mannah

What will God provide, and if we're abstaining in devotion?

Just (don't) try harder

From Maggi:

It's a common misconception that Lent is about self-improvement. Somehow a half-remembered custom of giving things up has been mixed in with our society's obsession with self-help and self-improvement, so that we've blurred the true meaning of the fast into a rather individualistic concept, more like a New Year Resolution to detox or de-clutter.

Lent is not about giving up luxuries, not about losing weight or gaining other benefits, not about food per se, not about de-cluttering or Feng Shui or about ay other kind of feel-good, de-toxifying exercise. In the end, it's about denying yourself some of the essentials of everday life in order to focus on the reality that we depend upon God for life itself; about re-aligning ourselves with God and his purposes in our world; about reminding ourselves that all we have is a gift from God in any case.

And neither is Lent about achievement. We cannot earn God's love, nor save ourselves. If our Lenten Fast is understood well, it will relieve us of the need to try harder, achieve more, feel worthy. It will ground us in the firm and unshakeable knowledge that we are human - we are but dust, and to dust we shall return - but that to be human is enough, under the loving gaze of God.

sign up for lent blog (updated 13/3)

Our lent blog will start next on march 1st.

Feel free to blog anything as long as there is some kind of link to lent.

Try not to make your posts too long ...

Looking forward to see what happens ...

Please indicate a day or days (in comments) when you would like to, or be happy to, blog / don't worry if someone's taken your day, we can have 2 blogs a day ...

Mar 1 - andy goodliff
2 - anderson
3 - maggi dawn
4 - laurence
5 Day-off
6 - ash beck
7 - ash beck
8 - jon bishop
9 - brodie mcgregor
10 - helen swinyard
11 - helen swinyard
12 Day-off
13 - andy goodliff
14 - helen swinyard
15 - ash beck
16 - laurence
17
18
19 Day-off
20
21
22 - jon bishop
23
24
25
26 Day-off
27
28
29
30
31
apr 1
2 Day-off (Mothering Sunday)
3 - andy scott
4
5
6
7
8
9 Day-off (Palm Sunday)
10 - andy scott
11
12
13 (Maunday Thursday)
14 (Good Friday)
15
16 Easter Sunday (end of blog)

Stop,Look and Listen!

When I was about six or seven I would go to the Tuffty Club to learn about Road Saftly, every week we would recite in parrot fasion what we should do before crossing the road, STOP,LOOK and LISTEN. As we journey through Lent I’m reminded that as Christians this is something I should be doing:

We should STOP being so busy, have more time to reflect. Slowing down for God is important, we can be so busy thinking we are serving God that we are truly failing to do what is important to him!

LOOK at what God has and is doing in my life. If we can’t see where we have come from it’s difficult to see where we are going

LISTEN to what God is saying to me and act on it, he may want to change a long held believe, or get me to look at something from a different angle, may be take me deeper into something and show me more of him!

May I wish you all a happy and a holy Lent, don’t forget to STOP,LOOK and LISTEN!!!

we ask you to create space ...

How shall we spend these Lenten days? Will we make space in our lives to pray and fast, to journey with God through the wilderness as Israel and Jesus did? Lent reminds us that our God is the one who forgives and makes all things new.

A prayer from Walter Brueggemann

The pushing and shoving of the world is endless
We are pushed and shoved.
And we do our fair share of pushing and shoving
in our great anxiety.
And in the middle of that
you have set down your beloved suffering son
who was like a sheep led to slaughter
who opened not his mouth.
We seem not able,
so we ask you to create space in our life
where we may ponder his suffering
and your summons for us to suffer with him,
suspecting that suffering is the only way to come to newness.
So we pray for your church in these Lenten days,
when we are driven to denial -
not to notice suffering,
not to engage it,
not to acknowledge it.
So be that way of truth among us
that we should not deceive ourselves.
That we shall see that loss is indeed our gain.
We give you thanks for that mystery from which we live.
Amen.

24 Hour Famine 17-19 Mar

Join in with this year's 24 hour famine, organised by World Vision. I'm planning to get the whole of my church involved this year.

Lent Blog Coming Soon ...

2 weeks until the beginning of Lent. So end of this week/beginning of next, I'll post a sign-up sheet for those who want to get involved in blogging with Ashley and I through Lent.

Thanks - Come back for Lent

Thanks to everyone who was involved in advent blog.
It was a great few weeks of interesting and challenging posts to help us through the advent season.

Ashley and I would like to try a Lent blog - so at somepoint in early February, come back and visit if you'd like to be involved. Hopefully we can get some new bloggers as well.

and advent ended

And advent ended
our waiting over
Christ is born
God with us
God for us

Israel's hope realised
the love of God revealed
Christ is born
God with us
God for us

The holy child discloses
the welcome of our God
Christ is born
God with us
God for us

The main point of it all

For many Christians, Advent is a time to reflect on the central tenet of their faith: the incarnation. The Christmas season underscores what is most basic to them, the idea that God became a man and dwelled among us. The teaching, they say, is the distillation of all things Christian – everything boils down to this most prominent of truths.

Sincere as these people are, I'm forced to disagree with them.

A reading of Jesus' teaching in the gospels, along with the preaching of the primitive church, leads me to the conclusion that Christianity's core message is the kingdom of God. The Christmas story is about Messianic hopes, not metaphysical christology.

Consider the Song of Mary in Luke's gospel:

"He has performed mighty deeds with his arm;
he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts.
He has brought down rulers from their thrones
but has lifted up the humble.
He has filled the hungry with good things
but has sent the rich away empty.
He has helped his servant Israel,
remembering to be merciful
to Abraham and his descendants forever,
even as he said to our fathers."

This is the same message that blazed forth from the Hebrew prophets. A great successor to David would come and take the throne, ruling with perfect justice. Peace and goodwill were destined to reign on earth. The knowledge of the Lord would fill the world from the rising of the sun, to its setting.

Angels heralded the beginning of it all in Bethlehem. The realm of God had penetrated the human realm in a new way, never before seen.

We're called to continue what began on that day. The incarnation is not a theological abstraction designed to satisfy speculation about Christ's ultimate identity. It's not a dogma that we merely file away under the "orthodox" tab. It's a reality that we fulfill ourselves in this world.

When we love our neighbors, forgive without end, become like little children and live irreproachable lives, we bring heaven down to earth. The kingdom of God comes with power.

And our work continues. As long as "peace on earth" is absent from any corner of our globe, we Christians have a lot of incarnational work to do.

Art, Imagination and Christian Hope

Just found out about this conference being held at St. Andrew's, which links it quite well to what this blog is all about.

Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts
Research Colloquium, Spring 2006

'Patterns of promise: art, imagination and Christian hope'

27th-29th March 2006
St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews, Scotland UK

Hope is an inherently imaginative human disposition.

While securely rooted in something revealed, Christian hope nonetheless also engages our imagination.

In hope, faith reconfigures the shape of what is familiar in order to ‘pattern’ the contours of God’s promised future. In the process, the present is continuously re-shaped by ventures of ‘hopeful’ and expectant living.

In art, this same ‘poetic’ interplay between past, present and future takes particular concrete forms, furnishing vital resources for sustaining an ‘ecology of hope’.

This colloquium will explore our imaginative engagements with the shape of things to come. In particular, we will attend to the contribution that literature, music and painting can make, as they trace ‘patterns of promise’ and so generate hopeful living.

Speakers

* Professor Richard Bauckham, University of St Andrews
* Dr Anna Williams, University of Cambridge
* Professor Paul Fiddes, University of Oxford
* Dr Daniel Chua, King's College, University of London
* Dr Patricia Bruininks, Hendrix College, Arkansas
* Professor Trevor Hart, University of St Andrews
* Professor Jeremy Begbie, University of St Andrews

Listen

so our waiting is nearly over, Christmas is just about upon us. Last night I asked my 7 year old son why Jesus was born, he replied, "so we could get presents". I was a little disappointed in his answer. But that's just it - with all the presents, parties, dinners, TV, visiting family it can be hard to "see" Jesus even if you want to.

So I'm going to use my ears! Babies cry and cry so that no matter what else is going on you hear them. So I'm listening waiting to hear what he wants to say this Christmas.

Waiting for Heaven

From Maggi

Years ago now, just before Christmas, one of my best and closest friends died in his 20's from cancer. We had prayed and hoped for months that there would be a cure, or even a miracle. But as Randy got weaker and thinner, one by one we began to give up on the hope that he would live. It was clear that our prayers were not being answered the way we wanted. I began to pray for his future "life" in terms of the mystical beyond, not physical healing. He had been an aircraft engineer, and loved flying. Sometimes he used to talk about his fantasy that he could fly with God through the universe, looking at the stars and planets. I began to think that was a good metaphor for the timeless, spaceless sinking into God that death might be like.

Sometimes I think the waiting of Advent - waiting for God to break into our world with salvation and redemption - can, if we aren't careful, turn into a fixed idea of what it is we're waiting for. We gather ideas and images of what the redemption will look like, what needs to happen in order for our salvation to be complete. And sometimes when redemption comes it is not at all in the shape we anticipated. Sometimes it doesn't even look particularly redemptive. Sometimes a redemptive moment is disguised under moments of shock and grief, and we have to wait a while. Only when the shock of events begins to recede do we begin to understand that redemption is hidden in the shadows of current events, waiting to dawn on us when the right moment comes.

Death seems pretty bleak as an answer to prayer. But even a shortened life still has its impact. Even now, years later, I still sometimes think I see Randy's extraordinary clear blue eyes looking into mine, searching for honesty, looking for the answer I'm afraid to articulate. Even now, his legacy to me is to make me brave enough to tell the truth, to myself most of all, regardless of whether other people approve.

Earlier this year I collected up a lot of poems and prayers about death while I was planning a memorial service. I came across this one, which was originally written for Jonny's father . It fits the theme rather aptly of transforming our idea of what we are waiting and praying for. Sometimes our prayers get answered, but not at all in the way we've envisaged.

it was a marvellous healing;
after the months of asking,
of waiting;
after the desperate, slow deterioration,
the warring tides
of faith and doubt:
to be released in an instant,
from every pain.
it was as if the very molecules of his flesh
had been infused, invaded,
with the life of God,
until he was filled, fit to burst,
with the Shalom, the peace,
of the Father's rule.
limbs that had fallen flaccid with weakness
waved and danced with joy;
lungs that had so utterly failed him
sang out with strength and boldness.

he ran
through the unfamiliar sunlight,
drinking it in,
experiencing all at once
the thousand and one feelings
that for so long had been denied him.

it was a marvellous healing:
to be so totally restored,
made whole,
rebuilt.
it had just surprised him,
a little,
that he had had to die
to receive it.

(gerard kelly)

a question of observation?

The last two saturdays I have spent in London. The first one was because I needed to book plane tickets with my travel agent. This was Sta Travel on Kings Cross. After we'd booked, my friend and I decided to head to Oxford Street and see if we could pick up anything good in HMV.

this saturday gone, I and a different friend headed down to Camden Lock to pick up a few slightly odder gifts. Following this, we headed down to Leicester Square and Charing Cross Road because I needed the loo and wanted to look in the bookshops.

Both days I expected it to be manic. I expected Oxford Street and Leicester Square to be full of insane people who want that bargain or ticket and are prepared to kill me if it means getting there 0.2 seconds quicker. This is what Oxford Street is normally like. I've been there on non-seasonal occasions and, within 20 minutes, been quite ready to spill the blood of the next person who pushes me.

But, the 2 last weekends before Christmas, and the place was... relatively quiet. I've been on busier days. much busier days. Apart from the 300 odd people dresses as santa and protesting that they want Christmas and want it now (genius) and singing carols that are slightly altered, such that they are about booze (also genius); it was pretty empty.

This tells me one of 3 things.
1) everyone is so efficient that they all finished their Christmas shopping in July.
2) everyone has ordered their gear from the internet.
3) people aren't buying as much.

I hope it's 3. Very much. So my inner cynic is at war with my inner optimist....

May you all have a Christmas and New Year full of peace and devoid of debt and materialism.

Be happy!

Right, this isn;t exactly going to be my most amazing peice of writing, as I have little over three minutes before I go off to panto all day...

The anticipation! I am strangely in a good mood today; I feel Christmassy and full of goodwill. Which is always fun. But anyway. I'm not really sure what I want to say, except that we should be happy... This has been hard for me over the last few nights; I've been having trouble with friends, they keep doing things that annoy me, for instance spending the whole time gossiping and slagging people off, and trying to get me to join in etc etc... But I feel on top of things today. I read last night "if you don;t forgive your fellow man (or woman ;) then God won't forgive us. Which is fair enough.

So anyway, back to advent. I think that this time of year should be full of goodwill etc. I think it's time I started to enjoy God's love abit more. Show a little kindness, instead of hate. Stick with Him through and through, because I have just found out that it's quite cool at the end of it. We have soo much to be thankful for! :D

So be happpppppppppppyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!! :D :D :D

Let it rain.

FRANKLY MY DEAR, I DON'T GIVE A DAMN*

What do you seeee?
The lights not yet here, fantastically.
But you keep waving your hands,
throwing vases and smiles.
Wrap up in rugs and wait a while longer.


*With thanks to the Reverend Graeme for this title.

On Frango Mints and the Reign of God

This Advent I am preparing to celebrate Christmas with my family in our new home in Cambridge. So far our transition to life in the UK has been relatively smooth and fairly painless. In fact the vast majority of the time, we simply love it here.

But Advent and Christmas are saturated with memories and associations. Maybe more than any other time of year, Christmas and the time leading up to it are redolent with sights, sounds, smells and tastes that transport us to another time, another place. And so the more I have experienced Advent and the anticipation of Christmas here, the more I am – ironically – somewhere else.

Frango Mint Chocolates are one of my memories not only of Christmastime but also of my hometown, Chicago. They are made and sold by Marshall Field’s Department Stores, and both the candies and the stores are distinctly Chicago institutions. Frangos are a popular Christmas gift and end-of-the-year indulgence. They are a sultry, luxurious delight, chocolate and mint melting in your mouth, leaving your taste buds begging for more.

My in-laws, who have come to spend the holidays with us, were good enough to bring us a box. I leapt on them. (In fact, I ate three while composing the last paragraph – purely for research, you understand.) And tasting them, I found myself standing on State Street, in the heart of Chicago’s Loop, in front of Marshall Field’s, as a child, standing in the snow, looking in at the Christmas windows with my parents. This one taste vividly summoned for me sights and sounds of a quarter century ago. Memory is an amazing thing.

But what if it’s not only meant to work in reverse?

What if we are also meant to remember in advance?

As every year passes, I become more attracted to the Advent theme of looking ahead – not just to the coming of Jesus in the manger, but the return, the final Advent of Jesus. We look for that final return when things will be set right, justice and peace will embrace, when the whole creation will know God, and God will be all in all.

I know we usually talk about this in terms of hope, and I don’t disagree. But I have a harder time getting my arms around hope. It feels more abstract, more like a pie-in-the-sky, wish-upon-a-star kind of thing.

But what if instead of just hoping for something which is not yet, we could remember something which is not fully yet? What if a sight, sound, smell, taste or texture could capture us and transport us to another time and place, which is yet future? What if we could take that small, fertile memory and let it open up into an incalculably larger picture? It seems to me that this would allow us to see, hear, smell, taste and touch the reign of God which is already here through the ministry of Christ, and which is not yet here in its fullness.

When we are reconciled with someone, when we see justice done, when we reach out across a surprising boundary, when someone feels the energy and vision which can only be called new life, when the poor or the suffering find hope and deliverance, when someone comes to God – or returns to God – these help us to re-member, to put together again the whole from parts, of what lies ahead of us in God. And, I think, it leaves us begging for more.

This vivid anticipation, this remembering in advance, is a means of nourishment for our waiting, watching, working and worshipping for the day when it will be complete. In short, perhaps, it will be a way of cultivating a hopeful imagination.

the dark side

I love advent, the countdown, the candles, the excitement, the Christmas cards, the carols and the lights. But it has a dark side, lurking, ready to jump up and blow out the candles and stamp on your mince pie. It's the consumer side to advent.

As the day draws nearer the pressure builds: find the right gift for the right person becomes find anything that will do (and fast). I am sure there are little gremlins that grow increasingly stronger, feeding on the blind panic of Christmas shoppers who don’t have a clue where to start. Fazed with a dazzling array of choices and offers the poor shopper slowly begins to suffocate in a dense fog of pressure and confusion.

On Christmas Eve fever pitch hits. The gremlins reach the height of their power and you can easily spot the haunted souls who have fallen foul of their schemes. You see them piling high baskets with gifts and food that family and friends will probably not like or never open. Auntie Vera really will never use that luxury bath oil and Uncle Arthur already has 3 pairs of unworn, extra warm totes non-slip socks that you got him in 2004,3&2.

What have we done with Advent? How have we let it become this consumer binge? You have probably heard of the Oxfam Unwrapped or Christian Aid's Present Aid, or another such scheme. I like them. They are like pure water in a sea of filth. They offer us an alternative and a perspective on the world that we're not going to find amongst Boots' 3-for-2 offers. I am plucking up the courage for the Christmas that everyone I love simply gets a chicken, or if they are really special a donkey. But for now I am incorporating it gently a tree here, a water tap there...

The most important thing we can gain this Advent is a little bit more self-awareness: who we are in the world and the riches and power we hold over people we will never meet. So, I would encourage you, when the gremlins come to over-whelm you this Christmas: resist, stop, think and put the shopping in perspective. Maybe even get a donkey instead?

Coming, ready or not

From Maggi:

Just over eight years ago I was a PhD student, an ordinand (priest-in-training), and five months pregnant. The pregnancy was on course; it looked like this baby was really going to be born. So I needed the relevant information on maternity leave for Ordinands, what would happen to my funding, housing allowances etc., ... you know the kind of thing.

I went up to see my tutor at Theological College - a kind and humorous woman, who could be formidable when necessary. I discovered that to date, there was no policy on maternity leave or funding breaks for pregnant Ordinands. I don't think I was the first woman to have a baby mid-training, but there had been so few thus far that there wasn't any established pattern. I sat in my tutor's study while she phoned the relevant grant-awarding bodies, Diocesan and National offices, trying to get some kind of game plan together. After some long, frustrating phone calls, I heard the mumbling of a man's voice at the other end of the phone, and then my Tutor's terse reply: 'It may well be that you don't have any policies. But what you don't seem to understand is that the birth of this baby can not be postponed. This baby will be born in four months' time whether you have policies or not.'

I like the fact that the coming of God into our world was realised in something as inconvenient, unpredictable and untidy as the birth of a baby. A baby will be born when it's ready. It makes no difference whether we are ready for it (who is ever 'ready' for a baby?). But regardless of policies, theologies and leadership structures, and irrespective of postmodern theories and conventions and housegroups, God will come and be born in our world.

Birth is a great leveller. It is always messy and inconvenient, painful and undignified. It is usually joyful, often frightening, sometimes tragic. It happens to those who are ready and those who are not. Babies break up the order of our lives, and defy the plans of even the most organised of mothers-to-be. Birth isn't fair or controllable: it sometimes comes quickly and easily to people who are unprepared, and with agonised diffuculty to those who have a meticulous birth plan.

So it is with God. He will be born in our world whether we're ready or not, deserving or not, prepared or not. The incarnation of God will defy our plans, upset the organised, and come with ease and rapturous joy to undeserving sinners and the poor in spirit.

'Now let your love be born in us,
O come, Lord Jesus, Come.'

Waiting for the Prince of Peace

I find I am in such a state of waiting this morning, I don't know what to write. John Dominic Crossan, I believe, reminded us that Caesar was called the Prince of Peace, and that the message in naming Jesus the Prince of Peace was to send a message to the Romans that peace is not the out come of beating others into submission, but is the result of making peace first, not as the quiet between the wars.

We are waiting for friends held in Iraq. The four CPT members. We wait with prayers for a good outcome, waiting for peace, waiting for hope, waiting so hard that I feel separated from the wait for "Christmas". In my neighborhood, it means walking sober through crowds last Seventh Day (Sat.) crowds of young people dressed in Santa Claus suits for a newly emerged holiday, the weekends before Christmas, Santa pub crawls, where bands of rowdy people stager around the streets drunk and dressed as Santa Claus.

Before my separation from that was a sort of bemused, "och, look at that..." Now, I am just sad.

But Jesus taught us an important thing. He taught us to seek joy in the worst times. To find peace in days like these. Last night at a meeting for worship with a concern for business, we spoke for a time about our friends, now missing... and a message came to me, that we may find joy in the expressions of tenderness for our friends from people and organizations hardened by war. Another friend said yes, that the hardest hearts are touched by loving truth. That the other day, a friend showed him a fragment of cloth. She told him it was a piece of the wedding dress of Mary Dyer, the Quaker martyr. It had come down in her family. She was the descendent of the man who hanged her. He had become convinced of Quakerism by Mary Dyer's courage.

Waiting for peace.