September Message

VICAR’S MESSAGE SEPTEMBER 2010

Practising Community: for the sake of the world

Being Christian is primarily a belonging rather than a private matter. We’re Christian because we were baptized “into Christ”. Being in Christ is to be part of the long history of God’s people stretching back to Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, John the Baptist and to the life of Jesus. Jesus’ ministry was a team affair. He’s always to be found healing, preaching, and forgiving with groups of disciples, small and large, and often with massive crowds.

Enjoying eating meals and talking about deepest values together was a key to Jesus’ being with people – with Martha and Mary, with people society didn’t trust, with religious leaders, with 5000 on a hillside, with the 12, including Judas, the night of his arrest, and after God raised him from death, the Resurrection appearance meals at Emmaus, by the lake and in the upper room. Jesus taught the disciples to include everyone – “bring them in from the highways and byways – compel them to come in!” (Lk. 14.23).

So when we come together as God’s people now in Whitley Bay, the table fellowship of the Eucharist is the biggest clue to who we are and to how Christ is present with us and with the whole world.

In gathering, receiving forgiveness, praising God, hearing and responding to Scripture, interceding, sharing God’s peace, offering our lives to be transformed, in the broken bread and shared wine, and being sent out to love and serve the Lord – we celebrate the whole of Christian life – to be part of God’s mission for the salvation of all creation, including the most problematic bit, ourselves.

We practice community in this way because Jesus commanded us to “Do this until I come again”. This is how we keep ourselves focussed and on track. We practice faith as a doctor practices medicine. We know that there’s nothing we could possibly do for God to love us more than we are loved already. But, hopefully through practice, we do improve and become more responsive and make a contribution to God’s purposes. Remember, the Church of God doesn’t have a mission, but the God of mission does have a church.

From adversarial debate to a web of difference

The “emerging church” movement is one that is attempting to engage with people who are now in their twenties and thirties. I know, from talking with those the age of my adult children, how differently they experience the world, compared with how many of us did, even ten or twenty years ago. Whether you think of life-long employment, child rearing, relationships, racial perceptions, attitudes to marriage, how to manage change or perceptions of sexual orientation, we so often start from very different sets of assumptions or ways of debating. The danger is we give up because we don’t care enough or we’re scared of conflict.

History shows the mistake, time and again, of older ones simply admonishing the next generation for being misguided or worse, cutting off communication altogether. So how can we honour and work with and offer our faith to those whose way of seeing the world is more unlike, than like, our own? It isn’t just a matter of age, either, is it? We all know people in their 30’s who agree more with people in their 8o’s than with their peers, and vice versa. So what is it that can hold very different ways of being human in conversation, in a world where profound innovation and change challenge and disrupt every part of life?

Instead of dualistic thinking, that says, “well I’m right so by definition, you’re wrong, and therefore we can’t work together”, can we see with a contemplative third eye? Can we discover a new quality of awareness and attention: yes, attention towhat we do and how we do it, but as God’s people, attending to the inner source from which we operate. Our inner source is the mutual, self-giving relationships between Jesus, the Spirit and the Father.

If you notice, in the New Testament there is a dynamic between the three persons of God, always re-configuring. Sometimes the Spirit makes Jesus present (his birth by Mary), or Jesus shows the Father (parable of the Prodigal Son), or Jesus brings the Spirit (Resurrection appearances) and so on. In other words it’s not a fixed, top-down hierarchy, but an evolving network or field of relating – Trinity.

I believe the identity of “emerging church”, of which we can be proud to be a part, is a kaleidoscope of constantly emerging patterns of relating. Think of that next time you take part in sharing the peace or the coffee conversations after the 10 am Eucharist. Notice how we are all contributing to this butterfly, emerging from a chrysalis. People who come to us with fresh eyes are more aware then we can be of ways in which generosity and mutual acceptance are making a huge difference to who we are:

• Welcoming. The father in the Prodigal Son story waits with longing for his son to return. Then when he sees him on the horizon he rushes out to fling his arms around him and give him every sign of delight to draw him into food, security and honour. Some who have joined as recently at St Mary’s would say that it is the quality of our welcome that gave them confidence to step through a small, in intimidating entrance-way and into a rather cluttered and scruffy-looking building, with a lovely, warm atmosphere.
  
• Singing and music-making is a primary way of growing in and communicating faith. Gradually over recent months we have allowed God to stretch our horizons towards a practice where all kinds of musical expression can have their voice at various times.
  
• All-age worship is becoming a theme, so that we don’t say “it’s either for adults or children”, assuming that one group or the other is superior. On All Saints Day (31^st October) after the 10 Eucharist, the congregation is invited to consider an evolving music policy.
  
• In the way we have watched out for one another in the long drawn-out Consistory Court proceedings. As I write, I’m sorry to say there is still no legal judgement available. It would have been so easy for little groups of people to have cut themselves off from one another saying “we’re right, so you must be wrong”. Through God’s grace this hasn’t happened and we have managed the rule of Jesus that there is one thing that is excluded and that is exclusion itself.
  
• We have all kinds of people working on various parts of our life: communicating, spiritual growth, learning, building maintenance and cleaning, stewardship, marriage preparation, supporting baptism families, administration, Godly Play, school visits, caring for the sick, and so on. We are all part of a field of loving action in an unfolding of Christian life in a world that is new and scary for many. The capacity we have for mutual respect and trust will be a great test of our ability to attract others to our community of faith.

I Have Called You Friends

So, as we look to celebrating 80 years of St Mary’s building in 2011 – and plans will soon be emerging – let’s recall another of Jesus’ sayings, “I have called you friends”. In our sharing in God’s mission, can we let go of old scripts, that may have served us well in the past. Let’s experiment instead with being part of deeper space, where we relate to one another as an echo of the way Jesus was with people -  God’s trinitarian life? The benefits are personal too. We shall be more joyful as we co-create and bring forth something profoundly new. Jesus invites us to be “friends” through sharing in a self-giving community. We’re invited to shift our sense of who we are, to be always aware of one another, so becoming more real, authentic, and present. Let’s encourage one another to go on growing this attractive and challenging church that we are making with God and one another for the glory of God and the hope of our neighbours.

Come and visit us at St Mary’s. You’ll be very welcome.

Canon Robin Greenwood