Bury Parish Church

Everybody knows that Christianity is a missionary religion:  it is not simply concerned to promote peace and joy among those who are already committed to it; rather, there is an obligation on Christian people to seek to bring others to the light.   ‘Go therefore’, says Jesus to his disciples in the last chapter of St Matthew’s Gospel, ‘Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’.

There is a variety of opinion about how this task should be undertaken.   We must all have noticed how particular Christians, or parts of the Church, use very different methods.   Some see their calling as that of  telling people who seem to be content with their lives that they have no business to be content:  ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand’, says the man with the sandwich board at Hyde Park Corner.   ‘You may think you’re OK, but you are not really’.   On the other hand, some see the task not so much as to challenge those without a faith, as to find common ground with them, and to suggest that they are already close to Christian truth without having realized it.   Both methods are apt to be patronizing:  the first says to unbelievers: ‘You may think that you are content to ignore God, or to disbelieve in him, but actually you have a big hole in the middle of your life, and are empty without knowing it.   What you really want is to be like us Christians’.   The other says to them:  ‘You may think that you don’t believe, but really, you know, the things that you do hold dear and important are more or less Christian anyway.   You are practically a Christian without knowing it’.   So the first way tries to tell unbelievers that they don’t know their own hearts, and the second, that they don’t understand their own minds.

It is a fraught and difficult business.   But I am certain that the first and necessary step for those of us who do hold the faith is to learn to give a far better account of  what we believe, and why, than we have generally done in the past.   You must all have noticed how much hostile coverage there is of Christian things in television and the newspapers, and how this has grown significantly over the past few years.   No doubt it is partly because the Church has somehow been diverted from talking about things that matter to the world at large, and has in stead turned in on itself, endlessly debating issues that are really of no interest to people outside the pews.   But it is also, I believe, because Christian people have not been half clear enough about what it is that they actually believe.   Again and again, I hear some media guru attacking what he or she calls ‘Christianity’, and ascribing to it beliefs and attitudes that no Christian I know has ever held.

With this in mind, I have decided to put together  a series of Evensong sermons in Lent, setting out as clearly as I can the heart of what Christian faith is about, and how it hangs together.   You may feel that that sounds a bit like King Canute trying to make the waters recede.   What are a few parsonical utterances to tiny Evensong congregations, against the advancing hordes of Richard Dawkins and all his minions?   Well, maybe not very much.    But it will be a useful exercise for me – and I hope also for those who choose to come – and I hope at least that my poor words will help to prompt a bit of useful thinking from us all.   The first two, as you will see from the Parish Diary – on 21^st and 28^th February – are about ‘Faith and Evidence’ (if faith cannot be proved, does that mean that it doesn’t have to make sense?), and ‘The God of Israel’ (what should Christians do about the Old Testament?).  I shall run off a few copies to give away at the back of Church, and hope to generate a bit of general thought.  If any of you have questions or difficulties that you would like me to try and tackle, please let me know.

 There will also be an opportunity during Lent to do some group Bible study – this year, on St Luke’s Gospel.   There will be a communion service in Church every Wednesday evening at 7.30, and we shall then move to the Ashton Room for just an hour.   We begin on Ash Wednesday, 17^th February.

Bury Rectory

November 2009

Dear friends,

I wondered this morning, as I walked across to Mattins in the rain, whether it was ever going to come light again.  Every year, the shortening of the days, or at least the speed of it, catches me by surprise: it is easy to see how our distant ancestors should have imagined at this time of year that the sun might disappear altogether.  So they kept a great celebration at the end of December to mark the beginning of the lengthening of the days, and the promise of a new spring.  The Romans kept the festival of Sol Invictus (the unconquered sun) at the turn of the year, and it is easy to see why the Church should have chosen to celebrate Christ’s Nativity at the same time.

But before that arrives, we have four Sundays of Advent to occupy our minds.  The difficulty that I have with Advent, as I guess that you may, is that there is such a concentration of powerful images in the readings and prayers for these Sundays that I find them almost overwhelming; it is the sort of indigestible religious equivalent of plum pudding.  There is too much at once.

Partly, of course, Advent is about the countdown to Christmas, and that is easy to understand – almost too easy.  Twenty-four windows on the Advent calendar, each with a square of chocolate.  Children love it, and it is meat and drink to department stores.  The problem is keeping alive the sense of waiting – of expectancy.  We become bored with carols, if we are not careful, before the end of November.  But even here, in this sense of an ‘appointed time’, as Scripture says, there is the sense of a deeper truth.  The Lord’s coming, and its timing, and the pattern of it all, are in God’s will. He will have things his way.  This means that there is nothing that can come – shakings of the foundations, ‘wars and rumours of wars’, all those terrible Advent texts – that is outside his control. That is why we can dare read during Advent those frightening passages from Revelation and Daniel about the End of all things. 

Then, mixed up with this, there is also the great Advent theme of the ‘Four Last Things’ – death, judgement, hell and heaven.  The fact that at last we shall all come face to face with God’s truth, and be judged.  ‘The night is far spent; the day is at hand’.  ‘Let us cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light’.  I don’t see how we can escape such convictions if we take our religion seriously.  In the end there is the truth – God’s truth – and we shall have to face it.  As we sing those lusty Advent hymns – ‘O come, O come Emmanuel’; ‘Lo, he comes with clouds descending’ – which most people enjoy so much, I sometimes wonder whether we are singing the words with as much conviction as the tunes.  Because the words are sombre, and they are about judgement.

And Advent takes all of these things, and holds them together.  Nothing is outside God’s control.  Let the sea roar and the mountains quake, he is still God.  We came from him at first, and we shall return to him at last.  We stand under his judgement.  And the judgement to which we must come is the judgement of Christ. In the old liturgies of the Church – it is still there in the Prayer Book – the Gospel for Advent Sunday is the story of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem ‘humble and seated upon an ass’ : Advent means ‘coming’, and this was the great Coming that  Jerusalem had waited for. 

Yet, for all the Lord’s gentleness, it is no negligible thing, this judgement of his.  Woodbine Willie has a poem in which a soldier reflects on the teaching of his Padre (‘we called him ‘dismal Jim’, he says) who had forever been banging his pulpit and threatening his men with Hell.  And the soldier has a dream in which he looks back over his life, and calls to mind what he has done, and the hurt he has caused to others.  The dream ends when he looks into the face of Christ himself and realizes that ‘as often as you did it to the least of these, you did it to me’.  And his last word is that this judgement, standing before the eyes of Love, was more terrible than anything the Padre had ever preached about.  This is why Advent runs over into Christmas.  The God who came to meet us at Bethlehem is the Truth that we have to reckon with.

With love to you all from all of us at the Rectory, for Christmas and 2010,

John Findon, Christa,

Kate, Clare & John