Starting Lent - the Garden and the Wilderness

Brothers and sisters in Christ, since early days Christians have observed with great devotion the time of our Lord’s passion and resurrection and prepared for this by a season of penitence and fasting.

By carefully keeping these days, Christians take to heart the call to repentance and the assurance of forgiveness proclaimed in the gospel, and so grow in faith and in devotion to our Lord.

I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word.


... So we began Lent in the Liturgy for Ash Wednesday. I'm always rather glad to get into Lent. This year it's taken much longer than usual due to the lateness of Easter - though it's questionable whether for all that I'm any more prepared. But - while it's good to hit the ground running - the point of Lent is not to have everything worked out perfectly from it start; it's to let those disciplines of Lent work in us to prepare us for Holy Week and Easter.

Our Reader, Rosie Junemann, took us into the contrast between the Garden of Eden where things go wrong for Adam and Eve and the Wilderness as Jesus prepares for his public ministry - read her sermon for the First Sunday of Lent here.

I followed the Sung Eucharist with a Baptism of three children (including twins) and approaching 200 guests in church - and in my brief homily (off the cuff so not online) reflected on the imperfect-ness of our world, all too conscious of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Questions of theodicy, our fallen nature, redemption and forgiveness are all in that Old Testament reading for yesterday (Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7). I'd wondered whether I'd get away with using it in such a context, but we had a great time, a largely responsive congregation and perfectly behaved children. Which in part makes me wonder why General Synod is getting so wound up about the Common Worship Baptism Service - isn't it more a matter of how you do it rather than its content that is the issue? Elements such as the "Commission" don't work off the page - but there's permission to use your own words in order to be more direct; why not use it, rather than asking for yet another text?

Holy Island... and National Marriage Week

After a rather over-busy few weeks, I knew I needed a Quiet Day. Having nothing booked formally, I drove up to Lindisfarne - re-named by Benedictine monks from Durham as "Holy Island" though of course the original monastic foundation goes back to its establishment by St. Aidan in the seventh century.

Because the causeway to the island is tidal, there's a discipline required in working out when to go there - consult the Tide Tables! A further discipline of patience was required on the last leg of the journey when I found myself in a long queue of traffic held up by work on the East Coast mainline level crossing at Beal, just before reaching the causeway. Several drivers turned their cars round and drove off - I wonder what else they thought they would do when they must have travelled some distance to get that far?

Once I was on the island, the clouds broke up, the sun came out and the weather turned quite mild. There's something special about the quality of the air and light on Holy Island. And while there were other cars in the car park there were few people about to disturb the stillness.

I wonder how many visitors make it beyond the confines of the village - or at best the Castle? A few venture to St. Cuthbert's Island, crunching over the mussels and slipping on the seaweed. But very few go more than half a mile from the centre of the village over muddy tracks or along the coastal path to explore the dunes and discover vast expanses of sandy beach, rocky bays, cliffs and the lough with its hide. It's sometimes possible to walk more than halfway round the island without meeting anyone - and in between the dunes there are areas where even the sound of the sea is blocked out.

I'm not all that keen on the "Celtic Christianity industry" - but come to Lindisfarne and you can understand how the monks who established themselves there found a sort of "desert" in which their lives of prayer could flourish. And it's all just off the A1, which I could have got back to very quickly at the end of the day - if Balfour Beatty hadn't still been continuing their work on the level crossing.

There are more pictures of the Holy Island of Lindisfarne here. The shutter button on my ageing mobile phone isn't working too well - so sometimes it didn't work quite when intended!

And on Sunday I tackled the hard sayings of Jesus found in the Gospel reading from Matthew 5 - with particular reference to his words concerning marriage and divorce - click here! The day ended with my being interviewed for Metro Radio in connection with National Marriage Week. The idea was that it would go out in snippets at various times today - if you hear any of it, let me know!

See amid the winter's snow...

I know it's too early for Christmas trees - but I've just got back from decorating our Hall for use by our various user-groups over the coming weeks. We have some magnificent decorations - and hoped they would have been seen to their best as the Rainbows, Brownies and Guides put on a coffee evening and entertainment tomorrow. Sadly, it's had to be postponed due to the ice and snow on Church Bank - hopefully it'll go ahead on Monday 20th December.

Only two cars with snow tyres made it down the Bank to the church and hall this morning - so thanks to everyone who walked. And we grabbed people while they were there to help with the decorating (completed in record time), a task we don't now have to do this afternoon - and even had a Finance Committee meeting (only one absentee, who lives on an even steeper hill), so we don't need to have that tomorrow!

Preaching this morning, I tried to make the connection between John the Baptist and the way we might be feeling in this wintry weather. I don't find John a particularly appealing character (too much shouting at people, poor dress sense, disgusting diet) - but probably I do him an injustice... I found myself reflecting on his formation through life in the desert and went on from there to the desert experience created over a thousand years later in the Russian taiga. To quote Carlo Caretto (via Andrew Louth's The Wilderness of God), “All the great religions were born between the desert and the steppe.” See how I developed that by clicking here - you'll probably need to tweak the sidebar to make the text appear.