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Brothers and Sisters

Only a few weeks after the brutal killing of Sir David Amess MP, I find myself less inclined than usual to mark Guy Fawkes Day. Part of me enjoys the fun, the fireworks and the opportunity for one last sausage and soup picnic before the year really is too cold, and part of me finds that which we are remembering is too close to the knuckle. Of course, we are celebrating the failure and not the success of Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators, but faced with this recent assassination, with the inevitable memories of Jo Cox and before her of the bombing of the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton, it puts me slightly on edge. And then of course, there are the dogs who are petrified of the “big bangs” and all those who, having escaped to this country from a place where bombing and shootings were commonplace may be re-traumatised by what we see as a celebration.

On the other hand, it is a very British response to tough times. We take them, we laugh at them, we subvert them, we make them into something else. Ring-a-ring-a-roses was a song about dying from the plague; Baa baa black sheep was about workers’ rights and Georgie-Porgie, Pudding and Pie was about inappropriate sexual demands made by someone who was too powerful to refuse. Songs that have become children’s ditties were originally reminders, teaching tools and a way of claiming back some power.

This upside-down, back-to-front way of seeing the world is perhaps a reflection of our understanding of the upside-down of Kingdom values; our interpretation of teaching that says “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you”, and takes the cursed death of hanging on a tree, mixes it with the ritual uncleanliness of blood, and declares it to be God’s way of washing clean the sins of humanity. Whether the back-to-front nature of taking the Great Fire of London and writing a song about it to be sung as a four part children’s round is in fact Godly, or simply a particular way of healing difficulty through dark humour, it is true that we are called to live in this strange world of God’s where the first will be last and the last will be first, where it is easier for a small child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than a rich and educated ruler and where the blind can be healed, but the priests and the Pharisees see less and less of what is going on.

What ever the case, when we see those sparkling fountains in the night sky, let’s send up after them a prayer of thanksgiving for Jesus, the light of the world.

God bless, Vicci

Sisters and Brothers

This Sunday falls on All Hallows’ Eve or Halloween as it has come to be called. The day before All Saints’ Day on the 1st and All Souls’ Day on the 2nd of November. It ushers in what has become a season of remembrance in the Church with Remembrance Sunday to follow.

In the very early days of the church, Christian martyrs were given a day to mark their martyrdom and so for example, St Stephen’s Day, marking the death of the very first Christian martyr is on the 26th of December, although we more usually call it Boxing Day. Eventually though, there were so many martyrs that we simply ran out of days in the year and so in the 8th century, the 1st of November was declared All Saints’ Day to mark the death of all the martyrs. It was then decided to designate the 2nd of November All Souls’ Day to mark those who had died in the faith. Over the years in various well-meaning sermons, I have heard preachers say that we are all saints and that All Saints’ Day is for everyone. I do believe we are all saints in one meaning of the word, and I do believe that when we sing “For all the Saints, who from their labours rest” we are talking about all those who have gone before us, but I sort of want to reclaim both days, because it is no small thing to have died because of your faith and although we do not usually run that risk in this country, still today there are countries where those who affirm Jesus as Lord are putting themselves at risk.

Perhaps because of Newton’s 3rd law (“For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”) when faced with the celebration of All Saints and All Souls, the ancient Celtic tradition that ghosts returned to earth on the 31st of October before their New Year on the 1st of November, was marked by certain people as a time when the fabric between earth and heaven became thin, and people dressed up to scare off the ghosts or perhaps to confuse them. Who is to say? We are faced with the inevitable march of capitalism which requires that any and every day that can be turned into an opportunity to demand money shall do so and we now have the chocolate consuming, zombie-fest that is today’s Halloween. Like it or loathe it, it is here to stay for the moment, but whether we put up a pumpkin and offer the 6 year-old witch some sweeties, or whether we close our doors and curtains and pretend to be away, let’s take some time this week to remember all those who have gone before us and whose teaching and actions has lit for us the path that leads to Heaven.

God bless, Vicci

Brothers and Sisters

The founder of our Methodist movement, John Wesley, considered there to be two types of holiness: personal holiness, which is growing your personal relationship with God and social holiness, which is showing love to others through caring for their physical needs. This understanding takes very seriously such passages in the Bible as James 2:15-17 – “If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?”

I want to both challenge and affirm this. On the one hand, when Wesley talked about social holiness, he was talking about holiness through worship, partaking in holy communion, Bible Study and hymn singing. He felt that withdrawing from the world in search of a purely individual holiness was not the way to go. Yet at the same time, he was passionate about social justice, which is what we have come to see social holiness as meaning. Wesley and his friends visited the sick, the dying and those in prison, worked for social reform, education, abolition of slavery and against the distillers – not so much because he was anti-alcohol as because they unfairly exploited the poor. John Wesley was all for social justice, but when he spoke about social holiness, that is not what he meant.

However, language and its meaning changes through the generations as we know. The important thing is not so much which words John Wesley used to describe it, but what he intended Methodism to be about. Written into our DNA is the singing, the preaching, the learning but also the caring, the social justice, the determination that we will not rest until our mother’s glib response to our cries of “It’s not fair” with “Life’s not fair” should cease to be true.

Life at the moment is not fair. We see it in the fear and the worry in the world around us where we are faced with political assassination, concerns as to rising costs and worries about shortages. I would suggest however that a Methodist response to the reality that life is not fair, is to figure out why and for whom and dig down into how we change the story. We will not be able to change it for everyone, but this winter, let’s strive to make life a little bit fairer for those who are put in front of us. Whether we call it social justice, social holiness or living the Jesus way, it’s what we are called to do and who we are called to be as Methodists.

God bless, Vicci