Scribbles & Sermons

Sadness

Self-knowledge and finding contentment.

Ich weiß nicht was soll es bedeuten,Daß ich so traurig bin;

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)

Why, my soul, are you downcast? Why so disturbed within me?

Psalm 42, 43

These must be separated by thousands of years, yet speak of the human condition as unchanging. We have our ups and downs, and quite often we have no idea why. Maybe we learn things that trigger our own changes, maybe we discover tricks that break us out of the spiral. Music, long walks, activity? Maybe just finding some purpose, even in the very short term.

We somehow feel this transcends mere brain chemistry, yet that is so often the approach to therapy. Surely it can’t be more than a tweak, addressing the symptom rather than the cause? I remember a film from my youth “Morgan – a suitable case for treatment” where the treatment for manic depression left Morgan strangely inanimate, bereft of all his artistic talent, a shell of what had been before. Was he any better off? Was he happier?

Contentment is a great thing. Where does it come from? For me it started with self-knowledge, with recognising the sources of some of my deepest desires. It started with discovering personality type and realising I wasn’t the only one like me. With understanding that it was OK for others to be very unlike me, and vice-versa. I was OK the way I was. I might want to change or be changed, but the essential ‘me’ was OK. And other people were less irritating when I knew that their deep-seated desires were different from mine, their nature and history moulding them to something I could accept, even if I couldn’t understand.

“Love your neighbour as yourself” – this contains the presupposition that you love yourself. Lots of us might not! And if we don’t, then that’s where we have to start. Christ didn’t say Despise others as you despise yourself, he didn’t say Disparage others as you disparage yourself. We have to learn to love ourselves, otherwise all we see in others is a reflection of ourselves.

There’s a place to start. Myers-Briggs, Enneagram, Love languages. Find yourself; only then can you begin to appreciate others.

Bless you!

A people of prayer – Day 1

First impressions.

A people of prayer is next Sunday’s sermon topic. The readings are:

Matthew 6:5-8

and 1Thessalonians 5:16-28.

Reading these two passages immediately brought me back to last Sunday’s scribble. Alone or together? Well of course it’s both. Jesus always went to the synagogue, but he went to pray alone.

I also realise that different people pray in different ways. In Soultypes, Sandra Krebs Hirsh and Jane AG Kise examine the different soulwork (their term) preferences of people with various personality types. Here’s a brief extract:

……………………………………………………………………………………………….

“I attended a writers’ workshop at a retreat centre. One evening our leader dismissed the group to work on an assignment identifying our strengths as writers and our aspirations for the coming year.”

Introvert – “I couldn’t wait to get to my room – the evening session had covered so much and I was ready to organise my thoughts. The next ninety minutes flew by as my pen filled the paper. For me, this quiet time alone on the retreat was the most meaningful segment of the weekend.”

If this person was asked to participate in prolonged group discussions with no time for reflection, they might think they were struggling spiritually.

Extrovert – “They chose to use each other as sounding boards, tossing out ideas and dreams to allow those listening to give input on the patterns and strengths they saw. At breakfast they were still bubbling about the insights they had gained through their discussion.”

If this person attended a silent retreat with long periods for pondering a single idea, they might think they were struggling spiritually.

……………………………………………………………………………

I’ve got some starting ideas. I need two things now. One is time to ponder what I already have. This gives opportunity for God to speak, to inspire, to point me the right way.

The other is to give myself a better grounding in the Bible. So tomorrow I’ll start looking at what I find about prayer in the Good Book, starting by going back to the two set passages.

I use quite a few Bible translations and versions. Although I have a good library of proper paper books, I usually use Olive Tree Bible on a tablet. I have lots of Bibles available instantly, I can search and annotate, I can copy verses, and I have good commentaries instantly available too. I also use e-Sword, mainly because of the macros available to copy verses straight into MS Word.

Mentioning commentaries, I will be going to these after looking in the Bible itself. Primary source first.

 

Doing it by my own

In solitude or all together.

During Sunday morning’s service, I felt isolated from everything going on, so I scribbled down some thoughts.

How to praise when we just feel like being alone?

How to be the people of God when we don’t feel like being around other people?

How to go to church when we just want to go for a long walk by ourselves?

How to open up when we just want to shut down?

What is it about being together when we worship or praise that is significant? Christians, Jews, Muslims all gather together for prayer and praise.

It is often said you cannot be a lone Christian, yet the hermit has a special place in church history. The desert fathers lie firmly in our spiritual history. Why?

No man is an island: yet we all are. We have to establish our bridges and boats, to communicate ourselves to others, and to let them into our lives. No one truly knows us, and we are fearful of letting others see the person we perceive ourselves to be.

Yet God knows us thoroughly, better than we know ourselves – a great part of spiritual growth lies in coming to know and understand ourselves, and this can be a hard journey. Often, I think, we scarcely know ourselves. We are shaped so thoroughly by our early experiences that we can fail to recognise their influence, even to the point of not really understanding what we are now, let alone starting to comprehend how we came to be like that.

When we pray aloud, it is not because God needs to hear what we pray – he already knows what is on our hearts. It is because of what speaking something out loud does in us, and what it means to those who hear us. We are making bridges, launching boats. We are telling each other what lies on our hearts.

But what is it that happens within us when we pray (or praise) aloud? What happens when we take inchoate thought or desire, and mould it into words, and speak them out? Something changes. What is it?

Singing in a choir, or playing in an orchestra is somehow significantly different from playing or singing by ourselves. Why? How?

Harvest

On the wall across the room from my desk is a lithograph by John Nash. It depicts the corn harvest and dates from the 1940s, when a series of pictures called “The School Prints” was commissioned. I’m familiar with many of the series – they still hang in my parents’ house.

“Harvesters” shows a cornfield mid-harvest. A horse-drawn auto-scythe with its characteristic big paddlewheel is working its way around the shrinking stand of wheat in the centre of the field, leaving a trail of sheaves behind. Men are collecting the sheaves and stooking them up. Others are chasing rabbits flushed from the standing corn, as are several dogs. One has a shotgun, and is shooting at a fleeing rabbit. Altogether eight men are gathered to bring in the harvest from one small field.

This scene is much what I saw in my early childhood, though tractors were just starting to replace horses. My memories are of whole families gathered to collect and stook the sheaves, returning after a few days to stack the sheaves on a trailer using pitchforks to throw them up to the boys working atop the growing pile of corn. Long summer school holidays originated from the need for whole families to work together at harvest time. The school year started when harvest was complete. It still does.

Nowadays we see much bigger fields harvested by a single person with a huge combine harvester. Far fewer people are needed to work the land. Whole families no longer gather together for harvest.

For the Christian, the harvest that is a focus of the Gospels is still a labour-intensive business. Whole families are involved, but it isn’t a once-a-year concern, filling the summer holiday; it’s a life-long all-year-round interaction with our communities. It’s a concern for people, an involvement in the life of others. It’s loving your neighbour, not just at harvest time, but all year round.

Bless you

Jon

Memories

I sat on the train watching a familiar, long-forgotten landscape slip by: the tall chimney of Capper Pass at Brough, which had closed the airport. I remembered the Blackburn Beverley aircraft that were made there – squat fuselage and twin tailplanes, unlike any other plane I’d seen. Then sliding up alongside the Humber. Great banks of mud at low tide, or a broad expanse of clear water when the tide was in. Past the Bridge. I recall the building of that bridge, the longest single span suspension bridge in the world when it was built. I also remembered the ferry from Hull to New Holland – old-fashioned paddle steamers – which the bridge replaced.

As we drew into the city I saw familiar places like the allotment gardens tucked in between factories and warehouses – gardens which had been there the first time I made this journey as a small boy; I saw new retail parks occupying what had been docks beside the waters of the Humber. The city centre had become very different from my boyhood memories – the docks in Hull came right into the centre of the city, which had born the brunt of wartime bombing raids. The rebuilding had been slow, and continued after I left Hull in my late teens. There was much I just didn’t recognise at all.

The sadness of the lost memories filled me, reminding me that many of my memories of Hull included the father who was no longer there. So many good things, all gone.

But you know, we can wallow in nostalgia. “It ain’t what it used to be!” I remembered a poignant Beatles song from my youth – “In my life”.

There are places I’ll remember all my life, though some have changed. Some for ever, not for better; some have gone and some remain. All these places had their moments with lovers and friends I still can recall – some are dead and some are living. In my life, I’ve loved them all.

But we live in the moment, in the ‘Now’. The reality of things past was never as rosy as the pictures we paint in our memories. The Fifties and Sixties might seem like bright memories, but they were filled with poverty for many, with horrible injustices and inequalities, with poorer health and shorter life expectancy.

We live in the ‘Now’, and there is much to be thankful for, even if we view the future with a jaundiced eye, even though we worry about our country’s political and economic future, even though we worry about our world’s ecological future. Not that we shouldn’t be concerned about those things, but we should see the half-full glass we hold, and consider how we might help to fill it a little – being active in our support of the things we consider important, but valuing and enjoying the present. Living in the ‘Now’.

 

Encouragement

St Paul, in his missionary journeys around the Mediterranean in the First Century, usually had an assistant. Barnabus was one of these, and later Timothy took his place.

I have often wondered about this double-act. Paul comes across as an intense, driven man. I’m not sure he would have been easy to live with, and he rarely stayed in one place longer than a couple of years. Barnabus was called the “son of encouragement”. I like to think of him as a jolly, rather portly man, a good listener with an infectious chuckle. Paul shared the great truths of the Christian faith, Barnabus modelled their human face, showed the attractiveness of Christianity. I have met a number of Christians over the years who have prompted me to think “I wish I had what they have!”

That’s what Barnabus had. And it makes me consider the importance of encouragement in our lives. When we come up against problems, against opposition, we are often discouraged and down-hearted. We consider giving up the struggle, we wonder if we’re actually capable of doing whatever it is we’re attempting.

But encouragement comes like a refreshing drink – it restores our enthusiasm, it lifts our hearts. Remember the old advertisement – “Refreshes the parts other beers can’t reach”. That’s what encouragement does. It’s vital for our well-being, and we are drawn to those whose natural gift lies in encouragement – they are the glue in our fractured lives.

And maybe just occasionally, we stop and think “I wonder just what it is they’ve got, this thing I’d like to have. And for some of them, like Barnabus, it is the love and presence of Christ.

Bless you all

Jon

Where is our value?

August is here. Time to unwind from the stresses of work and spend time with the family. Time to recharge our batteries and remember that there’s more to life than work or school.

Work often gives us a purpose in life – “What do you do?” is always asking us about our work. Work is where we take our self-worth, where we find our identity. Losing your job creates a crisis of self-confidence, of identity, as well as the financial pressures it may bring. Even a well-planned retirement can result in real problems – we aren’t who we were – we have to reinvent ourselves.

We also value the esteem others hold for us – so we spend our lives trying to impress other people, instead of trying to do the right thing. It may be our family, or our peers – school friends or work colleagues – or any passing stranger! Whether we want smarter clothes or a better car, the chances are we  are thinking of how they will impress other people.

Even our ambitions are seated in the desire to impress. I pursued an academic career to please my parents – I wanted to feel my own value in their approval. Even now I can feel the sense of failure that I didn’t get a better degree, study for a doctorate, become an academic, because these are things I know my parents value.

But this is not how it should be!

When these things are stripped away – when we retire, or lose our employment, when we lose a position of influence, then we are thrown back upon ourselves. Who am I? What am I worth?

For the Christian, these questions should be answered within the context of our faith – God made me the way that I am, he looks upon me just as I look upon my children, and he loves me. Only when I think about how much I love my children do I realise how God cares about me.

This gives me a value that no job can, that no smart suit or posh car can – I matter to God, and I don’t have to work at it. And when I fail, as inevitably I do, He urges me to get up and start again, with forgiveness and no condemnation.

And so, it is time to take a break, to remember that work is not everything.

Have a great holiday!

Jon Rotheray

Forgiveness

ASH WEDNESDAY 2019

I have preached on Ash Wednesday for 5 of the last eight years. Looking back I see references to acts of kindness, God’s generosity (and ours), relationships, and justice. Today I’m going to look at forgiveness and repentance.

I think most of us know the story of the Prodigal son. The son who claims his inheritance, then leaves home and squanders it, leaving himself destitute. He resolves to go home, to beg his father’s forgiveness, and to offer to work among his father’s servants.  His father sees him coming from far off, and rushes to meet him with an embrace. He throws a huge celebration party for the son he thought lost.

Now, at what point in the story do you think the father forgave his wayward son?

I think forgiveness was in his heart from the very beginning. That is how I see God: forgiveness is in his heart. Today’s words from the Prophet Joel echo some lines from Psalm 103:

The Lord is gracious and compassionate,
slow to anger, abounding in love.
He does not treat us as our sins deserve,
or repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his love for those who fear him;
as far as the east is form the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

So far HAS he removed our transgressions from us. Past tense. It is done already. Christ has already paid the price. Through his sacrifice, we are made clean and fit to present to God our Father. What remains is our contrition and resolve to mend our ways.

So how does today’s story of the woman caught in adultery fit in? As we read the story we can see she has been trapped – the charge against her requires two independent witnesses to have observed the act of adultery. This doesn’t happen by accident! These witnesses had the opportunity to prevent the sin, but were more concerned to punish the perpetrator. There is no mention that the witnesses were present. Even if they were, the Law calls for her and her partner in crime to be stoned. But where is her partner in crime? No witnesses, no partner… Too many people are missing. This is a set-up. She is being used to trap Jesus himself. And he knows it.

But I digress, I really want to consider Jesus’s last words to the woman herself. Christ’s act of forgiveness (neither do I condemn you) comes first. The call to repentance and change (go now and leave your life of sin) follows it.

This is the same sequence as the Father’s forgiveness –  a sequence we all too easily lose sight of. We forget that our repentance does not earn us God’s forgiveness. Our repentance is, rather, an entirely appropriate response to God’s grace. We are already forgiven. Christ died for everyone, he’s not waiting for us to repent, although it will gladden his heart if and when we do.

The absolution that follows confession in our services reminds us of God’s generosity and grace. I don’t think the priest is calling down God’s forgiveness – Jesus said on the cross “It is done” – it was all finished a long time ago. We just need reminding that the Lord is gracious and compassionate, so we can find the appropriate response.

That response could be all sorts of things: random acts of kindness, pursuit of justice, prayer, generosity, friendliness. But for each of us it will be the thing God places on our hearts. What do I feel called upon to do in response to God’s fatherly love to me?

Ponder that, and then spend Lent reminding yourself how good God is.

 

Grief

It is six months now since my father died. His death was not unexpected, and in many ways was a considerable relief, but death is always a shock. The combination of the finality of death and the reminder of our own mortality shakes us up.

If you read about grieving there is often a suggestion that it’s a process we go through; there are stages of grief and descriptions of how we might expect to feel. We experience denial, isolation, anger, depression, acceptance. Or maybe it’s numbness, pining, disorganisation and despair, and finally recovery. It all depends which book you read.

It’s almost as though grief, like everything else nowadays, has a sell-by date, after which we return to normal. Except that we don’t. Grief isn’t well-behaved, it doesn’t follow the prescribed stages in any sort of order, or sometimes at all, and normality will not be resumed. You’ll never be the same again. You will live with the loss, you will adjust. But you won’t “get over” it.

All sorts of aspects of grief have troubled me – a sense of lethargy, an inability to make even simple decisions, an exaggeration of my normal tendency to put off decisions until the last minute, or not make them at all if possible; a lack of motivation to do anything new; a reluctance to resume ongoing projects that somehow got shelved after Dad’s death; strange very lucid dreams of all sorts, but especially involving those closest to me – I find myself putting off going to bed. Grief even contributes to our physical condition, and simple physical problems (like arthritic knees and stomach pains) cause more problems than before.

Grief will rear its head at unexpected moments, plunging you back into anger, despair, depression or lethargy. Tears will flow at quite unpredictable stimuli. Your patience may suddenly run out and you’ll lash out at people, often those you love the most. You can flip from depression to euphoria without any discernible reason, or sometimes simply feel numb, as though your emotions had been neatly cut away from you in some fiendish surgery.

It’s as if you suddenly don’t know who you are. You look in the mirror and realise you ’re living with a stranger who is unreliable and temperamental. And you have to cope with this stranger alone, because the chances are you won’t let anyone else in emotionally. You might just be adding a dollop of guilt on top of all this, because all your nearest and dearest are having to cope with this stranger too.

Logically it seems my faith should sustain me. I know I have a loving heavenly Father and a Saviour who will never let me go, but there is an emotional disconnection. This knowledge seems to have been withheld from the stranger that is grieving, leaving me more alone than ever.

There are loads of books and articles about grieving – there’s a whole industry based on bereavement, but much of the literature is full of quick, glib fixes. Life doesn’t work like that. Grief is messy, chaotic, and unpredictable. And grief may well continue to disrupt your life for far longer than people imagine.

But if you are grieving, remember that many others will understand the nature of life under these circumstances, they have been there, maybe they are still there. Unlike Queen Victoria, we don’t necessarily wear our grief on our sleeves, so we don’t always recognise those affected. Loss is part of life. We survive, but we are changed forever.

 

JR 15/6/2018

Be the change you want to see…

Ash Wednesday 2018

In Proverbs we read:
A generous person will prosper; whoever refreshes others will be refreshed.
A soothing tongue is a tree of life, but a perverse tongue crushes the spirit.

And in Exodus:
Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God.

There are often two ways of looking at things, and in the Old Testament we find this a great deal – it is called parallelism. A modern example might be asking whether your glass is half empty or half full.

Lent is a time of fasting, of self-denial. It is a time when we remember Christ’s sacrifice, a time of prayer and penance, mirroring His 40 days in the wilderness.

But Isaiah shows us that God wants us to adopt another way of considering fasting: not self-denial but generosity to others. He is suggesting these two form a parallel. Is it a day only to humble yourself, He asks.  Is it just about self-denial?

NO he says. No!- your fast is a time to “loosen the yoke of injustice”, to share with the hungry, the poor, the homeless, the naked. He says there is no point in denying yourself unless the fruit of that self-denial flows generously to others! The fasting and sackcloth and ashes bring no pleasure to God on their own. They must be accompanied by a generosity of spirit that finds its outworking in the lives of other people.

Surely these are actions we should always practise, aren’t they, and attitudes we should always hold dear? So what changes in Lent? If we are to mark it we should be accentuating these things, making them even more a part of our lives, making more of a point of being generous and just.

In the story of the woman caught in adultery from John’s Gospel (John 8:2-11) the evangelist paints a scene consisting almost entirely of men. Yes, there is the eponymous woman in the story, but she is alone. All the others in this scene are men. The teachers of the Law are men. The Pharisees are men. Those being taught in the temple courts are men. The one man who should be there isn’t. Where is her co-accused? Adultery takes two!

But the men aren’t interested in justice, or in the woman herself; they only want to trap Jesus. The woman is being used as a pawn in a bigger game. Everything here is to do with power, consideration for people is irrelevant, especially the least important ones in society, the ones Jesus usually championed. That’s why she is there, and that’s why she is alone. Jesus has to choose between justice and mercy.

We like to think things have completely changed. But it was only 100 years ago that all men over 21 got the vote here, and only 90 years that same right was given to women. My grandmother didn’t have the right to vote at 21 because she was a woman; my mother didn’t receive her degree from Cambridge University when she passed the Tripos Exams because she was a woman. Legal change has come slowly, but the attitudinal and cultural advances have been even slower. Sadly the church has often lagged behind wider society in this respect. Reading the passage from Isaiah alongside this one from John’s Gospel should be a wake-up call. We have no room for complacency.

Christ taught us a radical equality, reflected by Paul’s statement in the letter to the Galatian church:

“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Perhaps we should add: neither privileged nor poor; native nor immigrant; home-owner nor homeless; young nor old; black nor white.

Or is that just wishful thinking?

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’”.
Martin Luther King spoke these words on the steps of the Lincoln memorial in 1963. Almost a lifetime ago.

Don’t even think about giving something up for Lent. We are called to do something much more difficult; to offer something more; to go the extra mile. To give, feed, clothe, cherish.

Mahatma Gandhi said “Be the change you want to see in the world”.

 

“Be the change you want to see in the world”.

 

February 2018