Recently in Lifestyle Category

Heard about this at New Wine - no idea if it'll take off, but it sounds like a simple idea that has plenty of potential for building community.

StreetBank allows you to offer three things - a skill, an item for lending and/or something you'd be up for giving away.

You put in your email address and your postcode and the website links you up with anyone else in your area looking for what you've got to offer... and vice-versa.

Hardest part in getting a site like this going - hitting that critical mass where most of your street are on it.

Worth a try though....

Sometimes Twitter has its uses... John Piper (U.S. preacher and prolific writer) has just started 'tweeting', giving his justification here (deliberate pun - if you've been following the Piper vs Wright debate!) - and his twitter feed from a few days' ago carried a link to the pdf of a famous C.S.Lewis piece, The Weight of Glory [links to pdf download] - one we looked at briefly in a short course last year.

That first paragraph, which Piper describes as "One of the most important paragraphs I ever read...", ends like this:

If we consider the unblushing promises of reward ...in the Gospels, it would seem that our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday by the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
[C.S.Lewis, The Weight of Glory, publ. 1942 in Theology]

It's a paragraph I remember us dwelling on at the short course - enjoying the unexpected and powerful imagery (classic Lewis) and the surprise of finding that the Christian faith is more about "desire" than "denial" - the crucial, life-changing question being "What do I desire?".

The question reverberates about my day today - what do I desire from it for me: merely comfort, or success or approval? - as much as around the whole of my life-before-God.

Following 74 people or organisations on twitter... 174 friends on facebook... heaven-knows how many RSS feeds in google reader... all of which end up sending me links to other webpages or websites...

That's an awful lot of noise all at once!

Problem is that it's pretty addictive - what if I miss something?

I had four days just after Easter with no internet access at all. It was great.

Current plan is to remove the computer from my study at home (where the idea is I will be able to study, preparation etc.) - but of course I'll scupper that if I ever get my hands on the mobile I'm coveting at a distance...

It comes down, of course, to that most under-rated, most seldom-practiced and most needed of virtues - basic discipline, in particular the discipline of "delayed gratification"... something we're meant to develop as we grow up.

Perhaps I just never did? Grow up, that is...

I wonder whether I managed to miss it?

I was here, of course - at church most of the day (in my office, though) - and I'd had a week of build up (mostly at my computer, though) - and I'm looking forward to Sunday (though I still need to finish what I'm going to say and how I'm going to lead).

And therein lies the problem : too much stuff, not enough time and space.

Holy Week really and truly ought to be a week to do less of the stuff we do the rest of the time (yes, even for Vicars) and set aside the calm, unhurried time that lets us catch up with the drama and wonder of the week itself.

For me, today has been truly the opposite of what it ought to have been - I've sat at my desk trying to clear stuff through so I can go away for a few days' holiday on Sunday evening. If ever there was an inappropriate way to spend such a day, this was it.

Next year - and here's something to hold me to - I want to plan a week where the week itself (not getting ready for the holiday afterwards, or planning the next term's preaching, or clearing my inbox) becomes the focus.

Otherwise I risk arriving for a celebration on Sunday morning only dimly aware of why it's all such good news.

Two rather different headlines from reputable news organisations...

New York Times

Prostate test found to save few lives

BBC News online

...prostate cancer screening could cut death rates from the disease by 20%

Remarkably, the two articles manage to come to completely contradictory conclusions from precisely the same sets of studies and data - and they were published the very same day!

Informed choice is valued above almost everything else - from schooling to hospital treatment, to the environment - but the contrast between these two reputable sources of 'information' points up two major trip hazards along the way:

1. Being 'well informed' is not the same as being right
   
   One of the hallmarks of the 'post-modern' mindset is a huge (and not entirely ill-founded) suspicion that we can ever really 'know' exactly the right answer to some of the most important life-changing/saving questions we can imagine.
   
   The problem is that this breeds a suspicion of experts, of claims to authority or certainty that can leave us either stuck with indecision, or to react against whatever view is mainstream, fearing we've been duped. The furore over MMR vaccinations is one obvious case where this seems to have caused real damage. The reaction against the faith-based assumptions of a Christian worldview is, perhaps, connected...
   
   
2. Choice itself can be the enemy.
   It's not merely the reliability of information that can scupper our decision-making, but the availbility of choice itself.
   
   Next time you're in a supermarket, just think how much simplet - if a bit dull - it would be to have rather less choice in the bread aisle, or amongst the 50+ butters, spreads and margarines on offer.
   
   We like choice, but choice itself can be so overwhelming and demand so much of us - that we become experts on everything - that we could wish it were taken away.

Both problems lead to a swing away from uncertainty and choice towards the certitude that comes from trusting an 'expert' and being told what to do - it's an undeniably safer and easier existence and the reason - at least one of them - why more 'extreme' forms of religion are making a comeback... as we mentioned briefly yesterday.

Sitting here in London Diocesan Synod doesn't seem to be the most likely place to feel fear!

But we're listening to a presentation by Brian Cuthbertson who heads up the Environmental Challenge for the Diocese, so the figures, predictions and possibilities are nothing short of terrifying.

How do I react?

I read plenty on this subject, have preached on it and feel passionately about it - I think! I say, I think, because mostly I choose not to think about it at all. That's one of the most common reactions to fear, isn't it, 'denial' - and it's something I'm a great expert on (pretty convinced it got me through my undergraduate degree!!)...

Denial is one way - another is to think that it's all so beyond me that it's not worth even trying to do the little I/we might be able to do.

Panic is another - that it's all so bad there's no hope to be seen or imagined... this tends to lead to denial anyway...

Some good news: things are genuinely changing in the CofE.

The national church has apparently, a similar carbon footprint to a large national supermarket chain - and has very ambitious targets to reduce this.

London aims to reduce the carbon footprint of its churches by 20% by 2012 and by 80%+ by 2050... and remarkably the last two years have already seen a 10% drop. Things are happening - and churches are being encouraged to think very creatively. One church in the Diocese is about to commission a recently installed biomass heating system. Three parishes have installed solar panels - and many more have done the basic things of changing lightbulbs...

We're determined to pursue this in All Souls.

We're aiming to form a Green Team to help co-ordinate our action - both changes to our buildings and habits and also promotion and awareness of the global impact of the changes that we're living through - and causing.

If you'd like to be part of that team - or would like to find out more... or if you'd like to suggest ways we could change our church lifestyle... let me know!

I've been reading - for the umpteenth time - a book that's been a constant companion over my (very nearly) ten years as a pastor. Eugene Peterson is a prolific author (best known for his version of the Bible: The Message), but at his best, I think, when reflecting on ministry and leadership.

This particular book, subtitled "Reflections on Christian Ministry" was originally called The Gift, but for reasons unknown, it's now The Contemplative Pastor.

Honoured today to have taken the memorial service for a remarkable gentleman whose life spanned many decades of change and whose friends and family remember him with genuine affection and honour. We were hosted kindly by a central London church - a Wren building I'd never been into before.

Writing my talk/sermon, I sat with the second reading chosen by the family - not one I've preached on before in any context...

There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to refrain,
a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

Here's what I said (leaving out the gentleman's name) following on from the (very moving and beautifully put) eulogy delivered by a close relative...

"...it's true of all life, looked at a day at a time or a decade at a time: we realise that all of us live through experiences that can plunge us into the deepest darkness and at other times make days sparkle with the brightest of joy. We experience the pleasure of friendship as well as the ache of loneliness, trust alongside betrayal, times when we have felt sick to our stomachs with failure and others when we enjoy the giddy high of success...

It's that roller-coaster ride of life that the writer of Ecclesiastes picks up in the reading we've just had. He recognises that the life we lead - this time we spend "under heaven" - sweeps together the best and the worst: from war to peace, loss to gain, mourning as well as joyful dance.

And I want to suggest that the challenge he places before us is simply this - not to live life in compartments, but to recognise its wholeness before God.

It's a great survival mechanism, isn't it, to box off different areas of our life - family life, work, friendships of different types and depths. We can present ourselves slightly - sometimes radically - different in each one and bottle up emotions from one area that might spill over and damage another.

Hearing this passage, and remembering the book as a whole, I'm struck by the fact that the writer never winces at the thought that all this mess of life is lived before and, in fact, with God. This is no God just of high-days and holidays, of Sunday mornings at church, or Christmas in a Carol Service. The God he speaks of through his writings seems as interested in the darkness we walk through, at times in fear and confusion, as the light we enjoy.

And that's a pattern we see lived out in the life of Jesus: God made flesh - far from finding a pain-free well-insulated life of luxury, but walking the muddy paths and hungry days of a poor carpenter in first century Palestine - knowing deep friendships alongside heart-breaking betrayal; enjoying the sights and sounds of God's created world and weeping at the harshness of death and disease; experiencing the joy of seeing God at work, yet aware even of those times when God seems distance, even absent.

And in all of that, Jesus lived out a life stubbornly refusing to box things in - a life of wholeness before his Heavenly Father - knowing that God was not just interested, but utterly committed to walking with him through it all with a love stronger even than death itself.

As we remember today the richness of this particular long life, lived before the God who made and loves us, let's hear the challenge of the wise writer of Ecclesiastes to recognise the presence and love of God in Jesus, walking with us through the whole of live and hand-in-hand, even through death itself.