John Davies - Notes From a Small Vicar

We cannot know what’s coming - but we can approach it faithfully

John’s Notes

Parish Magazine Editorials, January 2019 

 

In my childhood we welcomed in New Year by standing beside the River Mersey at midnight to hear the ships out on the Irish Sea sound their foghorns. They made an odd sound, groaning and weirdly pitched - not unlike the sound of a distant herd of cows anticipating feeding. In my memory when the ships’ horns sounded it was often foggy: obscuring their lights and muffling the offshore noises, adding to their mystery. 

So our New Years began in mystery and dullness and distance and oddness - far from the clarity demanded by our culture with its call for resolutions and its shrill predictions of what we should expect in the year ahead. But don’t you think that most of our experience is wrapped in enigma; mostly our future is a mystery to us. It’s a waste of time my trying to predict what will come my way in 2019. But like my younger self stumbling home across Crosby Beach in the dark as the foghorns faded, so my present self must simply turn with the year, and step directly into it in faith and hope. 

When people talk about prophecy they often mean ‘predicting the future’. But a truer description of the prophets is that they were and are people who shine a light on the signs of our times, speak the often hidden or uncomfortable truths, and call people to live faithful, obedient lives with and for God in the face of all of that. We cannot know what’s coming - but we can approach it faithfully. This is why I am a fan of the Methodists’ New Year practice of renewing their covenant with God. If we pray John Wesley’s covenant prayer we acknowledge the uncertainty of what is ahead whilst embracing it in faith and commitment. He prayed it daily:

I am no longer my own but yours. Your will, not mine, be done in all things, wherever you may place me, in all that I do and in all that I may endure; when there is work for me and when there is none; when I am troubled and when I am at peace. 

Your will be done when I am valued and when I am disregarded; when I find fulfilment and when it is lacking; when I have all things and when I have nothing. I willingly offer all that I have and am to serve you, as and where you choose.

Glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you are mine and I am yours. May it be so for ever. Let this covenant now made on earth be fulfilled in heaven. Amen.

Calling the midwives: that’s you and me

John’s Notes: Parish Magazine Editorial

December 2018

 

If Jesus was born today what would it be like? Well, Mary was an ordinary girl, so if it happened today I picture the angel Gabriel appearing to her at home while she was sitting reading the TV Quick or tapping her on the shoulder in Aldi. And Joseph was an ordinary man, a carpenter, a worker with wood. So if it happened today I picture the angel Gabriel appearing to him while he was out shop-fitting or sitting in his van at traffic lights. If Jesus was born today he would come into the lives of ordinary people like you and me. 

If Jesus was born today Mary wouldn't be worrying about finding room at the inn: she'd be worrying about getting a bed at the nearest maternity hospital. Joseph wouldn't be thinking about hiring a donkey to get her there: he'd be tidying out the van, topping up the oil, fixing that dodgy brake, to make sure there'd be no problems once her waters broke. Maybe the choir of angels would be singing outside A+E. Maybe a group of hospital porters would be the first to hear the good news. 

For today the good news is just the same. The good news that repents of that old spiteful, violent God intent on bringing misery to the world and sets our eyes on a loving, gracious, giving God bringing peace to all who look for it. 

The good news shows us God in a vulnerable child born to an everyday couple in the midst of a complex, conflicted world. And asks us to be the midwives who do our bit to bring his new world to birth.

The grown-up Jesus invites us to live with eyes wide open to the new world he’s creating in the midst of the old one: ‘This is but the beginning of the birth pangs,’ he once said. Meaning that our troubled land, our aching world, is pregnant, expectant of the birth of a new ‘kingdom’ in which human conflict and its consequences (poverty, famine, disease) will be no more. 

God does come to earth today - inviting all people of goodwill to embrace our task to nurture this new kingdom into being. We are the midwives of the new world. We occupy the tension between the present, troubled, reality, and the new, transformed, world which he is bringing into being. And we play our part in bringing it into being through the way we live our lives. Just as competitiveness, conflict and violence are learned behaviours, so are love, grace and peace.

Happy Christmas - and may the love, grace and peace of God be with you and all your neighbours.