The Vicar's Letter April 2009
I HOPE you have used this Lent so far to slow down the pace of your life and spend more time with God. Lent is a gift to us to enable us to do just this. To spend more time in prayer, reading, whether the Bible or a Lent book, and maybe the experience of simply being still before our God.
But soon the pace of Lent begins to pick up as we follow Jesus to the cross. Holy Week becomes hectic as we journey with Jesus from his entry in Jerusalem to the upper room and the Last Supper, through the Garden of Gethsemane experience, the trial and finally the crucifixion.
It was to this end that Jesus’ public ministry was leading – had been leading from his humble birth in the stable of Bethlehem, but as we know it was not the end. There was something more glorious in store: THE RESURRECTION.
If the cross had been the end there would have been nothing more to say. Another good human being, maybe a blessed prophet, would have been executed, which history may or may not have recorded.
It is from the resurrection that all the unique Christian claims for the person of Jesus spring. The resurrection speaks to us of Jesus’ divinity, his Sonship and his relationship with the Father. It also speaks to us of God’s new way of relating with His creation and his love for us all.
Holy Week is an important one for Christians particularly as we reach Good Friday, and all the momentous events of that day. I know of Christians who cannot face attending Good Friday services, but I am sure it has been said many times (I know it has because I have said every year I’ve been here and I am sure my predecessors would have said something similar) that you cannot really arrive at Easter Day full of expectation of meeting with the risen Jesus without journeying with him through his trials, his crucifixion and death – of hearing his cries, without hearing that shout of victory: “IT IS FINISHED”.
The death of Jesus isn’t pleasant for any of us and shouldn’t be. It may bring a tear to our eyes, it may cause us to
ask the question “WHY?” But it is necessary.
In seeing Jesus die, we may not be able to comprehend the cosmic significance of it all, we may only see, as William How’s hymn It is a thing most wonderful says, “a little part”, but it is necessary to try and comprehend the enormity of the love of God that is displayed on that cross.
It is also necessary because out of it springs a new day, a new dawn, a new relationship which we want to be part of. The one we saw die is now alive, risen from the tomb that imprisoned him. The power of death couldn’t hold him because he went right to the heart of the cause of death and destroyed it root and branch. He died so that we might live, but also He himself also lives again.
The words of John Crum capture the sense of the new life that Easter brings:
Now the green blade rises from the buried grain,
Wheat that in the dark earth many years has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.
In the grave they laid Him, Love Whom we had slain,
Thinking that He’d never wake to life again,
Laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.
Up He sprang at Easter, like the risen grain,
He that for three days in the grave had lain;
Up from the dead my risen Lord is seen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springs up green.
May this Easter be a blessed one for you and yours.
Alleluia! Christ is risen!
Shalom ... Peace
The Vicar's Letter for February 2009
ALTHOUGH I would not wish to use it week-in, week-out, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer contains within its pages some of the most majestic and wonderful words and phrases that have been written in the English language, rivalled in my opinion as prose only by the plays of William Shakespeare.
Words, such as those of the Nunc Dimittis – “Lord lettest now Thy servant depart in peace” – stick firmly in my mind, not just because of the beautify of the language but because there is something God blessed about them. One of my favourite BCP prayers is the third collect at Evening Prayer, on which the words on the front cover of this month’s magazine are based:
“Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord; and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night; for the love of thy only Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen.”
In its day there was something radical about the BCP after the pre-reformation years when the liturgy – the words of worship – where solely in Latin. To have worship in the English language was, in my opinion, a massive step forward, but was also one resisted very much as the 1980 Alternative Service Book and Common Worship have since been resisted by those who hanker purely after unfetted tradition.
I have not doubt that Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, the architect of the Book of Common Prayer, would actually be quite horrified to think that in 2009 there are Christians who still use only his words to worship God in public worship. Although the 1662 BCP was published 106 years after Cranmer’s death it is almost entirely based on the Archbishop’s first Book of Common Prayer of 1549 and his second of 1552. If he had lived, there would almost certainly have been further revisions. It is strongly believed that there was already a third BPC being prepared at the time of his arrest and imprisonment in 1553.
I believe there is still a place for the Book of Common Prayer and its language in the worshipping life of the Church of England, both because of its beauty and also the fact so much of our theology is defined by it. At St George’s Huyton I particularly used it for the Morning Prayer service on Good Friday because, I feel. it lends itself particularly well to penitential worship. I believe, however, that the main liturgies of our Sunday worship should be in the contemporary language that can be found in Common Worship – but also believe that the language we use in worship, and I am of the firm opinion that Thomas Cranmer would have agreed, should continually reflect the language as we actually speak it and change as the language changes.
My reasons for using the words I did on the front cover originally had nothing to do with the BCP or liturgy, but actually the beginning of Lent at the end of the month. As I write this, the Christmas and New Year holidays have just finished, but I am already planning and thinking ahead to Lent.
In 2009, Lent will begin on the 25th February with our Ash Wednesday service. This year the Ash Wednesday team service will be hosted by us at Peel.
Lent is an important period for us as Christians in our faith relationship with God both individually and corporately as a church. It is a time when we should allow the light of God to shine into those dark areas of our hearts and lives as individuals, and our organisation and structures as a church, so that through God’s grace we can all be changed from the inside out.
At the Ash Wednesday service there is an opportunity to receive the sign of the cross in ash, imposed on us with the words: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” The words, “Turn away from sin and be faithful to the Gospel” may also be added. An ash cross, a visual reminder that Lent is ‘a season of self-examination’, a time of reflection on the depth of God’s love and of our response to that love.
It is to this end that I pray that God will give light in the darkness of all our hearts. A light which is radiant and all-illuming and will search even into the darkest niches and crevices.