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Chocolate Teapots (5th December 2010)

Matthew 3:1-12

John the Baptist is a catalyst for people's best intentions. The Prophet of the wilderness and locusts and wild honey has found the way to make hope real, the hope we carry with us that we cannot be set free because it has been tied down with guilt and shame and worthlessness. John the water-merchant is a means of emptying the baggage of implied dead-ends and culturally taught no-can-do's that make a barrier in our living and prevents renewal and instead of filling the bag up with good practice and fulfilled laws, John leaves it empty which leaves us with only possibility.

John the mind-changer, the vision-grabber, the freedom-fighter, has that great ability most ministers and priests want (though I know some who don't) to cleanse people of the stuff that trips them up and then let them go again, blessed and loved into the world able to live the truth with passion: I am born again. It's a state of mind, a state of vision and state of believing we are free.

Perhaps it is infectious this ability to dream. Perhaps the water-pourers of the world are the real dream-merchants. There is some thought that John baptised folk often, three, four, five times and more as they continually renewed themselves (so presbyterian: always being reformed). Free people to dream and the dream becomes possible. Give people the chance to lay down those burdens that stop possibility and the world becomes a more generous place and more alive to hope. The moment we believe that, we find ourselves in an advent moment, and that incarnation is not bound up in stables, but that that too has been set free.

Advent Prophets

So the prophet has spoken today: swords to ploughshares.

Is wikileaks prophetic?

Are prophets prophetic?

What would make us change our lifestyle to one that was more sustainable and just? Can Wikileaks change behaviour because people might be held to account over decisions and actions and intent or does behaviour change  ome with the more vocal style of the prophets screaming in the streets within earshot of his or her hearers about the state of affairs of the their lives?

It strikes me, and I talk from personal experience here, very little makes us change our behaviour. Only when you can relate because you are related in some way to some one affected by your behaviour: only when you see the face, know the name, held accountable to that one person, you know.

How to be a prophet: get to know the ones that call for our behaviour change.

Let's just do wikileaks and sing carols. Easier.

Rewriting

At our Big Sing last night we were talking (or rather I was talking) about how when we sing new words to songs we begin to think once more about what we are singing about. there is no back-story to hang on to. This is not saying that back-story isn't important. In fact it is one of the most important things about hymns: the place you last sang it, the funeral of your mother that it was sung at, the birth of a childm, a wedding, played in the background of some event etc. All vitally impportant to faith. Hymns are always far more than the words themselves.

But sometimes it is appropriate to start a new stoay, sing a hymn again for the first time and we can do that by singing re-imagined words to old tunes, or vice versa. So lets do that with our carols. I have to say I'd rather drink curdled milk that sing the First Noel. So can we re-imagine some of our least favourite carols.

Just pick one here, let us know what it is and together we can reword them. It could be funny, or sensible, or something inbetween. Let's go for it.

Advent I

in the filtered light
of a low sun
bathing short winter hours
with a meagre paleness
the brilliance seems so fragile
as it lies across the morning frost
it's light thinner, longer
than at any other time
the last of the dried leaves
shimmer on barren twigs
and the promise of rebirth
seems another world away
and so it is
for time is still shrinking
towards the solstice
the winter cold growing
alongside the eclipsing of the light
but creation knows
this is the last great gasp
the deep in-drawing of breath
before reversal
a game of holding onto the promise
for just a few weeks longer
another day of retiring light
holding back
the renewal
toying with the excitement
the unexpected surprise
the turning
towards incarnation

 

Light Festival

Our light festival is almost organised. It's going to be great. We've having a wee ceremony under the tower then lighting the lanterns (all hand made) and after that we ave different areas of the church set aside: Creative, Chillout, Community and Cafe. Each has a different activity including acrylic square painting, origami, space images etc. Then there is also moments of story telling, quizes, light pools and light experiments. It's going to be great.

My question is about the we opening ceremony ad closing ceremony: what do you do at a light festival? What music? Please make as many sugestions as you like. What words? Anyone have suggestions for poems, readings?

Chocolate Teapots (28th Nov 2010)

Isaiah 2:1-5

The thing about Advent is that is seems to let us off the hook. Christmas takes over before we've done anything about it. We leave all that incarnation stuff to God anyway: justice, peace, renewal, transformation. That's the thing about Advent, we wash our hands of the whole change thing and pass it over to God to sort out as if we've misheard what the prophets is meaning. We've been offered great visions and think we've to let God get on with it while we party and then we wonder why the world hasn't changed by Boxing Day.

The thing about Advent is we imagine it is a time of waiting. What, like chairs round the wall in a residential home? Or a doctor's surgery? Or in the queue to get your flu' jag? The thing about Advent is that is isn't about waiting at all. It's about choosing. The prophets have been holding up this vision for us for millennia now and we pay it lip service thinking we can wait for God to do something about it while we're pulling crackers but really it's the prophets who are waiting for us to choose to go with the vision and belong to it's fulfilment.

The thing about Advent is, it is a time when we are done with waiting and we now have to do the choosing. It's God whos is waiting for us, to decide: the prophet's vision or exactly the same as last year.

Turning of the year

A sending thing for The Reign of Christ Sunday:

in all the splendour of celebrating Christ’s reign
and the lost confidence and hope-filled certainty that stirs
don’t forget the ancient promise that holds up today’s glory
don’t forget the quiet light waiting to shatter the growing darkness
don’t forget the unspoken word that is slipping into human skin
for next week the journey begins once more
the movement shifts from heaven to earth
and in the long echo of the aged prophets
and for the thin longing of a tired world
God labours with incarnation

First Christmas

Spotted the first Christmas Trees up in people's houses last night. There are two along the street from us: all lit, windows decorated, flashing away.

Better get writing to the Easter Bunny now or I'll miss out on the start of that as well.

Should we have a Christmas Tree Watch? Let us know when you see those trees lurking in windows pulling in the happiness sooner than decent because we all need some of that cheer right now.

Christmas Sound Scape

So we've got a wee royal wedding to look forward to. Good Morning America, as only they can do, began their programme with fanfares while we British always undersell these things. But before all that we have Incarnation which ought to be a bigger celebration and louder fanfare. You always need some music to go with celebration so I wondered, what music, contemporary or otherwise, ought we have in the background of the impending season?

This exercise hopefully will sculpt some background and offer some contemporary meeting points of incarnation and society. It also heps reinterpret the advent with contemporary images and poetry and thought. Always well worth doing.

So what muzak ought incarnaton have playing in the background of promise and birth...

Meant to add that this could become a wee thing for the carol service late in December. It;s just an idea at the moment and miles away but it can be a quick journey getting there and the more music playing, the better.

Chocolate Teapots (21st November 2010)

Colossians 1:11-20

Wee bit of cultural historical background needed here: it's the idea of Spirits everywhere, invisible, swirling around in the air and in all living things. You can't catch them but they can catch you and unless you appease them then you only have yourself to blame for every spot and pimple, disease and death that comes your way. What a nighmare way of living but such was the state of being for many in Colossae. Indeed there was a rich seam of various philosophical and spiritual ideas competeing with each other. Then along comes Paul (or someone who sounded awfully like him) and said: here's another one to add to your list: Jesus Christ, but he shifts all the rest into 'so last year'.

The 'Christ Philosophy' isn't something that simply reinterprets what's gone before (though with Advent and christmas coming up, that's exactly what has happened) but shifts one way of thinking and replaces it with another. And that is the crux. The Christ Philosophy transfers one philosophy into lost baggage and replaces it entierly with a new way of thinking about our relationships with each other and the world. How many times ought we say that to ourselves becasue we still live trusting two different philosophies: our secular one (of economy and politics and pensions and stock markets) and our sacred one ('just in case'). It's a bit of Harry Potter: wizarding world and muggle world.

It is Reign of Christ Sunday. It's not a Sunday that's meant to replace the monarch with the Jesus but one that says: the Christ Philosophy is not an alternative in a competative market-place for would be followers: it is everything. In this philosophy, 'all things hold together'.