John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

The Leafy Lanes around Lydford and the People of The Way

Here's my Reflections column for this week's Okehampton Times. Based on last week's news item: here.

Congratulations to the 150 charity walkers who last week raised £2,000 for the Derriford Hospital Oncology Unit by stepping out along the Leafy Lanes around Lydford and Bridestowe. And thanks to their organiser David Hocking for inviting me to offer a few words of encouragement to bless them on their way.

It was a Sunday morning start. I managed my brief appearance before them on the Fox and Hounds campsite inbetween taking one service at Bratton Clovelly (9.30) and another at Sourton (11.00) and I noticed that among the walkers were quite a few people who are often in church with me, but who’d opted to do something worthwhile outdoors instead that day. Which is fine by me, because I’m a great believer that God is not constrained within the walls of churches (though these can be enormously helpful to people seeking him), but that the divine presence is everywhere. After all, Genesis reports that God created the world in its physicality, and Christians believe that the resurrected Jesus is present with us now, at all times and in all places. One way of putting this is that God walks with us.

I love a good walk. In the countryside or the city. I used to take pilgrimages, rotagion tours, etc, around the streets of Liverpool, encouraging the walkers to look for signs of the divine around us as we went: ‘heaven in the ordinary’ if you like. And we never failed to find them: in the things we saw and the insights we gained from the conversations we had. The early Christians used to be called the People of The Way. We should embrace that title again today - opening ourselves to giving and receiving from those we walk with in life, and the invisible One who journeys with us.

[See more pictures of the Leafly Lanes walk at the Pals of POOCH website.]

Stephen - the gaze of the protomartyr

My sermons are a bit long at the moment. I'm full of it. Hope that's not too bad a thing. Stephen - the gaze of the protomartyr, today's offering to the longsuffering listeners of Bridestowe and Lydford. From a section on the beheading of John the Baptist:

        It was John who some time previously had stood together with Jesus in the River Jordan, at Jesus' baptism, when the heavens opened over their heads, and the voice of the Father from heaven said, 'This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.' [Matthew 1.17]. But rather than keeping his gaze fixed on that glorious vision as a guide and direction for his future life John instead got caught up in a deadly rivalry with a king whose desires became John's own. John gazed on Herod and embraced the king's desire for power and influence by any means: John's vision of a Messiah was of one who would come to judge and rule with violence: 'the winnowing fork [..] in his hand to clear the threshing floor and gather the wheat into his granary, ready to burn the chaff with unquenchable fire' [Luke 3.16-17].
        But the Messiah he had baptised was not the violent judge John anticipated. Hearing about John's imprisonment in Herod's court Jesus said, 'From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force'. [Matthew 11.12] Applied to the situation of Herod and John, Jesus' words carry two meanings - of a king fixated on vengeance over the one who criticised him for his moral failings, and of a prophet also fixated on vengeance that he thought the kingdom of heaven would enforce: a vengeance of unquenchable fire. Sadly John's fixation on the desires of King Herod meant that the prophet went to his death without recognising the coming of Jesus' loving nonviolent kingdom of grace.
        We can imagine Hollywood taking hold of the beheading of John and making a hero of him. Following the usual movie format John would probably have got his vengeance, somehow. Picture this: the court of Herod gasping as the prison executioner brings the head of John the Baptist into their dining hall for all to see; but the camera cuts away to the empty prison cell beneath which, unknown to the king's guests, is burning violently - John set the flames the moment before they took him away to be killed, and now these flames are licking the floorboards beneath Herod's feet.

Cheltenham: Peculiar Pedestrian Pilgrimage

Greenbelt are getting more efficient every year. It's only May and I'm already being asked for copy for the festival's daily diary, describing my contribution to the jamboree this year. This is how it reads:

Cheltenham: Peculiar Pedestrian Pilgrimage
Sunday 1.30-4.00
Encounter Cheltenham as you’ve never imagined it before. An urban experiential walk referencing the methods and obsessions of Jim Hart, influential maverick urban missioner and committed explorer of towns and cities, who died in 2009. Led by John Davies. Meet in car park outside the main festival box office at 1.30. Back by 4.00 approx.

The festival are keen to pay tribute to some of the lesser-known saints of our community in recent times and it's great to be asked to do something which has Jim as its focus. I'm sure we will deviate from Jim's methods quite a bit - no-one could walk and talk a city like he did anyway, at high-speed, streaming off a wildly informative monologue of historical references, architectural place-notes and forthright opinion as he went - and I'll also be guided by something which is coming to me this week: a copy of Phil Smith's new publication, a booklet called ‘A Sardine Street Box of Tricks’ which offers 'various approaches and tactics' intended to serve as 'a help to anyone who makes, or would like to make walk-performances or variations on guided tours'. Looking forward to it. This August Bank Holiday walk will be different from 2007's Heart of Cheltenham Pilgrimage: this is going to be a Hart of Cheltenham pilgrimage. If you're at the festival, dear reader: do join me.

At the Sheep Gate - saved from sacrifice

At the Sheep Gate - saved from sacrifice: today's talk in three churches. Jerusalem's Sheep Gate was the place that sheep destined to be slaughtered at the temple altar were brought in from the country, on a one-way journey to destruction. The pool by the Sheep Gate was where the city jettisoned its sick, its lame, its lost, abandoned to their fate well away from the heart of society. A meditation on the saving power of what Jesus  meant when he said, 'I am the gate for the sheep'....

The Dead Man Walking in a World of Motion

I'm loving Anthony Bartlett's Virtually Christian - How Christ Changes Human Meaning and makes Creation New. His book makes a bold claim that it 'reconfigures the traditional framework of theology. Gone are the heavenly other world and its metaphysical God. In their place is revealed a God deeply implicated in the human story and laboring [sic] with us for a transformed world'. Bartlett affirms that in a rapidly-moving world of signs it is possible to see God alive and at work. My talk today, The Dead Man Walking in a World of Motion, owes a good deal to Bartlett's inspiring theologising: the Emmaus Road story, ever an inspiration, helped me to get the thesis over very well:

        The film Dead Man Walking projects into a motion-picture world signs of compassion, love, forgiveness which are only visible, only possible, because of that moment in history when the original Dead Man Walking became the Dead Man Raised, a moment marked by the sign of the empty cross and remembered at the meal table in Emmaus in the sign of the broken bread.
        From the fixed point of Calvary Christ projects into our world of motion the empty cross - sign of the dead man raised; from the fixed point of Emmaus Christ projects into our world of motion the broken bread - sign of the dead man walking with the People of The Way. At the end of that day in Emmaus Christ disappeared from the company of Cleopas and his friend to begin to make himself known to others who are seeking him in the universe of signs which make up our rapidly-moving world. The resurrected Christ moves unhindered towards us through space and time, in absolute love and forgiveness. In our world of motion the resurrected Christ continues to generate signs of his absolute transformation. If you look for them you will find them everywhere.

The Resurrection - believe the peace

Thomas, when he saw Jesus in that hidden room, didn't doubt the resurrection. He doubted the crucifixion. Thomas wanted evidence that Jesus had actually died that cruel death - he wanted to see his body wounds - because he was struggling to believe that the event had actually happened - that Jesus their Lord had been executed; that the one who was supposed to be saving them from the powers which oppressed them, had submitted himself to those very powers; that the Messiah had become a victim of the violence of the world.

Thomas struggled to believe that having gone through that terrible ordeal his Lord's response was to come back to them in a spirit of forgiveness, offering peace. It was clear to him that his Lord was alive. But could he really have died so violently in the first place, if, on coming back to life, he was so free of vengeance, retribution, and so full of forgiveness, peace?

From The Resurrection - believe the peace - my offering at three or four churches today.