Almost 400 years ago, John Donne penned the words which became a modern proverb, and have proved with the passing of time to be prophetic as well:
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
[Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII]
The language sits awkwardly on our modern ears, but the sentiments in this text from 1624 resonate with many of us alive today.
None of us are islands, complete and self-sufficient. From our shared genetic material to our cultural and social identities, we are part of a larger reality; the web of life.
When we lose one person from our community due to death, each of us has lost a part of ourselves. Even if we did not know the person. Even if we did not like the person.
In times past the bells of the village church would sound when someone was being buried. We still do that at Grafton Cathedral. Each time we conclude a funeral the Cathedral bell tolls.
“Never send to know for whom the bell tolls,” says Donne. “It tolls for you!”
Just before midday today the Cathedral bell will ring continuously for twelve minutes. The same thing will be happening at other cathedrals and churches around the country.
Today the tolling of the bell is not to mark the death of a local person, but to alert us to the imminent death of our Mother: Planet Earth.
This date has been chosen because it is the point in the year when we exceed the capacity of the earth to provide or replenish the energy we are consuming by our lifestyle choices.
If this trend continues, the “overshoot day” will occur earlier in the year. If we begin to make a positive difference then the overshoot day will move closer to 31 December.
We are each diminished by the failing health of the planet, and we are each called to action in the brief window of opportunity that remains for us to reverse the sustained depletion of the Earth, whose children we are and without whom we have no future.
The well-being of our fragile blue planet is a challenge for us all, but it evokes a passionate response from people of faith.
Christians, Jews and Muslims all understand ourselves to have been placed in the world to serve and nurture creation. Many other religions also promote a deep respect for—and a profound sense of affinity with—nature. Some theologians have even urged us to see the world as the body of God, and many ordinary people with little time for organised religion describe profound experiences of the ‘holy Other’ as their hearts are touched by the beauty and the complexity of nature.
Today the bell of your Cathedral will be tolling to call us to action. One minute of bell ringing for each of the 12 years left during which time we may yet turn things around.
Without a healthy and sustainable planet, we are not just diminished; we are doomed. But it is not yet too late to turn things around. As we save the planet we rescue our future.
These past few days the people of Grafton and the wider Clarence Valley have reeled in shock as we heard about the massacre in two Christchurch mosques and then learned that the assailant was one of our own, a young man who grew up in Grafton.
Over the weekend I was interviewed by numerous national and international media, and one of the most frequent questions concerned our contacts with the local Muslim community as we prepared for the prayer vigil that was held in Grafton Cathedral last night.
When I explained that it was proving very hard to make contact with the local Muslim community, as they meet in secret and do not advertise any community contact persons, the immediate question was: Why?
Why are they afraid of us?
They are afraid of us because of the spread of an insidious virus in the Australian body politic, evidenced in the rise of right-wing parties such as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party.
This ‘virus’ is not limited to the far right, but also infects major political parties who find that fear fuels electoral support. Even parties which are traditionally left-wing creep to the right to minimise the electoral damage.
In the nether regions of Australian political life we find overtly white-supremacist groups and even members of parliament blaming Muslim immigration for the rise of Islamophobia and suggesting that the massacre in Christchurch was the result immigration policies that do not privilege white people.
The dog whistles echo around the media, and especially at a time when we have both state and federal elections.
It is controversial to name the elephant in the room, namely the rise of populist political movements with policies that oppose immigration, call for the protection of our ‘western culture’ and seek to reduce or eliminate controls on gun ownership.
Read their policy documents. I have. [See australia.isidewith.com for a helpful collation of the data]
For the record, the context of my comments was the sad fact that our small Muslim community in Grafton (and indeed throughout the North Coast) meets secretly for their prayers and had proved impossible to contact as we planned the community prayer vigil at Grafton Cathedral.
Now why would they be afraid of us? Could it be the rise of populist political movements and the infection of racist atttiudes within so-called mainstream parties?
More importantly, in my view, how do we make Grafton a compassionate city where everyone feels safe and welcome, including our Muslim neighbours?
This is not party politics, it is compassion as taught by Jesus. “Love your neighbour as yourself …”
My prayer is that we come together as the generous communty that we are and use a project such as the Compassionate Communities program to demonstrate our true character to the world, but especially to our Muslim neighbours.
A checklist for prayerful practices to help us become more mindful as we engage intentionally with the spirit-work God that calls us to undertake during these 40 days of Lent, and at all times.
When entering the Cathedral
We are crossing a threshold, a liminal boundary between ‘outside’ and ‘in here’. You may want to acknowledge your entry into this house of prayer by making the sign of the cross, or offering a prayer such as this one attributed to St Francis of Assisi: We adore you, Lord Jesus Christ, here and in all your churches in the whole world, and we bless you, because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.
Stillness
Sit quietly in your place, breathe gently and allow the silence to envelope you in its wings. It is good to be here. It is good to be me.
Light a candle
Lighting a votive candle is a way of being conscious of a person or a particular matter we wish to hold in God’s love. The candle keeps burning as we walk away, just as our prayers continue to surround the person for who we are praying.
Stations of the Cross
The Cathedral has a set of modern stations that commemorate different moments in the traditional procession from the palace of Pontius Pilate to the execution grounds at Golgotha. Walk quietly from one to another and reflect on Jesus’ own faithfulness to God’s call on his life, as well as contemporary people who suffer abuse of judicial authority, who see their children tortured and killed, who struggle with doubt and fear.
The Gospel in Glass
Get to know the windows of this Cathedral and pray for the families who donated them. Delight in the skill of the artist and reflect on the biblical texts or characters depicted in the glass.
Memorial Plaques
Take time to wander from one memorial plaque to another. Who are they commemorating? What a precious legacy we have here. AMDG Ad maiorem Dei gloriam. Indeed. To the greater glory of God.
Organ preludes and postludes
The visual art of the building and its installations is matched by the musical art that streams out from the organ, as quiet preludes before the service begins or as triumphant celebrations as the liturgy ends.
Sing, choirs of angels
The Cathedral choir offers a variety of musical pieces during the liturgy, from the Introit to the Mass Setting of the day to the Psalm and the anthems during Holy Communion. Enjoy being carried by the angels as the Choir leads us in our worship.
During Holy Communion
While waiting during the time that other people are receiving the sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood, call to mind those people and those situations in your own life, for which you are seeking a blessing in this most intimate moment of the liturgy.
Pray the Pewsheet
The weekly bulletin has lots of information, most of which can be pivotal moments for prayer and reflection. Notice the Mass Setting and the musical choices for the day. Pray for those listed as sick, for bereaved families, the recently departed, and those whose year’s mind occurs at this time. Do you know any of these people? How might you offer them care and support this week? For what do you give thanks to God as a result of the time you shared with them?
Preview the Bible Readings
Our lectionary provides us a with a three-year cycle of texts to challenge, encourage, inform and stretch us. Do you recognise the readings set for today? What memories do those passages stir for you? Are you reminded of another passage you want to read when you get home? Should you be sharing these readings with anyone else who might find them helpful?
Pray the Hymns
The hymnbook is a rich collection of religious poetry. Look up the hymns set for today and consider why they may have been chosen to complement the readings or today’s festival. Read quietly through the hymns and pause to reflect on the deep experience of God among us that these poems preserve.
As you leave the Cathedral
Another beautiful prayer attributed to St Francis of Assisi:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
Grant that I may not so much seek to be
consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand,
to be loved as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying
That we are born to eternal life.
This essay was published in the February 2019 issue of North Coast Anglican which will be available in churches across the Diocese of Grafton this morning.
In the liturgical afterglow of Advent and Christmas with all those special services and all that wonderful music, we pause and catch our breath.
The season of Epiphany—like its more rigorous cousin, Lent—invites us to reflect on the many ways that we encounter the God who reaches out to us and then to fashion our response to Emmanuel, God with us.
We are invited into intentional discipleship, as distinct from an inherited religious identity.
Discipleship is a word that is closely associated with Jesus and the responses people made to him on the other side of Calvary, before the Easter triumph transformed their views of his significance.
To my surprise when doing a recent word study in preparation for one of the Dean’s Forums at the Cathedral, I discovered that this is not a word ever used by Paul. It is a term only found in the four NT gospels and in the Acts of the Apostles, written originally as part two of the Gospel of Luke.
The difference between the Gospels and the Epistles is stark.
So to be a disciple is to be someone with an intentional relationship with Jesus.
To have beliefs and opinions about Jesus is not the essence of discipleship, even though disciples will have beliefs and opinions that matter deeply to us.
An intentional relationship with Jesus?
That would be a continuous Epiphany experience as we discover more and more about God’s loving and compassionate purposes for the universe, including our own selves.
That would be a lifelong commitment to shape our lives around the beliefs and practices that mattered to Jesus.
That would be to engage in compassionate action to bring the effective reign of God into the lived experience of our families, friends and local communities.
An intentional relationship with Jesus is going to be about practice (what we do and how we treat people) more than with ideas (what we believe and how we explain our faith to others).
As the practical Christian wisdom found in the Letter of James puts it: “Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith.” (James 2:18)
As Anglicans, we are blessed with a rich heritage of spiritual practices that can be embraced as we commit to intentional discipleship. Some of them (like Baptism) are a once in a lifetime event, while others are practices that we can use regularly in our own spiritual disciplines.
Gathering with other believers for the Lord’s Supper is perhaps the first and greatest spiritual discipline for anyone who is serious about intentional discipleship. We need to ensure that our weekly Eucharistic gatherings are engaging and transformative, and not simply a case of going through the motions. What we celebrate in the Eucharist is the saving presence of God in Jesus and among us. Our liturgies should express that dynamic reality.
Prayer is at the heart of intentional discipleship. At its most basic level, this means we cultivate mindfulness: we are attentive to the presence of Christ within us, in others, and around us. Our personal and collective rituals can help us develop and sustain our mindfulness, and from that will flow a deeper experience of prayer in all its forms: contemplation, thanksgiving, protest, and intercession.
Deep engagement with the Scriptures is another of the core spiritual disciplines for anyone who is serious about intentional discipleship. The church already offers many patterns for daily and weekly attention to Scripture, and there is no shortage of Bible reading plans online and in your local Christian bookstore. As the fitness gear retailers constantly remind us: just do it.
Eucharist, prayer and Bible reading are the big three spiritual disciplines for intentional discipleship, but there are many more. These include cell groups, compassionate action for justice and environmental stewardship, fasting, labyrinth, pilgrimage, preparing a rule of life, sacrificial distribution of our own resources for mission, spiritual direction, and volunteering our time for church and community projects.
Which of these spiritual disciplines we embrace depends on our circumstances and perhaps our personalities, but the call to intentional discipleship is universal.
Imagine the transformation in our mission as a Diocese and in the communities we serve if every North Coast Anglican was actively engaged in intentional discipleship.
Additional note: A video of the Dean presenting a session on intentional discipleship as part of the My Faith My Life My Church program at Grafton Cathedral is available on the Cathedral website
As a child of active church people in the 1960s and then a young church leader in the 1970s, I have filled a lot of envelopes in my time and applied a vast number of address labels.
Yesterday I was at it again—preparing a mailout to the households that are connected in some way with Christ Church Cathedral in Grafton.
Very late in the evening, indeed while still filling the final few envelopes, I posted the image above to my personal Facebook page, with this comment:
Parish dynamics in one photo. The envelopes on the right are people who come often enough for me to know their names and predict they will be at church this Sunday. The other pile of envelopes is for people who come once a year or maybe once every two or three months. What is wrong with this picture?
That whimsical post was partly a statement of “look what I have been doing today” and partly an unformed theological reflection on the missional dynamics of serving as priest to a small church community in a regional Australian city.
That post triggered an unexpected set of reactions, with some people fixated by the small number of ‘regulars’ in the short stack, while others noted the familiar dynamics of a larger base of people with lower levels of participation relative to the small number of people who I could anticipate seeing in church on any Sunday of the year.
Well, not without some trepidation, let me revisit this seemingly innocent photo of two piles of envelopes. There are several sets of ministry dynamics that might usefully be pursued in relation to this data. I will address just a few as a stimulus for conversation in various contexts.
One aspect is that even ‘regulars’ in Australian churches now mostly come to worship just once a month. This is true also of Evangelical and Pentecostal congregations. It is one reason why I had such a small pile of envelopes for the “No need to post, I shall see them on Sunday” category. The sporadic nature of participation even by our core adherents is problematic as it undermines our cohesion, reduces the capacity for faith formation, limits the people available to assist with worship, and generally gives the impression of us being a much smaller community than we really are. It doubtless also has some financial impacts as few parishes that I know about still have a strong envelope system with recording of pledges and follow up of those who are behind.
[As it happens our “cash (non-pledge) offerings” are up along with the numbers coming to church each week, even though we have a systemic decline in the number of times each month when most individuals will be in church on a Sunday.]
Another aspect for my reflections is what kind of contact with people is welcome and appreciated these days? I encounter members of the congregation in all kinds of social settings around this small regional city of about 10,000 people. One of the privileges I have as Dean of Grafton is a civic profile that goes far beyond my role as Rector of the Anglican Parish of Grafton. I am actively seeking to develop, foster and exploit that profile for the sake of the Cathedral and the special ministry we have as ‘cathedral’ in a small city whose very status as a city largely rests on the Cathedral being here.
For sure the majority of the envelopes represent older households, for whom social media is not a major point of connection. But there are other implications related to our age profile. Increasingly our events are scheduled to meet their needs, including not driving after sunset. Younger people—and families with work and school commitments—are excluded from the few events we still have, and we offer almost nothing that suits the schedule of persons who are not enjoying a healthy retirement.
Happily, about half of the envelopes—yes, really, about half of them—represent families with young children who have overcome all the obstacles we inadvertently put in their way to ask for their children to be baptised at the Cathedral. Increasing we can connect with them via social media, but until very recently the Cathedral did not collect email addresses. We do have that data for about a third of the 100 families with young children. Typically both parents work during the week. Weekends are for sport, family time, friends, home maintenance, etc. The missional challenge that I see here is how we equip parents to nurture faith and compassionate living in the family context, rather than seeking ways to lure them into our liturgies.
This catalogue of reflections does not even touch on the challenges of rebuilding our reputation in the wake of the sexual abuse scandals, or our almost total disconnect with our community’s acceptance of gender diversity and marriage equality. I am so proud that our small Parish Council has taken a courageous and generous position on the blessing of civil marriages.
Nor does it touch on the impact of secularisation and a healthy disdain for pre-modern expressions of religion that simply fail to connect with our children and grandchildren, nor even with ourselves if we are honest.
Despite all these challenges and maybe because of them, I find parish ministry absorbing and challenging. It does not require me to set aside my knowledge and skills as a critical religion scholar, but rather to hone those skills for application to the practical context of parish life, liturgical preparation, and weekly preaching. These days it even includes the obligation to craft a short daily message that goes out every morning via the Cathedral app.
The small pile on the right are my biggest supporters and they want my ministry in this community to flourish and succeed. They are backing me in.
I am also grateful for the large pile.
It gives me the names of real people who have done the hard yards in years past and now are at a stage in their journey where they cannot be so active, even though many of them wish they could be still.
That large pile also reminds me that there are many more people in the local community who value their association with the Cathedral and may just be waiting for the right moment to reconnect.
Then there are the active grandparents who are often away from church several Sundays a month because they are investing time and energy into the nurture of their adult children and the growing band of grandchildren.
And about half of that big pile represents families here in Grafton who have young kids and have not given up on the Cathedral, even though we have not been very effective at supporting them in their critical mission as parents.
This is a holy day with ancient roots that run deep into the spiritual soil of our religion, while offering us a fresh vision for what life and faith might mean now and in the future.
Pentecost is a holy day that we share with our Jewish friends.
In ancient times this feast coincided with the spring harvest festival, and it was a time to gather in the crops before the hot dry summer burnt the fields brown.
By this stage seven weeks had passed since Passover, another great Jewish festival. Those 49 days—7 weeks each of 7 days—gave rise to the idea that day #50 was worth celebrating. A week of weeks had passed, and indeed that is what this holy day is called in the Jewish religion: Shavuot, The Festival of Weeks.
For us as Christians, the Great Fifty Day of Easter finish today.
In the shops Easter has long since been forgotten. The hot cross buns have disappeared from the shelves and the chocolate bunnies have vanished.
But in the church we have been busy teasing out just what kind of difference Easter makes in our lives here and now.
At Easter, God said NO to fear, hate and death.
At Easter God said YES to hope, love and life.
Today as we conclude the fifty days of Easter we pause to think about how our lives, our community and our world might be transformed for the better if we took seriously how God responded to the death of Jesus.
God took everyone by surprise at Easter time. Nobody saw this coming.
At Pentecost we celebrate another time when God took everyone by surprise.
Today we celebrate the presence of God among us, within us and between as the Spirit of Life, the Spirit of Jesus, the Holy Spirit.
This is not about religious party tricks.
It is about the love that throbs at the very centre of the universe being active in our own lives. Every day. Every moment. In good times and in bad times.
That is the ultimate meaning of Easter, and that is the big, exciting and transformative truth into which we baptise Lottie this morning.
