John Davies - Notes from a small vicar

On mountaintop experiences

Mountaintop experiences are sometimes a mystery to us. I can’t explain what really happened on the day that two friends and I were caught in a white-out on a peak in Snowdonia, where we couldn’t see our way any more because all there was before us was snow - in the sky, in the air, on the ground - we were surrounded by white, in the blizzard our footsteps had disappeared, and we knew that whichever way we headed we were in danger of stepping off an edge into a drop of hundreds of feet. Our minds play tricks with us now as we recall the moment that a man emerged from nowhere, and greeted us as we stood stranded and stricken there in the white-out, an old man, ill-equipped for a winter mountain climb with a string bag hanging from his shoulders. Was he real? He was real enough to help us overcome our fears that day. Did that incident actually happen? All we know is that he guided us down into safety.

- from my talk today, On mountaintop experiences (which also features a reworking of my M62 Ainley Top poem Junction 24: thanks for the high places in Walking the M62, and an extract from Martin Luther King's last speech). All to do with The Transfiguration, of course.

Mark 1 - The slow unveiling of the man of mystery

We are with the gospel of Mark for quite some time now. Which means that the Ched Myers season begins - and what a great inspiration Binding the Strong Man will be. Mark 1 - The slow unveiling of the man of mystery, today's offering.

Big Brother and the desert experience

The TV programme Big Brother isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. The prospect of watching a house full of strangers thrown together for a few weeks with very little to do except eat, sleep, do their make-up and talk, doesn’t appeal to all. And the characters, chosen for their quirkiness or likelihood to create tabloid headlines, aren’t always the most endearing, more often instead self-promoting, self-serving, not the easiest people to live with in a confined and highly-controlled space, for any length of time.

But look at it another way and Big Brother is a fascinating experiment in human behaviour, an exploration of how people relate, bond, make decisions, form groups, fall in and out of love, when all that they have to do all day is to focus on that very process and their part in it.....

I got Pip Wilson (who champions Big Brother) and a meditation on the ‘desert’ or ‘wilderness’ experience into my February article in The Lydford village magazine [Big Brother and the desert experience]: with the suggestion that this Lent people consider the parish church available as a real-time Diary Room ...

Turning water into wine, and blaming the ship's captain for a disaster

... I also like to think that Jesus performed the miracle of the wine at the wedding at Cana for the sake of the bar staff, the caterers. It may or may not have been their fault that stocks ran so low; whatever, they would have got the blame and took the shame when the wine ran out. Jesus saved them from all that. 

How quick employers are to blame their staff for mistakes: how little time it takes for a shipping company to blame the captain of a stricken vessel for a disaster, and how quick everyone else is to join in the scapegoating. Evidence is not required - just a victim.

This brings us to the very heart of the gospel where Jesus’ crucifixion is the consequence of scapegoating, but Jesus the crucified victim brings the scapegoating mechanism to light for all of us to see; on the cross the scapegoating mechanism dies with Jesus and Jesus’ self-giving generosity reveals another way we can be. That’s the very heart of the Good News. The miracle at the wedding in Cana gives us the first hint of it. 

From my talk today, Intemperate Christianity - the good news.

Nathaniel and the new vision of God

Nathaniel and the new vision of God: today's offering.

 

Epiphany - dreamers and stargazers

Epiphany - dreamers and stargazers: today's offering.

At the year’s turning: with Mary, pondering

Happy New Year, reader. I sincerely hope it is for you.

Today's talk, At the year’s turning: with Mary, pondering, owes a tremendous amount to the opening chapter in a small but characteristically powerful book by Walter Brueggemann, Subversive Obedience: Truth-Telling and the Art of Preaching, which begins, 

We might as well concede at the outset that we live, all of us, in a promiscuous, self-indulgent society which prizes autonomy. As a consequence, "obedience" is a tough notion, which we settle mostly either by the vaguest of generalisations, or by confining subject matter to those areas already agreed upon.

How to preach "subversive obedience" into such a society? This is Brueggemann's subject which he tackles with skill and subtle power. If I can get even a modicum of this into my preaching I'll be happy. No prizes for guessing my new year's resolution.

 

Happy Christmas, reader

Happy Christmas, reader. Hope it is a good one for you. Some seasonal contemplations for you, from recent services:

Zechariah - considering new possibilities

When he told me I was pregnant

.. and this morning's offering, Be My Baby, a reflection on the following, which I originally wrote for a Greenbelt Christmas special event at The Greenhouse 1992:

BE MY BABY 

Be my baby

Be my little bundle of fleshy joy

Be innocent

Be a gurgling, smiling distraction

For me

 

Be my baby

Be simply playful

Be soft to touch

And totally trusting

Of me

 

Be my baby

Let me hear your pretty giggles

Let me hold your tiny hands

Let your clear untainted eyes gaze

At me

 

Be my baby

Take my attention

Be the keeper of my hours

Make uncompromised demands

Of me

 

Be my baby

Be the giver of surprises

Be the source of troubled nights

Create moments of embarrassment

For me

 

Be my baby

Bind me to yourself

By your dizzying devotion

Trust the well-being of your body

To me

 

Be my baby

Make me feed you

Be my baby

Make me hold you

Make a sold-out suffering servant

Of me

Prepare in the wilderness a road for God

A voice cries out,

'Prepare in the wilderness

a road for God'

Isaiah 40.3

Working through advent with Ruth Burgess' Wild Goose book Hear My Cry. The Isaiah reading makes me think again about roads, which were for quite some time the one-and-only theme for me (see my other blog Walking the M62). The theme of preparation: recalling all those struggling men who hacked out large corridors of Britain in the push for motorways in the 1960s and 70s, their story captured poignantly in Ewan MacColl and Charles Parker's BBC Radio Ballad, Song of a Road, with its descriptive track titles including We Needed a Way Cut Through the Land, Sixty Tons of Steel, What Made You Come into This Game?, Come All You Gallant Drivers and I'm a Roving Rambler. Preparation is a rough, rugged, difficult task, and it relates well to my Advent prayer life at present. But the other trigger-point is thinking about the visionaries of the 1920s and 30s corporations who created the great out-of-town estates, neat houses with gardens front and back, tree-lined avenues, space for air and play - new homes for those previously crammed into inner-city slums (see eg my paper Towards an Urban Theology of Land). Preparation follows vision; results in something better. An advent theme with promise....

 

In search of leadership in a time of darkness

As we make our act of remembrance today we do so in a society and a world which needs good leaders. People who will not shrink from difficult decisions in government and economics, and conflict, who will embrace the realities, grapple with the complexities, act on conviction - people of all generations who can help and influence others along the way. Leaders like you and me.

Especially we need leaders (parents, grandparents, friends, neighbours) who can teach deep values to others, especially the young, who may be in the dark about such things: in a recently-published book on just war, the former defence advisor and leading public Christian David Fisher argues (along with General Lord Dannatt) that many modern soldiers have had little prior education in religion or morality: he says that "It was striking how Lynndie England, one of the participants in the Abu Ghraib abuses, claimed in her defence that she had assumed the abusive practices were acceptable because no one had told her otherwise."

In search of leadership in a time of darkness - my offering for Remembrance Sunday's services, with the Parable of the Talents as a conversation-starter on the subject of leadership. The quote comes from a book review in the Church Times this week, of David Fisher, Morality and War: Can war be just in the twenty-first century?.