We’ve been asked at our church to think about some questions over the next few days.  Today’s question is “What is the spiritual bread that you need each day ?”

The word ‘spiritual’ is a tricky one. It can mean different things to different people.  I remember once being on a visit to a local Catholic Church when I was training for ordination. The priest was showing us round, and then sat us down. He asked ‘What is the opposite of spiritual ?’ – there was a pause. We guessed that there was just one right answer to this question.  Who would be brave enough to answer?  Eventually someone said ‘Physical ?’  The priest might have laughed, or cried, or got angry, I can’t remember.  He very simply told us – the opposite of spiritual is unspiritual.  Oh. Light bulbs go on.

That’s all a bit off topic when thinking of the answer to today’s question.  But it might help.

Another memory I have is reading something by Eugene Peterson, who was very careful with the words spiritual and spirituality.  The light that he shed on the word spirituality was this: Christian  Spirituality has to do with what God is doing.  Now that I like.

So when I think about what spiritual bread I need, I want to set it within another question – How might God be at work in me and through me today.

So it’s not just about having my own ‘worship time with God’, important as that is.  Questions to do with community and mission also appear.  Do you see what’s happened ? Worship, Community, Mission – in that order. It’s so seductive.

So the question that Ruth, our vicar asked us has left me asking other questions.  How might mission and community be a daily part of what God is doing in me and through me, as well as the personal aspect of scripture reading and prayer.  Because experiencing mission and community as a daily part of life will surely feed me as well as my own personal reading and prayer.

I had better say a little about that.  My daily discipline has been pretty spasmodic a lot of the time.  It tended to be OK when I was working as a vicar, thank God. But on holiday for example, I couldn’t make it work.

I also get bored with doing the same thing all the time, so every so often I have to change to keep it fresh.  At the moment, I’m using one reading from the book of Acts, a part of a psalm, and a few verses from John’s Gospel.  I keep a journal which helps me to focus.  Writing stuff down is important for me.

I find the psalms are pretty vital. They cover the whole range of human need and emotion.  They make it Ok for example to be angry with God, and to ask God hard questions.

I look for prayers from different places to get me started. Here’s one that I have slightly adapted – it’s part of a prayer from the Iona Community.

For your love, strong and challenging,
which has called us to risk for you,
asked for the best in us,
covered the worst in us,
and shown us how to live,
how to love,
how to serve,
We give you thanks.

Grace and peace everyone.  Another question tomorrow,

Thursday this week – May 14th was the day the church remembers St Matthias.

Judas Iscariot (remember him ?) had come to a sticky end, and the 11 remaining disciples chose a replacement.  There were two possible candiates, Joseph and Matthias.

The disciples drew lots, and Matthias was chosen.

So there were some readings to go with this part of the story of the early church, one of them being from the prophet Isaiah.

Apparently, there was a man of some status, called Shebna, who had come up short.  This is what it says about him. (The Message translation)

God is about to sack you, to throw you to the dogs. He’ll grab you by the hair, swing you round and round dizzyingly, and then let you go, sailing through the air like a ball, until you’re out of sight. Where you’ll land, nobody knows. And there you’ll die, and all the stuff you’ve collected heaped on your grave. You’ve disgraced your master’s house! You’re fired—and good riddance!

Woah! That’s harsh.

Then God chooses someone else – Eliakim – to carry on the work. It’s all there in chapter 22.

One of the other readings set for this day is from John’s Gospel chapter 15, where Jesus tells his followers that they have been chosen, and put in the world to bear fruit.

Now bearing fruit is an interesting thought.  Earlier in the chapter, Jesus had been talking about the importance of pruning a vine so that you get good grapes from it.

We’re learing the importance of this – we have two young fruit trees – and apple and a plum.  They are in their second year, and if I pay attention to the experts, I will need to prune all the fuit bearing branches this year, because that will allow the tree to put all its energy into growing strong roots and branches.  If I don’t take the fruit off this year, then the fruit I do get this year will be small, and I will be risking not having the best fruit in years to come.

It’s a hard thing to do, but necessary if I want the very best for the trees.

So my question is this – where does God’s church need pruning at this moment in time ?  I have often heard these verses about pruning applied to the life of an individual, but what about applying it to communities, and to the church in general.

In the context of the coronavirus pandemic, we (the church) are having to find new ways to meet each other – through online platforms, social media etc.  Hopefully this time of crisis is causing us to think about what is really important for the health of the church. (Returning to a growth metaphor)

What might need to be pruned for us to see new growth ?

What are the essentials that make for church ? How can they be nurtured ?




 

In the current (coronoavirus) situation, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the nature of church, and the lessons we might learn for the future for a healthy church.

Sort of related to that, I’ve been thinking about my own (Anglican) tradition, and the mess I believe we are in, for all sorts of historical reasons, over leadership.

The New Testament has various words for gifts and roles within the early church.  The roles are – Deacon (Diaconos), Elder (Prebyteros) and Bishop or Overseer (Episkopos)

It may be that the roles of Elder and Bishop were pretty much the same thing ?  The Deacon (origin of the role in Acts chapter 6) was different and seems to be to do with meeting practical needs.

In around the 2nd Century, the word priest begins to be used for presbyter, mainly in connection with the eucharist – sharing of bread and wine as commanded by Jesus at the Last Supper.

The origin of the word priest comes from the Old Testament role, (hiereus in Greek), from which we get the word hierarchy.

My point is that churches today that use the word priest as a way of describing an ordained person, are using and Old Testament word for a role that stood between us and God.

The New Testament emphasis is on leadership, rather than on a role connected with a cultic ritual – eg sacrifice.

The Eucharist (Holy Communion) is in some ways a reinterpretation of the sacrificial system of the Old Testament, seeing Jesus death, symbolised in bread and wine, as a sacrifice. But there doesn’t seem to be anything in the New Testament that justifies a role of priest, in the same way as the Old Testament role.  To remember Jesus in bread and wine is far removed from that sacrificial system.

I am an ordained person in the church of England, and sadly the word usually used about people like me is priest.  This unfortunately only goes to perpetuate a church that is hierarchical, with an undue degree of authority and power vested in the vicar.

As far as my ordination is concerned, I have always preferred to see myself as Episkopos (overseer) or Presbyteros (elder).

The part of the episkopos word – scope – tells me it’s something to do with seeing, so Episkopos is about having an overview of what’s going on.

The prebyteros (elder) role tells me that it’s to do with experience and maturity.

You might guess by all of this that I’m in a strange place with regard to the church I find myself in!  Yet I believe for sure that this is what God called me to back in the early 90’s.  I have no regrets, but have to live with a certain amount of tension.

One way of dealing with the tension is to find voices that are outside traditional Anglican thought, and so I have a connection with the UK Anabaptist Network, where words like priest are seen for what they are – designations that belong to a pre Christian era.

I have been a part of the Anglican Church (Church of England) for around 35 years, both as a member of congregations, and as a minister (vicar).

One of the distinguishing features of churches like the Church of England is the pattern of the worship, which nearly always includes prayers of confession, a statement of belief (creed), readings from the Bible, a sermon, prayers of intercession, and often communion.

As well as Anglican Churches, Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Methodist, Lutheran and other denominations all use the same pattern, which gives rise to the description ‘Liturgical Churches.’

By the way, the word Liturgy, which is usually used to mean the structure of the worship, actually means ‘The Work of the People.’ The idea being that worship is the offering of the whole people of God.

This post is about one aspect of the Liturgy – the prayer of confession, or prayer of penitence.

A typical prayer of confession goes something like this:

It was a mistake, said Bonhoeffer to think of theology’s purpose as being the unveiling of the mystery of God. “to bring it down to the flat ordinary wisdom of experience and reason.”  Theology’s sole purpose, he said was to defend and glorify God’s mystery as mystery.

This mystery is about “Christ taking everyone who really encounters him by the shoulder, turning them round to face their fellow human beings and the world.”

A couple of things have come together in the last two days … our church ‘service’ on Zoom yesterday, and my continued reading of the biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

In the mid 1930’s Bonhoeffer was working on a book that would first be published as ‘The Cost of Discipleship’ (Later as simply Discipleship’).  In it, he describes how he sees the way that the Protestant (Lutheran) Church in Germany had a tendency to portray faith as a purely private thing. For Bonhoeffer this meant that faith had become for many Christians a refuge from obedience to yhe call of Christ, abandoning the public realm for a private sphere in which faith was all about personal salvation.

The events that propel Bonhoeffer to a call for the church to be more active in the public arena were of course the rise of Hitler, and especially the treatment of Jews.

The German title for the book was Nachfolge – Follow me, which points to Bonhoeffer’s assertion that the Christian life must be one of concrete acts, integrating private and public, inner life and outer reality, hearing and following.  There was no other way to be a Christian.

By the mid 1930’s the vast majority of Protestant Churches were part of the ‘German Christian Church’ – adhering to the policies of National Socialism, which excluded Jewish Christians from communion and worship – which in Bonhoeffer’s eyes challenged the very identity of the church as a Christian Body.

The establishment of the ‘Confessing Church,’ which stood against Hitler and Nazi rule was one way in which Bonhoeffer was to live out hs faith in the public space.  (Which in the end of course cost him his life).

Now to yesterday’s service.  Our services, conducted at the moment through ‘Zoom’ consist of a readings, prayers, possibly a hymn or song, and some time to reflect together on the Gospel passage for the day. There is no sermon, but each person can bring some thought on the passage.

One of the things that came up yesterday, which went a bit beyond the scope of the passage, was the way in which different gospels treat the same question.

So for example, Matthew’s Gospel ends with what Christians call ‘The Great Commission’ in which Jesus says to the discipes – ‘Go and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’

This is definitely taking the Chrisain Faith out into the public arena.

By contrast, John’s Gospel has Jesus meeting with the disciples after the resurrection and saying “Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.”

If we think about how the Father sent Jesus as described in John’s Gospel, it is more to do with Jesus ‘being with’ us.  There is of course the very public element of Jesus’ ministry in John’s Gospel, but there are large chunks where Jesus is talking with the disciples, and emphasising the importance of staying close to Jesus. (Remain in me).  

At its extreme, Matthew leads to a Christianity that is focussed on proselytising, making converts, even by force, as history shows.  Whereas John might lead to a quietist faith that is only concerned with nurturing the faith of the believer.

Clearly, neither Gospel is advocating either of these approaches, but we can see how at different times, and in various places, both of these approaches have held sway.

The question I have is this – we need faith that is personal but not private.  But how in today’s world, and especially with the current Covid 19 pandemic, do Christians take their faith into the public square.  One way of course is through being active in a wide range of serving roles, through food banks etc.  But while for Christians, those ways of responding would likely arise from a Christian sense of service, there are many people of other faiths responding and people of no faith who are simply acting out of a sense of common humanity.

We also see people of all faiths and none acting in the areas of justice and peace.

But is there something else that Christians might offer in the public space – something that is distinctly Christian ?

A few years ago, I heard a talk – I think it was by Ray Simpson of the Northumbria Community – about Celtic Christianty.  In the talk he describes showing a film about Celtic Christianity to church and other leaders, in this country and abroad.

Reflecting on the reception the film received, he noted that English audiences were mostly interested in practical ways they might use the new insights they had gained – “How can I use this?” – whilst European (I think especially German ?) audiences wanted to know ‘Is this true ?”

That always struck me as an interesting observation, which I have come across again in the biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Charles Marsh. (Strange Glory pp 115 -118)

In 1930/31, Bonhoeffer spent the best part of a year in the USA, and his impression at the start of this period was that Americans were over concerned about practicalities, and too little about ideas for their own sake.

One of his European friends at the time writes: “We were Europeans who like to reflect before acting, while the American gave us the impression of wanting to act before they reflected.”

(By the way – that makes me think of a prominent American who seems to have difficulty with any kind of reflective thought!)

Bonhoeffer is intially critical of the lack of serious theological underpinning to the sermons that he heard, describing one influential preacher as preaching ‘A Gospel bereft of miracle … with sermons that are reduced to church remarks about newpaper events’

All of this changed for Bonhoeffer when he began to experience the life of Abyssinian Baptist Church – a black church in New York.  Through the early months of 1931, Bonhoeffer had an education into the real lives of black America, with its racism, poverty and oppression.  It was these encounters that led him to write that it was only in the black churches that he had heard powerful preaching, thrilled to joyful singing, and seen true religion.

“For most of his ministry he had traded comfortably on a notion of Christ as inacccessibly transcendent, the God-man in majesty.  Lately he had begun to dwell on Jesus as the one who wandered into distressed and lonely places to share the struggles of the poor as friend and counsellor.”

This will emerge later in Bonhoeffer’s thought as Christ going ‘incognito into the world, and outcast among outcasts, hiding himself in weakness.

His time in the USA also included times spent in the company of Christian Activists including the emerging civil rights movement.

Having arrived in America with his Lutheran foundation of ‘Sola Gratia’ – by grace alone – he reurned to Germany with the conviction that Grace is ‘God’s divine verdict requiring obedience and action.’

Today is Easter Day – a day when we are reminded of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, but for me especially of the importance of the ongoing vital neccessity of living the resurrection day by day.

Perhaps we can also experience what Bonhoeffer saw in the suffering black church of 1930’s America that seems to encompass cross and resurrection – ’emotion, intensity and feeling in the sorrowful joy of Jesus’