Curating Worship 2

Somehow, something happens.  Sometimes that’s hard to remember when you’re taping down cords or lighting coals or dashing down the hall to the photocopier (again).

Somehow, something happens.  People gather.  And in silence and words.  Sound and movement.  Stillness.  Between the clumsiness and the elegance and the whimsy and the beauty.  Somewhere, there, something happens.

And that’s the grace of it.  That’s the Life in it.  That’s the hope for it. 

A space for allowing our humanity to be held gently.  A space for wonder.  A space to be at home.  A space for lamenting.  A space for hoping.  A space for playing.  A space for encounter. 

Real Life.

Curating Worship 1

You will find only odd-shaped pieces of transparent red paper when you look in the drawer.  Confidently driving to the shop you bought it at last time (while your beloved makes soup for Sunday lunch) disappointment will await you.  They do not stock that colour any more and mango doesn’t seem right for maps of fire.

Of course this will especially be the case when the collective has had its main meeting on the Friday-before-the-Sunday due to a confluence of circumstances including sabbatical leave, a music tour of the East Cape and Other Things.

You will improvise a solution to the red transparent paper Issue.  It may involve OHT sheets and sparkly red cardboard.  It may look more Sunday School Craft than postmodern cool.  You may have to swallow your vanity.

It is inevitable that there will be a Moment involving technology.  The loop may not loop.  The laptop may be carrying a grudge against the projector.  Although you have done it many times before you will not be able to print 4 postcards to a page.  You will try two different programmes and will mutter various sentences which decrease in faith, hope and love by the minute.  You will remember you were once a youth worker and a parish secretary and armed with scissors, correction fluid and invisible tape you will summon your long forgotten actual cutting-and -pasting skills.  The photocopier may or may not jam.

It will start to feel like it is all about the choice of font and the editing of sentences and the aesthetics of the take-home hand-outs.  You will wonder if It Will Work.  You will make piles and move furniture and consult the map that someone has drawn on the whiteboard and discover that you need one more RCA cable than you can currently find…

And if you’re open to it (and maybe even if you’re not) in the middle of all that you will experience a moment of grace, a breathing out moment of ease and you will remember that it isn’t about the font, the sentences, the soundtrack, the lighting (although you do rather like the red wash up the walls your colleague just made).  In the corner of your head will be the whisper that it’s not about the room, it’s about making room.  For a moment of  Grace as Cheryl might say.  About pointing towards the well of Living Water and getting out of the way so people can drink.

Now I know I’m home…

Good that our police force give such sensible advice!

“I have called you friends”

I preached at the Moot community Eucharist on my last night in London.  You can hear me, from the reading of the Gospel through the sermon here.

Here’s how the sermon ended.  It probably makes more sense if you’ve heard or read the first bit, but it sums up for me the importance of friendship as a way of being in the world.  A way which for me is at the heart of the Christian life.

Friendship is not some gimmick that we can market as a way of successfully living a Christian life.  It is not even primarily about about an act of will or making friendships in a calculating way.  Friendship as a spiritual practice, as the mark of a disciple, as a proclamation of the Good News of the Reign of God  – this friendship is about entering into authentic relationships, relationships of vulnerability and trust, relationships of mutuality and care.  In allowing ourselves to be affected by who we live with and how we live with them, by the gifts we receive in and from our friends, we open ourselves to being transformed by love and so enlarging the realm of God: the kinship and new community proclaimed by Christ.  That, my friends, would be Good News!

Safely home

Prayed this line from Jim Cotter’s Out of the Silence today:

Thank you for the trustworthiness of so many people in their repeated tasks for the common good.

Thought about the woman I saw sweeping the airport in Hong Kong, then about baggage handlers and airline caterers and the pilots and attendants and the fuel people and  and and…  all the people who had a hand in my being at home again in Hamilton.

It has been a challenging, nourishing, exhausting and refreshing two months…  More to write when my feet are more firmly on the ground and the fatigue receding.

Friendship

Am preaching about Friendship and the Kin(g)dom of God at Moot tomorrow night.  This quote didn’t make the sermon text, but is a powerful description of the transforming power of friendship.

Joan Chittister writes, 

“Acceptance is the universal currency of real friendship.  It allows the other to be the other.  It puts no barriers where life should be.  It does not warp or shape or wrench a person to be anything other than what they are.  It simply opens its arms to hold the weary and opens its heart to hear the broken and opens its mind to see the invisible.  Then, in the shelter of acceptance, a person can be free to be even something more”  (Chittister 2006: 55)

I give thanks for the friends who make me braver, more hopeful, more loving, more fully human.

Sunday in Brussels

On Sunday

                in Brussels

you can go to mass

                 museums

                contemporary or comic art, even

 

If you are persistent

                you can find a gluten-free cheese salad

                (in McDonalds)

                a beer or bottled water

                                at a gallery

but there is no shopping for the sake of it

unless

you compulsively buy postcards

of the art you would like to have seen

                if only

                you could wedge open your Sunday morning eyes

Tall Tree

Tall Tree and the Eye  by Anish Kapoor at the retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts

Liberating Revelation

Visited the Magritte Museum in Brussels at the weekend.  He wrote:

The real value of art is measured by its capacity for liberating revelation

Too lofty a goal for worship installations?  Not too lofty a goal for an space that invites an encounter with the Real…

 

 

Governance and Leadership

Ian Mobsby thought this clip might help me understand the issues of governance in Fresh Expressions/Emerging Church: