 'one size fits all'. Having said that, the traditional church remains part of the mix. New ways of doing worship and teaching and outreach don’t replace “traditional church” but fit in alongside and add to it.

For if what we believe matters to us, then we need to be sharing it, using every means at our disposal. But whether we're doing new and different things or sitting in the same pews as our forebears, this is always true: we need a firm focus in our ministry.

Not long ago I was watching a tight-rope walker on the telly; I could hardly bear to look, I’ve never been good with heights. Just now there’s an ad on the telly where someone’s sitting on a rock on the edge of a cliff; obviously they didn’t fall off, but I still worry that they might each time it comes on. I was also very worried about this tight-rope walker. He didn’t look very safe. He stopped and swayed on the rope; he took a step back; his pole was first tipping up on his right, then on his left. I thought he’d lost it, which I’m sure was deliberate, all part of the act. For suddenly he was OK again, stepping confidently across to the other side. And I was able to breathe again.

A few weeks ago the world said farewell to the Christian clown, evangelist and Anglican priest Roly Bain. He used to do tightrope walks as part of his act, on a wire strung across the church, as a way of preaching about faith. There’s a fresh expression of ministry if you like. I’ve watched him do it. On a tight-rope, to get across to the other wide without falling you need to be completely fixed on where you’re going. To be distracted could be - well, maybe not fatal, there is a safety net, but embarrassing, to say the least. So as a good demonstration of a truth that applies to disciples as well as tight-rope walkers, what Roly Bain fixed his eyes on at the far end of his rope was a cross. As well as enthralling and entertaining the people who came out to see him, he had a discipleship message to share from that rope, about being completely fixed on our Saviour and on the sacrifice that saves us, and not letting ourselves be diverted or distracted. As it happens, I did borrow his sermon and do my own tightrope walk once at a family service - but before you get too impressed, I did it at about three inches above the ground. I know my limits.

Anyway, neither tight-rope walkers nor disciples can serve two masters. At the end of our reading this morning, Jesus says that we can’t serve God and money. In the old Authorized Version we read that we can’t serve both God and “mammon,” and I like that word better: it widens our thinking out from just money, to include a whole host of worldly things that could distract us - that could hold us and bind us. Not just money itself, but status, possessions, even traditions, even wanting to keep things how they’ve always been. Jesus tells us that we should use whatever wealth we have in God’s service; and we should value what we have, delight in the good things of the world. But always in ways that honour the giver; what we mustn’t do is to let what we have use us, own us, take us over. Give God the glory, and him alone.

And, says Jesus, be inventive. Be like the unjust steward. Think on your feet. Use whatever you have at hand, make the very most of whatever opportunities present themselves. You don’t have to do what people have always done. But we do need to know where we're headed, we do need to know whose word it is we preach, and honour him in the preaching; we do need to keep eyes, heart, mind focused on Christ and Christ alone.

The words we use may change, the place in which we worship may be re-ordered, changed round, or maybe changed altogether. We may not dress the way we used to, or sing the same songs, or pray the same prayers. But, whether we welcome change or find it hard, what really matters is this: that the Gospel is being preached, taught and proclaimed as widely and persuasively as possible, and people invited, welcomed and affirmed, met where they are. The message itself remains the same. The words we use may change, the way we speak them may change, but the Gospel itself does not. Our Lord Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and for ever: and today he calls from us an urgent witness of focus and faithfulness, and of inventive opportunism, in the service of his love.

A Long Sentence

Our family’s been quite free of crime,
there’s been none of our lot doing time,
till my cousin, young Tom, he’s a clot,
on our copy book left quite a blot.

He went down to the library one day,
got a book out and took it away,
made a start on the crime he had planned,
bought some Tippex and steadied his hand.

He went through all the lines on each page,
with determined and furious rage,
and he Tippexed out every full stop,
working up from the base to the top.

He took the book back the next day,
But the library assistant said, ‘Hey,
you’ve defaced every page in this book!’ -
and she called her boss over to look.

And soon a policeman was called,
and off to the nick Tom was hauled.
That was Tuesday - and Tuesday next week
he’ll be pleading his case to the beak.

His defence doesn’t seem very strong,
defacing a book, it’s just wrong -
and if you remove the full stops . . .

. . . well, you can expect to get a very long sentence!

Ivy

Just when everything else is shutting down for the season, ivy is in flower along our hedgerows, in woods, on old buildings, in all sorts of places. A woody climber native to Europe, ivy is an important food-source for wildlife.

It can thrive in shady places, is a good groundcover and handy for hiding ugly garden features like oil tanks, old sheds,  and tree stumps. Many cultivated varieties are available, so ivy is a popular garden plant, used of course also in floral art and winter decorations especially at Christmas.

But ivy is also an important source of food and shelter for wildlife during autumn and winter. Just now, late insects are buzzing around its flowers, which are pollinated by moths and late wasps. Later the black berries will find a use. Blackbirds love them. Ivy berries that last through into spring will also be a useful early food source for young birds. And as an evergreen, ivy provides shelter for a wide variety of over-wintering creatures. Ivy is also browsed by cattle.

Though often thought of as a parasite, ivy is not in fact parasitic, and will not normally damage a sound building or wall, nor is it generally a threat to healthy trees. Regular trimming can help a lot though, as a good lush growth of ivy in winter, especially if covered by snow, can be quite a weight to bear, particularly where trees are already getting past their best.

Our native species of ivy, Hedera helix, is native to western and central Europe from southern Scandinavia southwards. Ivy has been introduced to many other parts of the world, and is often regarded there (e.g., the USA) as an invasive and unwanted species.

Ivy berries have been used as a source of dye, and in ancient Rome ivy wreathes were used to crown winners of poetry contests. In medieval times ivy on a pole was used as an alepole - the sign of a place that sold alcoholic drinks.

Bees make good use of ivy flowers, at a time when there are few other sources of nectar. One new arrival in the UK is the ivy bee, a fairly large solitary bee. This is rather like a honey bee in shape, but with stronger stripes of yellow or orange on the abdomen and a furry orange thorax. This bee flies through a five or six week period of the autumn, and so far seems to have had little impact on existing bee species. It was first noted in the UK in 2001 and had reached this part of the country by about 2013.

Scrufftop

A sermon for this Sunday . . .

I should preach to you about sheep and shepherds today, and perhaps in a moment I will. After all, the lost sheep is one of the best known of the parables Jesus told, one I’ve re-told very fruitfully in many a children’s service and school assembly. But first, let me tell you a story about a family moving house.

At the end of weeks of sorting things out, packing, preparing, the day at last had come. Everything that was moving had been packed into boxes and cases and tea chests. All the furniture was piled together, the carpets and rugs were rolled up, the pictures had been taken down off the walls and wrapped in old sheets. Soon the furniture van would arrive, and everything would be loaded in. And then the family would follow by car: Mum, Dad, David and Alison.

Alison had packed a bag with a lot of her toys in. They were to come with the family in their car, being, as she said "MUCH too precious to send in any old furniture van." Her mother had tried to pack My Little Ponies and a host of other things into the boxes labelled “toys”, but Alison would have none of it. Nearly all her best toys were in the car. Her big brother David, on the other hand, had been happy to let his toys be packed - those he was even bothering to take, that is. Really, David was growing out of toys.  He'd sent quite a few to the summer jumble sale at school.

Some of the others were outside, in the Box for Broken Toys. For when you move house there’s a great opportunity for sorting things out, and throwing things out, and Mum had done her best. That toaster that had somehow lingered on in the kitchen even though it had toasted nothing for years - there’d be no place for it in the new kitchen. Dad's old gardening trousers and that dreadful hat he sometimes wore were at the bottom of a dustbin bag where. all being well, he’d never find them. And the Broken Toys - cars and tractors with wheels missing, dolls that had lost an arm or leg, jigsaw puzzles with pieces missing: all of these had been tossed into the Box for Broken Toys, ready for that day's visit by the Dustbin Men. New house equals new start, no more Broken Things.

Among the Broken Toys was Scrufftop. He was actually quite near the bottom of the box, because he'd been one of the first Broken Toys to go in. Scrufftop had been David's teddy bear, but David didn't need teddy bears any more. He hadn't looked at Scrufftop for years. Scrufftop had an eye missing, a torn ear, and was mostly bald; nor was he as well stuffed as once he'd been. Not that he'd ever been a very handsome bear (hence the name). If toys could talk, like they do on 'Toy Story', I don’t imagine the other toys would have said much to Scrufftop that was positive. He’d had his day. Once he'd been loved; now he was just rubbish.

David and Alison were both very excited about the new house; but Alison was feeling a little bit sad as well. She'd had many happy times in the old house, and it was sad to see it now with no curtains in the windows, already beginning to look unwanted. The furniture men were just finishing loading the van, so the children climbed into the back of the family car. Many of Alison's toys were in the boot - to be honest, there wasn't much room for anything else - but she'd brought one load into the car with her (packed in a Sainsbury's Bag for Life); and now, as the car headed out of the drive, she delved down and found Harry, her fluffy and cuddly green hedgehog. A little bit of comfort, as she said a sad goodbye to their old happy house.

Meanwhile, down near the bottom of the Box for Broken Toys, think of Scrufftop - unloved and unwanted, not even thought about any more. Once he'd been loved; now he was just rubbish. Or was he? When David noticed his sister cuddling Harry the Hedgehog, he suddenly shouted out, "WHERE'S SCRUFFTOP?" Mum looked round and smiled. "Where's what?" she said. "David, you’ve not bothered with that old thing for years!" She turned back. "Haven't you brought him?" asked David. "Of course not!" Mum replied. The car turned onto the main road out of town. "We have to go back for him!" David announced - and with one of his 'My dear, what have you done now?' expressions on his face (but wisely saying nothing) Dad turned the car round, and headed back.

Back at the old house the Dustbin Men were already busily shifting rubbish. Half the street had been cleared already; and if there hadn't been a bit of a problem getting the dustbin lorry past a bus going one way and a milk float heading the other, maybe the bags and boxes at David and Alison's old house would also have gone. As it was, they just got back in time. As soon as the car came to a stop, David's door was open; he ran straight to the Box for Broken Toys, and scrabbled and scrabbled down to nearly the bottom.  And there he was - old hairless, one eyed, torn-eared fantastic Scrufftop.

Broken? Maybe he was. Old? Certainly. But unwanted and unloved, and just rubbish? No way. New house, new start, lots of new things to look forward to, but it seemed there'd always be a place for old Scrufftop.

So there you are. Funny, isn’t it, how we can go on loving scruffy old special toys like teddy bears, how they stay special even when no-one else would give them a second glance. Funny, isn’t it, how God feels much the same about us. David loved Scrufftop in a special way; even though he'd grown out of most of his toys, he wasn't going to let go of Scrufftop. Years later, and grown up, it wouldn’t surprise me if he still has him, and still loves him.

God loves each one of us in just that same way. As if each one of us was that one special toy you go on loving when you've forgotten all the others. And he still loves us, loves us just as much, when we're scruffy and smelly and not very lovable. He may not like us, but he goes on loving us. Other people may throw us out, treat us like rubbish, but God continues to love us. That’s the message Jesus came to bring; that’s the story behind the story of the lost sheep. It’s about how much God loves and treasures and cares for each one of us.

So back to the story of the lost sheep. I reckon that most of the time if one out of a hundred sheep goes missing, the shepherd will write it off, cut his losses, and be thankful he’s still got the others; but this shepherd doesn’t do that. Each one of his sheep is known, valued, loved; so off he goes to search for it. And when he finds it and brings it home, there's great rejoicing.

Some people thought that if Jesus was a proper teacher he’d spend all his time with the insiders, the holy folk who did all the right things and never strayed. They were highly suspicious of the way he’d go off to visit and spend time with outsiders, folk like tax collectors, prostitutes, undesirable people - sinners. Jesus gives them and us a simple and direct answer. You may write people off, he says, but God never does. We may drift away from God, to get lost in all the tempting byways of the world, but God never stops loving us.

The Church is the body of Christ, so being as like Jesus as we can be is our number one priority. This parable reminds us that to do that includes seeking out those who are lost, and bringing them home. Teresa of Avila says that 'ours are the hands with which Christ seeks to bless the world today'. So the Church can never be content as it is, and the Church has no right to be aloof and in any way to look down on those around it. We’re all rather like Scrufftop, loved despite ourselves, not because of our innate goodness or beauty. What saves us is not that we do well, but that God does not give up on us. And so like our Lord himself (and in his service), our call is to seek out the lost and strayed, and to bring them back so that they, like us, can know God's love for them, and know that love for real. And then there will be rejoicing in heaven.

As Jesus says to us (every one of us): "Love one another, just as I have loved you."

An old sermon

I was asked the other day what my sermon had been on the readings set for last Sunday (which included the difficult words of Luke 14. 25-33). I had to reply that I had in fact preached on totally different readings - however, here is a sermon prepared for Deut 30. 15-20 and Luke 14. 25-33, preached six years ago . . .

Today I offer you the choice of life and good, or death and evil.

With those stark words, the people of Israel are prepared for their crossing over into the Promised Land.  This is what Moses tells them: “Love the Lord your God and walk in his ways, keep his commandments, decrees and laws.”  When they do that, God will bless them as they enter the land.

In other words, there’s no room for half-heartedness;  what Moses is really saying is this: If you’re not fully up for this, then just stay this side of the river, or wander off back into the wilderness.  If you’re going to cross the river to claim what God has promised, you’ve got to be committed with all your heart to his service and to the keeping of his commands.

I was reading the other day on the sports pages about a star player who’d been dropped for the big game.  Why aren’t you playing him, the manager was asked: he’s the best player you’ve got.  I can’t play him, was the reply:  He’s not in the right frame of mind.   He can’t give me the commitment I need.  It isn’t how good he is, it’s whether he can play as part of the team.

I think I was a bit like that at school.  I was an able pupil, good at most subjects, I got good marks, I could pick things up quickly. And yet I was the despair of many of my teachers, because my mind was so often elsewhere.  I’d be gazing out of the window and not really engaging with things at all.

Ability isn’t enough, without commitment.  You need to be on-side, you need to be part of the team. You need to turn to the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.  If you can’t do that, don’t bother - isn’t that what Moses was saying?

And Jesus says some really hard things in our Gospel, doesn’t he? “Unless you hate your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, you can’t be my disciple.”  That really jars, doesn’t it?  We have to hate our own kith and kin?  What sort of a Christian would that make us - hating our own nearest and dearest? Doesn’t God want us to be loving and dutiful, as parents, as partners, as siblings?

Of course he does;  and if you do happen to be having problems with your parents, your children, your brothers, sisters, or even your friends, sorry, you do not have permission to hate them as a Christian duty!  Jesus is saying the same sort of thing as Moses:  this is about commitment.  What Jesus tells us is that we shouldn’t place anything above our allegiance to God, and our commitment to serve him;  not even our duty to our own families.  To be a dutiful parent, child, sibling, to be a good citizen or friend or member of the community member - these things follow from our duty to God, they don’t take precedence over it.

Those other duties are still important;  none of us should act badly, spitefully or uncaringly to those who have a right to expect us to treat them with love; but not even the closest relationship, not even our love of our own life, should be allowed to stand in the way of the first call upon us:  love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind and strength.  I think it was William Ruskin who said:  “He who gives God but second place in his life, gives him no place.”

Moses says: Don’t cross the river unless you’re wholehearted in your desire to serve the God who is giving you this land.  Don’t come with me, says Jesus, unless you’re seriously ready to put what my Father asks of you first before everything else.  In other words, religion doesn’t make a good hobby, not if you’re being real about it. True religion requires the gift of your deepest and truest self.  We’re to offer to God “ourselves, our souls and bodies” - and to hold nothing back.

Such self-offering isn’t just about what we do here, it’s not only about being committed to church.  When Jesus says “Take up your cross” that’s a lifestyle choice, and a lifelong commitment.  The place and power of the cross in our lives will be revealed in more than being part of the church and present here for this hour on a Sunday.  In some ways, dare I say, that’s the least important bit.  Our use of time, our allocation of money, our care for others and the welcome we offer, our care for the world and our thought for the environment, the moral standards to which we aspire, our readiness not only to speak but also to live the truth:  these are the vital outward expressions of true inward commitment.

Religious zeal can easily be perverted and misused by unscrupulous faith leaders who use the power they have for their own ends. That’s a feature of cults, of religious extremism, and even the mainstream churches aren’t totally immune.  We see it of course in other faiths too, and to me, extremism anywhere is abhorrent.  But   there’ll always be those who set themselves up in God’s place, to misappropriate the enthusiasm and desire of those whose only aim at the start was to serve.

Jesus knew that:  many will claim my name, he told his followers;  many will try and lead people in the wrong direction, and, yes, some people will get fooled.  We need to be on our guard, we need to test what we’re told and taught: the only true way for us is the way of the cross.  We know that God is love, and that in his love he seeks peace and healing and understanding, forgiveness and compassion and justice.  So any word that leads us away from those things, is not the word of God, however plausibly it’s preached.  We know what God wants of us, as Paul reminds us, for we have the mind of Christ. And in Philippians chapter 2 verse 6 he writes that Jesus was by his very nature God, and yet he humbled himself, taking the form of a servant.”  There’s the test we should apply, whether we’re looking inwardly at our own selves, or reflecting on the teaching others give us.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, with all your mind and strength;  and the second part of the summary of the law will then naturally follow:  and love your neighbour as yourself.  Our true love for God is bound to be revealed in our care for others, in our readiness to give and to serve in every aspect of our daily lives.  In our daily lives in which again and again, that crucial question is posed:  are you up for this, or are you not?  Will you cross the river?  Choose, life and good, or death and evil.  All that matters is this, as we come to kneel at the table set by our Servant King, whose mark is the cross:  are we people of the cross, or are we not?  Are we committed to him, are we his full-time disciples, or are we just playing at it?  This man wants first place in my life, or no place:  will I do that - will I make my best stab at it, anyway?  And will you?

Slow Burn

A poem in process . . .

You spent long enough

piling the brushwood into place,

getting it just right. You don’t need

too much oxygen in the early stages. Oh, there’s

no smoke without fire, maybe,

but since you didn’t want too much fire too soon,

for now there’s hardly a wisp of smoke.

Meanwhile, the sun continues to shine,

just another Monday, like all the others,

traffic queuing on the M6, children

climbing aboard a yellow bus, while in the park

ducks squabble over bread on the pond.

So, Monday morning: coming up to nine o’clock.

The accident at junction 12 has become a

traffic report, three miles of tailback; the

children climb down the steps, leave their bus

to chatter between the iron gates, new term,

same stories; and the ducks are dabbling elsewhere,

having abandoned the last few stale crusts

to their friends the fish.

And I am just heading home. It’s a nice morning.

Meanwhile, the brushwood smoulders gently,

and no-one notices, no-one yet can

even smell the smoke. But in any case,

this is a controlled fire,

not someone trying to set the world alight;

the rest of humanity can get on with their Monday.

This fire is set along my way home,

and you have set it so well: it is

carefully hidden, carefully aimed.

One minute everything was sunny,

and the world was candy-sweet;

the next, I am surrounded by flames

(out of nowhere, so why am I not surprised?)

and I seem to be catching fire so quickly -

though, truth to tell, you knew (I’m sure)

that I was already caught.