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Gardening

Are you a gardener? Do you love the feel of the soil running through your hands? Do you have ‘green fingers’ and seem to get anything you plant to grow? Or do you just enjoy sitting in a garden that somebody else has created as a little bit of heaven on earth? I fall into both categories. I always thoroughly enjoy sitting in my garden or visiting gardens such as Saughton Park or the Botanics but I love above all, actually gardening. Tending and tilling the soil encouraging plants to grow, especially roses and other flowers. Whenever I garden I often think of the earth’s first gardeners. Adam and Eve in that fabled Garden of Eden.

“11Then God said, ‘Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.’ And it was so. 12The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. 13And there was evening and there was morning, the third day ... 2:15 The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.”          Genesis 1:11-13 and 2:15

As we know, all went well in that garden until the gardeners were tempted by forbidden fruit. I bet they wished that had not eaten that ‘apple’ and had just continued to care for the garden as God intended. Those of us who are gardeners are following in Adam and Eve’s footsteps and I like to think that we are daily sustaining that Garden of Eden, that has now spread across the world.

Creation is a wonderful thing and we are called to share with God the stewardship of the Earth. So by gardening we do just that. By caring for plants we care for the Earth and the whole of Creation in the little bit of God’s Kingdom that we live in. What we need to do is to encourage those who don’t garden to do so, or to care for Creation in ways that do not exploit it or damage it. We can turn the climate crisis around by gardening more, by planting more trees and flowers and sustainable crops and we do it for future generations as well as for our own enjoyment. Imagine planting a sapping tree today, none of us will see it come to maturity but the generations below us will thank us for our foresight and efforts.

Lord God, Creator of heaven and earth, and of all living things, please bless our gardens and the gardens of the world that have been so carefully and lovingly prepared. Bless the seeds we have planted, that they will bring forth a plentiful crop. Bless the sun and water you provide to us, so our crop can be nourished. Bless our labour that we may continue to learn and grow through this experience. Amen.

Faith & Doubt 

Trinity VI  Proper 11 19th July 2020 Year A

“Slipping into Evensong, like good quality chocolate biscuits and George II side tables, was one of the luxurious tastes Mummy has acquired in widowhood. She claimed she has simply been exploring the cathedral one afternoon during her first year in the city when the service was announced. She was making her way to one of the exits along with other flustered godless when the choir began singing an introit. The beauty of the music forced her to take a seat to listen, if only from a distance. She had come back several afternoons after that, always sitting well outside the quire so she could enjoy the music and words but not feel implicated in the act of worship.

‘But then I thought, this is silly. Who am I so scared of? I don’t care what people think; my faith or lack of it is entirely my affair.”

  Writes the author Patrick Gale in his novel, ‘The whole day through’. He book charts a day in the life of four characters; an elderly mother and daughter and two brothers and how their lives cross and intertwine with each other. It is an excellent read but it was the paragraph I have just read that set me thinking.

How much should, we the church, worry about what people believe or not? Do you need to ‘sign up’ to a statement of faith in order to take part in the journey of faith? To have certainty of faith, to know, without question what you believe or know to be God must be comforting. Never having to question what you believe would make my life so much easier because the older I get the more questions and doubts I seem to have and I know from conversations with some of you that you feel similarly.

Gale writes later in the same chapter of his book:

“But you know all the words! Of course, I was a nicely-brought up girl. I attended confirmation classes at St.Swithan’s for a year when I was twelve and confirmed at thirteen, by the Bishop of Winchester in this very cathedral. ‘But you don’t believe it now? ‘I am not sure I believed it then. I was just being obedient. You get confirmed in the same spirit that you got married, in the fond hope that something solid would follow on the heels of faith.” 

Like many teenagers I got confirmed and then promptly left the church, struggling as I was with puberty, teen-aged angst and the death at 52 of my grandmother. Apart from attending school chapel, when like Gale’s characters I went through the motions I did not darken the church’s door until I left school. Then with two solid years of studying Reformation History I returned and became totally convinced and assured of what I knew to be the ‘true faith’. I became a fundamentalist, conservative, catholic Anglican and like all fundamentalists looked down on any other poor soul who wasn’t aware of the truth about Christianity and its practice of worship as I was. My arrogance appals me now, but it was the starting point for my journey into an adult faith – a faith that includes doubt as well.

What I believed at 19 I do not believe now, except that the ways of the man Jesus, still offer an excellent template by which to live and lead one’s life. At 19 I liked the ‘thou shalt nots’ and wished that if everyone followed the 10 Commandments they and the world would be perfect. Perhaps it might, but the world does not think that way. In today’s 21^st century society I believe that we need to find ways of helping each other make sense of life and the big questions it poses and to seek answers not proscribed by ‘shalt not’ but by ‘try this and see’. Like the sower, we have to be prepared to sow seeds, some which will come to harvest and others which will flounder or die.

The faith (or seed of faith) of Christ that I want to share is a one that is confident enough to allow doubt, questioning and exploratory thinking without fear. Not a faith that says – ‘I’ve got all the answers and this book will give them to you too.’

In Ariana Franklin’s novel; ‘The Mistress of the art of death’ the heroine Adelia says this of the church in the 12^th century:

“It wasn’t that she had anything against the faith of the New Testament, left alone it would be a tender and compassionate religion ... no what Adelia objected to was the church’s interpretation of God as a petty, stupid, money-grabbing retrograde, antediluvian tyrant who having created a stupendously varied world, had forbidden any enquiry into complexity, leaving his people flailing in ignorance.  P.221

As a description of the church in the late 1100’s it is apt but to many people out with the church today it would ring true. Someone once asked me if being a priest meant that I left my brain at the door of the church? That is what some people think and that is what we need to counter in life today.

We are not people of a book of rules. We are people or followers of the Word made flesh. For Christians our faith is expressed in the life of Jesus and in the ways that we witness to his way of being. He offers us guidance and direction but not a mapped out path that we all have to slavishly follow and I thank God that he does not.

To have it all mapped out would I believe exclude most of us. Once upon a time I did believe that there was only one prescribed way to God through Jesus. Now I believe that Jesus offers us a multitude of different ways to God. So many and so varied that there is a way for everyone to journey no matter how full of doubt or faith they may be. As seeds of faith we all germinate and grow in different ways. Sometimes our growth is strong and vigorous and at other times it is weak and fragile but if we try to nurture our seeds they will and do survive, even if at times those seeds of faith become dormant.

Doubt is nothing to be afraid of, it too paradoxically, is a healthy seed of faith! It is a healthy progression along the journey of life. What is scary is a church that does not allow this. I want to see and to try and build a church with Christ at its centre but one that is not confined by rigid walls of rules and regulations, of do’s and don’ts but one that says come along let’s journey together. Let’s explore what the way of Christ means for you, for me and for your fellow beings. A church that does not depend on rigid statements of faith but one that allows and encourages questions and the searching through doubt. And, to be a church that will support you while you do so.

This is the message I would like to share with those out with the church today, as well as to you who choose to be part of the church. I want the world to know that here is a place where you will not be expected to believe or know everything about faith, nor will you be expected to say things you don’t believe. Here is a place to think and be - a safe place to share your insights, a place where you will be respected and encouraged. A place where your tender shoots of faith will be lovingly nurtured and cared for.

Trinity V Year A 2020

As for what was sown among thorns, this is the one who hears the word, but the cares of the world and the lure of wealth choke the word, and it yields nothing.

The Gospel writer tells us that when Jesus speaks of “the cares of the world” as choking off the development of faith, the Greek words that Matthew uses literally mean “being drawn in different directions”. So not the “cares of the world” in the sense of the trials and tragedies that challenge our faith. Those are referred to earlier in the parable, when Jesus speaks of the seed that falls on rocky ground. By “the cares of the world” Jesus means the kind of distractions that were bothering Martha while her sister Mary was paying single-minded attention to him; the dissipation of attention and energy in many directions. Jesus’ words here, and his words to Martha, are a call to singleness of mind and heart; a call to turn from the things which distract us.

The pandemic has in some ways simplified our lives by ruling out many pleasures and activities, and that has not been easy. We have learned to place a greater value on people of whose company we have for a time been deprived, on the creative and restorative activities that we miss and perhaps on the mundane tasks that, in normal times, we would have rushed through in order to see friends and family and pursue outdoor activities. Singleness of mind and heart is difficult at the best of times, and particularly difficult when it comes to domesticity. I have been missing the energetic young man who, until lockdown began, cleaned our house every Monday morning. Deputising for him, not always enthusiastically, and discovering that it takes me three times as long as it took him to do the work, has led to the temptation to see the dusting, polishing and hoovering as a distraction. It has also been a useful reminder that there’s a Christian tradition of seeing mundane tasks not as distractions from the spiritual life, but as a spiritual discipline. St Benedict taught that “to work is to pray”. Brother Lawrence, the 17th century Friar whose wisdom is preserved in a short book called The Practice of the Presence of God, wrote that:

“We ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed.”

George Herbert also understood that wisdom.

“A servant with this clause 

Makes drudgery divine:
Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws,

Makes that and th' action fine.”

The poem from which that hymn is drawn is all about that singleness of mind and heart which is the opposite of “being drawn in different directions. Singleness of mind and heart is not necessarily a good thing. In today’s Gospel Jesus is telling his disciples that those who single- mindedly pursue “the lure of wealth” will not lead fruitful lives. And you only have to tune into the news to be reminded that there are plenty of single-issue fanatics in the world, terrorists willing to kill innocent people to further their cause, and internet trolls turning their scorn and hatred on those who disagree with them on a particular issue. The Parable of the Sower is an invitation to be single-minded in a different way. It is an invitation to hear, receive and understand “the word of the Kingdom”.

Why is that kind of single-mindedness not only acceptable, but desirable? How is it the key to the abundant living of which Jesus is the exemplar and to which he invites us? Those who single-mindedly dedicate themselves to a cause in a way which devalues or demonises people who do not share their opinions are seeking to change the world but see no need for change in themselves. Christians believe that before we can work to change the world, there is a need for change in us, for a healing of our brokenness, for the “turning around” of which Jesus speaks, and which is sometimes translated as “repentance”. That translation isn’t entirely helpful, because by “turning around” Jesus meant more than acknowledging our misdeeds, though that is essential. He invites us to a new way of living, turned towards God, and turned towards our neighbour.

That is the change that George Herbert explores in his poem The Elixir, most of which (though not quite all) has ended up in hymn books as “Teach me, my God and King.” He uses alchemy, the mediaeval and renaissance belief that it was possible to turn base metals in gold using a mysterious substance called the Philosopher’s Stone, as a metaphor for spiritual change. That is the “famous stone” to which the poem refers.

This is the verse that hymn book editors left out:

Not rudely, as a beast,
To run into an action;
But still to make Thee prepossest, And give it his perfection.

You can see why they omitted it. The meaning is far from clear to a modern reader. Herbert did not mean “rudely” in the sense of lacking good manners, but rather acting by instinct and without thinking about the consequences. “But still” means doing whatever we are doing quietly, reflectively. This is what pleases (“prepossest”) God and perfects what we do.

The poem can help us to make sense of what St Paul means when he writes:

“To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace.”

This passage from Romans has sometimes been misread in a puritanical way, as though Paul was expecting his readers and us to set aside physical pleasures. It is more helpful to think of “the flesh” as the human tendency to be drawn in different directions. That might mean being so busy fuming at the lunchtime news bulletin that we eat without really enjoying our food. There’s much to be said for mindful eating and, indeed, mindful housework. Christians take mindfulness an important step further, for our calling is to be mindful of God and our neighbour in all that we do, so that activities which might once have seemed to be distractions become acts of love and service and we are enabled to find, as George Herbert put it in another poem, “Heaven in ordinary”.

Trinity IV 5th July 2020 Year A Proper 9

You open the lid of the box and your eye glides around the selection of individual chocolates. You pause for a moment and then you pick the one you think you want and bite into it. THEN you either savour the delight of tasting that dark chocolate caramel or grimace that you had mistakenly taken the strawberry creme. Sometimes we make the right choice and at other times our choice totally dismays us.

St. Paul in today’s epistle extract (Romans 7:15-25a) is struggling with the act of making a choice; of making the right choice. He is quite despairing of himself:

“I do not understand my own actions. ... I can will what is right, but I cannot do it.”

We all make choices every day, in fact probably in every hour of our waking day. We make so many choices daily that most of the time we will be unaware of the process. Do I want tea or coffee? Shall I watch Fr. Brown or Grand Designs? Shall I have potatoes or rice with my meal? At the time these are important decisions or choices but in the bigger picture they are rather insignificant and even if one regrets one’s choice it is not really a disaster that can’t be rectified, the next time we face a similar decision. There are also the rather more important choices we make.

Who is the one I love the most? Shall I take that job offer or that one? Do I really want to move to that flat or to that house? These choices are significant and they are not, for most of us, decisions we have to make on a regular basis. Yes, our choice will have consequences but even if they prove to be the wrong choice in the long-run they can often be corrected.

Then there are the choices we make that are very important and can affect us at a profoundly deep level. These are the choices between good and evil, sin and not sin, good and bad. As St.Paul expressed two thousand years ago:

“For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”

Paul is really struggling with some of the actions he has done and decisions he has made in the past, just as we do. This is Paul at his most human. Like him we can despair of ourselves at times when we have committed an act that we immediately regretted and one that we felt soiled our souls. We are all guilty of these actions but thankfully, for most of us they are not something we often do. We don’t often offend because we have a sort of rule book or code of conduct that we follow.

For those of us of faith we have Scripture and the example of Christ to follow. They both give us a path to follow that we can choose to walk along or not. Most of us for most of the time walk that path and because we do so we always know when we have stepped off the path and gone another way. Our faith gives us a framework around which we can build and live our lives with thought to God, others and ourselves. We are not dictated to by God but freely offered a ‘life giving way’ by which to live happy and contented lives.

Paul refers to this as the ‘Law’:

“So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self.”

He rightly expresses his joy in the Law as a guide to life but he acknowledges that with every major decision the opportunity to ‘sin’ or not to get it right is always there. This is the dilemma we all live with.

A dilemma many of us are facing as lockdown eases and we seek to re-enter ‘normal’ life. Good intentions may not always be the right decision. Yet, that is the ‘normal’ life we lead. The best prayer we can send to God is always:

“Lead us not into temptation...”

For in doing so it makes us question the choices we make and can help us live with the outcomes of that choice. We can be assured that in making any decision we are not alone. God is with us and the example of Christ is there to guide us, should we choose to follow him.

We can also be assured that even when we muck it all up and rue the choices we have made, we can try again and that God will forgive us if we ask him. None of us are perfect and we will all continue to make choices good and bad but it is in the trying not to make the wrong decision that can keep us out of the temptation of sin.

Trinity III 28th June 2020  Year A Proper 8

Jeremiah 28:5-9

When I read this short passage from Jeremiah I noticed something that I had never noticed before. That fact, that this is about two prophets having a discussion about theology and what God is going to do in the future.

In the previous chapter of Jeremiah there is much talk about the Babylonian captivity of the Hebrews and how the King Nebuchadnezzar took most of the sacred vessels from the temple in Jerusalem with him, when he invaded and subdued the people. Jeremiah reminds the people that Nebuchadnezzar did not take everything from the temple and that they should be content with what he left rather than worrying about what he took. Basically, he says that somethings would be nice to have back but stop looking in the past and look to the future.

In his discussion with the prophet Hannaiah, Jeremiah gets him on board and the two of them begin to say that same thing because they both see that in order for the Hebrews to flourish they need to begin living in the present with and eye to the future rather than harking back to a past time that will never come again.

In the verses that follow today’s reading Hananiah states that he is symbolically removing the yoke of the past from Jeremiah’s shoulders and breaking it asunder in order to allow all the Hebrews to move on, to live a fresh and to live in peace. Hananiah  says that it is right to pray for the return of the Hebrew exiles but not right to stop living in the present. Jeremiah he says is a prophet of peace and he encourages the Hebrews to listen to him as he believes that in doing so the Hebrew society will prosper again and go from strength to strength.

These two prophets knew what they were about. They knew that they each had their followers and those who listened to them but that they need to work together in order to enable the Hebrews as a whole to flourish as a people secure in their beliefs and ways.

All too often in the church and in society we have competing voices and personalities who say; look at me or follow me or do as I say and ignore him or her over there and I will lead you to great things. Usually, they achieve very little. When great voices or leaders collaborate and work together great things happen. More is achieved by positive co-operation than can ever be achieved by individuals alone.

I wonder how different our governments in Westminster and Holyrood might be if our elected representatives actually worked together for the common good rather than for each party? How strong and forward looking might our church be if all denominations could work more closely together? It makes you think!

Romans 6:12-23

We talk a lot about ‘sin’ in the church but what do we really mean by it?

Is it a long list of things done or not done that are evil and wicked? Is it the fact that I am human and not divine? And what actually is a sin?

There are somethings that are more easily definable as sins, such as acts of terrorism, abuse, torture and conniving for the ill of others but what are my sins? If I try to live a good life doing what I hope is good, where do I sin? Are my natural imperfections a sin?

Basically I would say no. If you are trying to live a good life and to do your best then if you don’t get things exactly right then that’s not a sin; simply because you were trying to do your best for others. I think sin in our daily lives, aside from the awfully big sins that we can easily identify, might be things that get in the way of our relationships with each other and with God. That might be our pride or our inability to see that we have any faults that drive others mad or that we never say sorry for anything we may do that hurts another.

In daily life, perhaps the biggest sin we commit is when we set out to do something that does not seek to do the best for other beings or our planet. When our intentions are selfish and self-seeking or deliberately malicious that’s when we sin not when we muck it up trying to do something with the best of intentions.

Sin, I believe are those deliberate acts that seek to destroy others or harm creation in ways that serve only the perpetrator. Sin is awful, our occasional slip ups are not. What we need to remember that God is with us and offers us a choice to do good or to do evil but the choice is ours. What we have to do is listen to God and to our hearts and souls and to try and act for the good of others and not for our own ends.

Matthew 10:40-42

Two verses from Matthew but what a message! He tells us that as a Christian as a follower of Jesus we are called to welcome all God’s people. To welcome the stranger, the known friend, those in need, to try and welcome everyone you encounter regardless of who they are or what they might be like.

You are not, Matthew suggests, welcoming in order to like everyone you welcome but you are welcoming them in order to love them and there is a big difference between liking and loving.

Liking can be quite specific - because quite frankly we all know that we get on better with some people more than others  and there are always those few that we can’t abide. Some of those we like are easy to love, others take a bit more effort and some seem impossible to love at all but Jesus calls us to love them the more simply because they might just need to be loved by us more than we realise.  And quite often we just might need to be loved by them more than we realised as well.

Over the years our Scottish Episcopal Church has challenged itself as to how welcoming it actually is and who is really welcome and who is not. Generally, we would say that all are welcome and that all have a place in God’s heart and on our pews but is it true?

My response is ‘mostly’ and I say this after years of seeing our wee Episcopal church trying to be inclusive of all God’s people. Not all of us will agree with things our church has said or done and that is for each of us and our own consciences to grapple. I see, however, a church that is increasingly prepared to live with difference and to try and welcome all people into faith and into our Christian communities.

Living with difference is never easy but it does lead to interesting debates and discussions and above all if Mission 21 taught me anything in the years I ran it; it was how we are all called to support each other in our welcoming.

I used to ask folk who replied that their church was very welcoming just to stop and think who they personally would be happy to see in their church and more importantly who they would happily budge up and invite to sit next to them. Who would you do that to?

It makes you think, doesn’t it? For there are always those who you might say are welcome but who tax you personally. The thing is though, that person you find difficult might not be difficult for someone else in the church to budge up for. Just as the person you budge up for might be more difficult for another individual to do so. What we have to acknowledge and do as a congregation and as a church is to support each other in supporting those we find difficult and thank them for doing what we can’t do. That way we can say we are a truly welcoming church or congregation because we take ‘welcoming’ as a corporate act and not just an individual act.

Just because you can't do something or accept someone or something does not mean that another can't either. What we have to do is to try and love each other as we try to welcome all God’s people into fellowship.