Soho- New Rector Wanted
Genesis 15: 1-6
Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16
Luke 14: 16-24 (not the lectionary reading)
The story we have just heard, the parable of the great banquet, is I am sure a familiar one. Familiar to anyone who has tried to organise a party and then, to their bitter disappointment, discovered that some of their best friends can’t actually make it, and familiar to anyone who has read the gospels for it is a parable that appears in slightly different forms in two of the four gospels. I don’t know if you ever wondered why Clare and I choose the particular readings we hear at services, but the answer to that is that the vast majority of the times we haven’t chosen them at all!
Our readings are set centrally according to a table called the Lectionary which means that we are told which readings we must use on a given Sunday, or festival, though there are periods in the year ( the Sundays after Trinity being one) where we are allowed a little occasional flexibility if that is pastorally desirable- in other words if there is a different passage that relates more closely to some event in the life of the parish, about which the preacher wishes to speak.
Hearing proscribed readings has several benefits, the first is that by following the Lectionary scheme we read the vast majority of Scripture at our Sunday Eucharist across a three year cycle, secondly we don’t only pick favourite verses and miss out some uncomfortable bits ( though the lectionary has actually already sifted the scriptures so you generally don’t have to hear recounted the stories of battles from the 6th century BC coupled with long lists of Amorite kings). Thirdly, as the lectionary has an ecumenical basis, it also means that most of the time we are hearing the same readings as the Roman Catholics and the Methodists and quite a few other denominations around the World.
Anyway that’s just a just a bit of background liturgical info’ I thought you might like to know!
I have specifically chosen today’s gospel reading to complement the set readings from Genesis and Hebrews in order to prepare some ground for our discussion later. After this service there is an opportunity, for anyone who would like to, to stay and discuss how we are going to make what is called the Parish Profile in which we set out the needs of the parish in relation to us finding a new rector. But before we can decide on the sort of person we need, we must have a clear idea of what our needs actually are, and today we will begin thinking about how to go about assessing those needs.
But behind all this is a much bigger question we need to address and that is “who is the ‘us’ and the ‘we’ in all this we’re talking about?” .When you and I talk about St Anne’s the parish church of Soho what and who do we mean?
In other words “who and what is this place for?”. I believe that having an understanding about that is pivotal to any conversation about the appointment of a new rector here, and what I want to throw some light on now.
The Archdeacon reminded us at an open meeting that many of you attended recently of the wise words of Archbishop William Temple sixty years ago, that I also remember my RE teacher telling me when I was 17 or 18, “ the church is the only organisation in the world that exists for the benefit of its non members”.
Of course one of the things that any priest is called to be at his or her ordination is a pastor to a flock, to have a particular care for the building up of the body of Christ in a particular place, which we usually and rightly think of as the nurture of a particular Christian congregation… “us” (gathered here this morning)….and there is no doubt that what we will need to attract someone who we think can help us all grow in faith, someone who can talk our language and relate to our diverse and merry little band. But we must resist at all costs simply thinking that in seeking a new rector we are looking for a Chaplain to the St Anne’s Club.
The church exists for its non- members, and a new rector for Soho will be given the care of souls not just of this congregation , but of everyone within this parish whether they actually come here or not. The new rector will come here to pastor, serve and guide the stranger on the street just as much as to do the same for those of us who are at the core of our corporate life here. That can be an uncomfortable reality- and how often we may hear ( though not specifically here!) the moan “ well after all I’ve done for that church and the vicar didn’t phone when I had a cold!”, and whilst I do understand ( and might share ) that sentiment ( and we must, absolutely MUST, care for our own) it is a gospel-based imperative that the full time clergy person here is to be outward looking, caring for the whole community and helping us to do similarly.
The church, globally, nationally and locally exists not primarily for the sake of those of us who know that we’re welcome, who’ve received our invitations to the King’s banquet, but for those in our towns and cities and in the far flung streets and lanes of our world who are metaphorically lame, blind and poor who do not know that there is a place set for them at the feast table of the kingdom of God and that a foretaste of that great banquet is what we experience here.
I am often saddened that the huge number of people in the UK who are kindly disposed towards the church, and often the C of E in particular, who don’t recognise the necessity to pull up a chair at its table more often. Baptised, often confirmed, they have a simple faith that trusts in God, believe in Christ and would agree that in different ways God is active in the world through his Spirit, and yet their home lives, their property (or their yoke of oxen!) distract them from playing their part in the building up of the kingdom of God, through the church, here on earth. When they do come, perhaps at Christmas or for a wedding, they appreciate it and say they’ll come again, but like those in the parable when the dinner bell rings they don’t really believe that God’s heart aches at the empty space they leave at the table. Well, we need someone who can help us engage with them and help them to see what they’re missing.
The number of people for whom the church simply does not register on their radar at all, even at Christmas or for a wedding, has grown significantly in recent decades and we need someone who can help us both identify and engage with them, those for whom the master sent out a second time to find in the far flung roads and lanes. I don’t know that I would want to ‘compel them’ to come in by force as the parable perhaps implies … I hope we stopped forcing people to become Christians at the Crusades.. but I would hope we might make coming in irresistible, so that they are compelled to come out of response to being touched by the love of God.
The vision that God shared with Abraham for his future was of descendants so vast in number that they were like grains of sand on a seashore, or as many and beautiful as stars in the sky. That vision holds true for the church, the new Israel, in which it is God’s longing that every person in all the world might now His love for them and his desire that they find a place at his table.
But faithful vision should not be confused with fantasy, and we need to be realistic about two things:
Firstly, there is probably little point in asking those who are totally estranged from the life of the church what kind of a rector would they like to see here. They neither know what a rector is nor what the church is for; that is like asking someone who doesn’t eat cheese whether, if they did, they’d prefer Wensleydale or Camembert! We kid ourselves too if we think that the answer to the question “ what would make you come into St Anne’s Soho” wouldn’t be, from not a few people in the area, “turn it into a lap dancing club ”. We and the God we worship, love and encounter here is, they think, an irrelevance… they’ve other oxen to plough. We need the faith of Abraham to recognise that they too can be stars in God’s sky and seek someone as our Rector with the vision to help us engage creatively with them.
Secondly, we must be prepared to find ourselves changed in the process. We will not get a duplicate Clare, and it would not be right for us to seek one; but if we look only for someone who will keep us just as we are we ( because actually we quite like St Anne’s as it is!) we will not attract a loving pastor for ourselves and Soho, but a museum warden to dust us as we fossilise. We will need the faith of Abraham here too, so that we can look into the sky and see new galaxies and hitherto unseen constellations, and rather than feel nervous about the strange and the unfamiliar actually feel excited that even there we have a place.
There is a probably apocryphal story about a vicar who received a newly ordained curate, and on his first day in his new parish the curate came to the church to find out what the congregation expected him to do for them. He was therefore amazed to hear the vicar tell him that he wanted him to go into the local betting shop and place a bet. The curate was horrified, and protested that he wasn’t a gambling man, but the vicar said “ just do it… then come back and tell me what happens”. It was several days before the curate returned to the Vicar, “at first I wasn’t sure which betting shop to go to, and I kept walking past them to see if one looked better than the other , I wasn’t sure what the difference was. Then when I finally decided which one to go to it took me ages to pluck up the courage to go in. When I opened the door I wasn’t sure what was going on, there were lots of people in there staring at TV screens all of whom ignored me which I think made me felt worse than if they’d all stared at me, then I didn’t know how to place the bet, and even when someone tried to explain it to me I didn’t know what all the jargon meant . The guys in there seemed to be enjoying themselves but I just couldn’t wait to get out.” The vicar smiled, “Good” he said, “ never forget those feelings, because that’s what most people feel when they walk into a church for the first time.”
Yes, even here at St Anne’s we may need someone who will not only love us as we are, but help us to see how we may be able to empathise with those who are not yet ‘us’ and make it easier for them to come and find a place here. We do need someone who will comfort us but also someone who will perhaps unsettle us if we are to reach out to those who currently do not relate to us, or relate to God through us as we are.
So, perhaps, to return to the image from the parable, the banquet needs a new head chef who will shake up the menu so that our experience is enriched by new dishes (even if it means losing an odd favourite – don’t worry, new favourites do form), and so that new companions join us at the feast. We may need to translate the menu to lose some of the strange and off-putting jargon, and even lay out the tables differently so that our ‘family meal’ within these walls spills out to become more like a street party or a picnic in which all can share.
Lord our God,
Open our eyes to all you have given us here.
Open our doors to welcome in a new rector with vision.
Open our ears to hear your voice when it calls us to change
Open our hearts to welcome the stranger
That together in faith all may sit and feast as brothers and sisters in your presence.
Amen.
Touched by Thankful Lepers
2 Kings 5.1-3, 7-15
2 Timothy 2.8-15
Luke 17.11-19
This mornings two stories about the healing of lepers present us with a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. Naaman, in the Second Book of Kings is initially distinctly unconvinced of Elisha’s ability to heal him- he is appalled that the prophet doesn’t even come out of his house for a consultation with the patient , let alone wave his hands over him and say ‘abracadabra’ or whatever the 8th cent BC equivalent was. Nevertheless he follows Elisha’s instructions to simply dip in the river seven times and finds his skin restored to that of a young boy and comes to faith in God. By contrast the Samaritan leper in the Gospel Reading returns to thank Jesus for healing him only to hear Jesus tell him that it was his faith that had cured him. For one, faith comes as a result of the cure; for the other, the cure comes as a result of faith. Which comes first the faith or the cure, the chicken or the egg?
I suppose that it depends where you begin in the cycle. If you’re given a chicken first the chances are it will lay an egg later; given an egg in the right circumstances there’s a chance that later you may later find a chicken hatching! Naaman who came to faith after being healed must, despite his doubts about the prophet’s rather unimpressive showmanship obviously thought that there was some point in dipping himself repeatedly in the river Jordan which suggests that even for him who only appears to come to faith after being healed there was a glimmer of faith or trust before: even if born out of desperation. And for the Samaritan surely whatever faith he had that brought him to Jesus in the first place must have been increased by receiving the life transforming healing of Jesus, in fact it was that increased faith that led him to gratitude and thankfulness .
And that is the real issue here which I think the gospel leads us to consider ….. thankfulness. Does the cure, or the faith no matter which comes first lead to thankfulness.
It’s rather puzzling and amusing that Jesus, having told the ten lepers to go and show themselves to the priests at the temple then berates the nine who did as they were told, and praises the one ( who being a Samaritan wouldn’t have been allowed into the temple- so Jesus had given him an impossible instruction!) who instead returned to give thanks to Jesus. Who is to say that once the nine Jews had their healing verified wouldn’t have been on the first bus back to Jesus to say thank you? It was Ambrose, the saintly bishop of
Thankfulness plays a key part in Christian living. Show me a miserable Christian and you’ve introduced me to a contradiction in terms! Yes, of course we can all have an off day, or a difficult few months when clouds darken our usually sunny disposition : but for the Christian no matter how rough things may be at a given time the under girding faith that somehow even in the worst of times God is with them, that God in Christ died out of love for them, that by that death not even our own bodily death defeats us gives ground for thanksgiving…. And that is even before one throws in the smaller thanksgivings for the wonder of creation, the gift of friendship or the smile or kind word from a stranger getting off the tube ( and it does happen!) that actually touched you in a way that that person could never imagine. As the old saying that was often drummed into teenage confirmation candidates went “Count your blessings, name them one by one and you’ll be amazed what the Lord has done”. This is really not intended to be some glib way of glossing over the traumas and hardships of life, but the only method of survival. A passenger on the Titanic may have lost that enormous ship, but it was by finding a simple rubber life belt she may have been prevented from drowning, in that situation even in the face of so much loss isn’t the sense of thankfulness for the life belt immediate and actually impossible to ignore? The seemingly small things to be thankful for can put the big losses into perspective and help us to survive.
Some years ago I was filming at an infant school in East Sussex and I met a seven year old boy with a terrible illness called Proteous Syndrome. It is thankfully a very rare disease in which a rogue gene causes different parts of the body to grow alarmingly quickly and often grotesquely resulting in terrible deformity, disfigurement and pain. We’re still in touch and recently his mum sent me a copy of a channel 4 documentary that was done about him. In it my friend aged 11 used a camcorder to record some of his own feelings and the most amazing fact was that even with all that he suffered the seemingly most trivial pleasure just gave him a joy that outweighed all that he was going through, and I can see him now on his bed looking into the camera and saying “ I’ve had a brilliant, really happy, happy day”.
His mum agrees with me that it is his deep thankfulness for all that he enjoys that is enabling him now , a football mad 13 year old, to face having both his legs amputated.
We meet today in a service that has many names, and the one that resonates most powerfully for me is The Eucharist, which simply means Great Thanksgiving. To set the Eucharist at the heart of the life of a community of faith is to put thanksgiving at the heart of our daily living as individuals. No matter what we do in life , be it right or wrong; no matter what we experience in life, be it good or bad ; we seek to interpret our actions and experiences against a tapestry of thanksgiving and specifically against our thanksgiving for what God has done for us. That is what St Paul was saying at the opening of the passage from Timothy we heard earlier- that the glory of salvation which Jesus won for many through his death and by being raised to new life makes suffering the hardships and imprisonment bearable to the point of redeeming and transforming them. In many works of art the Saints appear to enjoy their sufferings, they appear to relish their pains or stigmata, and there is a strong tradition of people feeling privileged to suffer ‘with Christ’ and so see their hardships as a sign of their solidarity with him who suffered similarly. But I also think that when we look at many great works of art and see the serene and even joyful expressions on the faces of those being flayed alive or burnt at the stake, we see not some masochistic love of pain, but rather a person so Eucharistic in their being, a person for whom a deep gratitude and thankfulness for what God has done in their lives runs so powerfully and deeply that nothing can overpower it. Luke paints this picture in words at the stoning of Stephen who looking up to heaven saw Christ enthroned at God’s side and so even under the torrent of rocks that the good religious folk threw at him had the face of an angel.
So which came first the chicken or the egg? I don’t know obviously. Which comes first, faith or thanksgiving? Well I’m veering towards faith for most of us, and lots of people have come to faith in times of great hardship when thanksgiving has seemed like an unlikely disposition. Wherever we start it seems gratitude is an essential foundation, perhaps that’s why most of us learnt “please” and “ thank you” amongst our first words. Because if we are Eucharistic, thankful people at our core we have a resource to sustain us when life is hard, but if at our centre is only a bitter resentment for life’s difficulties we may not be able to recognise the things that could be a delight and to us, give us cause for thanksgiving, and lift us out of the mire of our troubles.
“Count your blessings, one by one, and you’ll be amazed what the Lord has done”.
For blessings great and small. Thanks be to God.