The Church of the Epiphany, Austwick
The Sixth Sunday of Easter, 26 May 2019
Script of a service to accompany the Late May Bank Holiday Flower Festival on the theme of Alice in Wonderland
Download Alice Festival Service Booklet
Welcome and introduction
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was written in 1865 by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. It tells of a young girl named Alice falling through a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar, almost-but-not-quite-human creatures. The sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, again sees Alice enter a fantastical world, this time by climbing through a mirror into the world that she can see beyond it. There she finds that, just like a reflection, everything is reversed, logic is turned on its head: running helps you remain stationary, walking away from something brings you towards it, chessmen are alive, nursery rhyme characters really exist, etc. Through the Looking-Glass includes such verses as "Jabberwocky" and "The Walrus and the Carpenter", and the episode involving Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
This tale of Alice has proved to be lastingly popular with adults as well as with children. Considered to be one of the best examples of the literary nonsense genre, its plays with logic, its narrative course and structure, its characters and imagery have enormously influenced so much of our popular culture and literature. [1]
Is it appropriate to bring Alice to Church? Some may have reservations. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who was a deacon in the Church of England, would no doubt have appreciated the words of St Paul, that ‘the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom; the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.’ In opening up new ways of seeing the world, of coming at things at a tangent to reveal deeper, hidden realities, Lewis Carroll’s stories work in similar ways to those we hear in the Gospel; Alice’s adventures are adventures we all relate to at some level; let us see what happens as we join them with our worship and our bible readings and our prayers.
Opening Prayer
Alice went on talking: ‘Dear, dear! How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!’
Speak to us today Lord, in our worship, as you always do; through the scriptures and through the prayers and through our songs of praise; and as we join all these with the stories of Alice, also permit us to find some new insights into our lives and the life of the world. In Jesus name. Amen.
Hymn Morning has broken
Table 1 White Rabbit by Joan Robson
So she was considering in her own mind (as well as she could, for the hot day made her feel very sleepy and stupid), whether the pleasure of making a daisy-chain would be worth the trouble of getting up and picking the daisies, when suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her.
There was nothing so very remarkable in that; nor did Alice think it so very much out of the way to hear the Rabbit say to itself, ‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be late!’ (when she thought it over afterwards, it occurred to her that she ought to have wondered at this, but at the time it all seemed quite natural); but when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.
In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.
The world we live in often feels like a White Rabbit world - we travel at speed; news travels by the second; money moves by the millisecond; data changes by the microsecond - and we are all caught up in it. Any wonder then that at the moment in history when humankind is moving faster than ever, so are levels of anxiety higher than ever before? Do we control time, or is it more the case that time controls us - or at least the systems we have built which entrap us in the relentlessly urgent motion of the world?
But the world we live in is God’s world - the God who in Jesus taught us not to worry - about the things we need to live - what we will eat, drink, or wear. ‘Life is more important than food, and the body is more important than what you put on it. Look at the birds. They don’t plant, harvest, or save food in barns, but your heavenly Father feeds them. Look at the wildflowers in the field. See how they grow. They don’t work or make clothes for themselves. Don’t you know you are worth much more than they are? You cannot add any time to your life by worrying about it.’ [2]
Prayer: We come to you this morning Lord with our anxieties - about keeping time, about keeping up appearances, about keeping our cupboards well-stocked and our wardrobes well-provided. All the time you have given us - help us not to spend it hurrying and worrying about these things. Help us to rest in this time you gift us; help us to find our focus, our resting-place, in you. Amen.
Table 9 Who stole the Tarts by Carol Wilkinson
One of the jurors had a pencil that squeaked. This of course, Alice could not stand, and she went round the court and got behind him, and very soon found an opportunity of taking it away. She did it so quickly that the poor little juror (it was Bill, the Lizard) could not make out at all what had become of it; so, after hunting all about for it, he was obliged to write with one finger for the rest of the day; and this was of very little use, as it left no mark on the slate.
‘Herald, read the accusation!’ said the King.
On this the White Rabbit blew three blasts on the trumpet, and then unrolled the parchment scroll, and read as follows:—
‘The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts,
All on a summer day:
The Knave of Hearts, he stole those tarts,
And took them quite away!’
‘Consider your verdict,’ the King said to the jury.
‘Not yet, not yet!’ the Rabbit hastily interrupted. ‘There’s a great deal to come before that!’
We live in a world where people are quick to judge - and in their haste to reach a verdict often get it wrong, often create trouble worse than that caused by the original wrong. How familiar, the cry of the Queen of Hearts, ‘Off with their heads!’ We hear versions of this every hour. It doesn’t enrich the world.
Thankfully we also live in God’s world, which is a world of grace. Jesus said, ‘Judge not, and you shall not be judged. Condemn not, and you shall not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.’ His instinct is to forgive first, to love first, to give first priority to the other - for in that, and not in being the one who is first to cast the stone - in that comes freedom and a fulfilled life.
‘Off with their heads!’ said the Queen of Hearts, often. But thankfully, in the end, their heads always stayed on. No-one is decapitated in Alice’s Wonderland. There is a hint of gospel in that.
Prayer: Help us, O Lord, to take to our hearts your word to us to judge not, to condemn not, to forgive first. As you have loved us unconditionally and forgiven us by your grace, help us to live a children of your grace. Bring light to our lives so that your light can shine all the brighter in the world. Amen.
Hymn Thou, whose almighty word
Table 2 Alice meets the Caterpillar by Molly Preston
The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.
‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ said the Caterpillar sternly. ‘Explain yourself!’
‘I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you see.’
‘I don’t see,’ said the Caterpillar.
‘I’m afraid I can’t put it more clearly,’ Alice replied very politely, ‘for I can’t understand it myself to begin with; and being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing.’
‘It isn’t,’ said the Caterpillar.
‘Well, perhaps you haven’t found it so yet,’ said Alice; ‘but when you have to turn into a chrysalis—you will some day, you know—and then after that into a butterfly, I should think you’ll feel it a little queer, won’t you?’
‘Not a bit,’ said the Caterpillar.
‘Well, perhaps your feelings may be different,’ said Alice; ‘all I know is, it would feel very queer to me.’
‘I am not myself’, said Alice. And we can appreciate why - as she had changed several times since the morning. We don’t tend to change that frequently but nevertheless we do change, frequently, throughout our lives. Sometimes these are changes we welcome - openings which lead us into worlds of new opportunities; sometimes these are changes we dislike - such as when aspects of our health and well-being come into decline; sometimes these are these are changes we resist - like when we have to give up our much-loved job or home.
Lewis Carroll gives us this picture of a little girl who shrinks - then grows - then shrinks - then grows. And in a sense, this is what we do throughout life. Shrink and grow.
Jesus invites us to see him as our Good Shepherd, who came that we, his sheep, ‘may have life, and have it abundantly’. So whether we are in a period of growth, and life is opening out before us, or whether we are in a time of shrinking where all we feel and know is loss - he wants us to know his presence and to live, as fully as we can in him.
Prayer: Lord Jesus, like Alice, at different times in our lives we grow and we shrink. We give thanks for those moments of opportunity which allow us to flourish; we pray for your presence in those moments where we feel loss. In each moment, whether of growth or of loss, help us know ourselves cared for, shepherded, by you who offer us life in abundance. Amen.
Table 8 Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum by Marilyn Eaton
Tweedledee:
‘The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright—
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done—
“It’s very rude of him,” she said,
“To come and spoil the fun!”
The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying over head—
There were no birds to fly.
The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
“If this were only cleared away,”
They said, “it would be grand!”
“If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year,
Do you suppose,” the Walrus said,
“That they could get it clear?”
“I doubt it,” said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.
There is a darkness and an oddness about Tweedledum’s fantasy world where the sun shone at night causing the moon to sulk, where there were no clouds and no birds and where the Walrus and the Carpenter wanted to clear the sea shore of sand, and which develops into a cruel journey where they lead the little oysters to their demise.
Sometimes our natural world is cruel; sometimes we see signs in the skies and the seas of darker and more difficult times ahead. Our children are now leading us in conscience to see that nevertheless we do live in a world of wonder, and that world should be cared for as best we can, and loved. This is God’s wondrous world. Let us sing this song in celebration of it, and in commitment to caring for it all our days.
Hymn
All the wonder that surrounds us
springs from God's care:
all that marvels or confounds us,
raw, rich or rare;
touch and texture, sights and voices,
nature's countless forms and choices:
all for which the heart rejoices
springs from God's care.
Every creature, every human
lives by God's grace:
every family, man and woman,
culture and race;
those whom fortune seems to favour,
those exploited for their labour,
those who need to know a neighbour
live by God's grace.
How can we revere God's goodness
meant for all time?
How ensure that each uniqueness
keeps in its prime?
How shall we revere with pleasure
all God gives for life and leisure,
how preserve that earthly treasure
meant for all time?
God has willed that peace and justice
walk hand in hand.
These, with love, shall build foundations
on which we'll stand:
love for lover, friend and stranger,
love defying death and danger,
love as first born in a manger:
heaven close at hand.
John L Bell © 2002, Wild Goose Resource Group, Iona Community, Glasgow
By the door The Looking Glass by Susan Fairhurst and
Table 6 Through the Looking Glass by Carol Wilkinson
The Queen said to Alice, ‘I’ll give you something to believe. I’m just one hundred and one, five months and a day.’ ‘I can’t believe that!’ said Alice.
Can’t you?” said the Queen in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said, “one can’t believe impossible things.”
I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!”
These days - particularly if we’re in the habit of starting our day with the news - it seems we’re all required to believe six impossible things before breakfast, as mediated to us by tweeting politicians, pay-rolled pundits and ‘reality’ TV stars. This is a strange, slippery, looking-glass world.
Our scriptures invite us to imagine ourselves in a world where things look different to this - because God’s view of the world is so different from the one we humans make for ourselves. So, for instance, in this world of God’s we find swords reinvented as ploughshares, spears as pruning-hooks. And this inspires people like Alfie Bradley, an artist who created the 27ft (8m) ‘Knife Angel’ sculpture currently on display at Coventry Cathedral, made from 100,000 blades handed into police across the country. And Alison Cope, who, in the five years since her18-year-old son Joshua was stabbed to death, has since spoken to over 280,000 people in schools, prisons and groups across the country, inviting her audiences to imagine a world without knife crime, and by imagining it, to bring it into being.
It’s only by allowing ourselves into a world of strange imaginings that we can start to make seemingly impossible things come wonderfully true.
A ‘nonsense’ creed?
Some might all it nonsense but we believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth.
Some may think it a fantasy but we believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
Who he rose again on the third day;
who ascended into heaven,
who is seated at the right hand of the Father,
and will come to judge the living and the dead.
Some just cannot see but we believe in the Holy Spirit,
the holy catholic Church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and the life everlasting. Amen.
Table 1 Eat Me Drink Me by Catherine Menday
Soon Alice's eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table: she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words ‘EAT ME’ were beautifully marked in currants. ‘Well, I’ll eat it,’ said Alice, ‘and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door; so either way I’ll get into the garden, and I don’t care which happens!’
She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, ‘Which way? Which way?’, holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing, and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size: to be sure, this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.
So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.
….
There seemed to be no use in waiting by the little door, so she went back to the table, half hoping she might find another key on it, or at any rate a book of rules for shutting people up like telescopes: this time she found a little bottle on it, (‘which certainly was not here before,’ said Alice,) and round the neck of the bottle was a paper label, with the words ‘DRINK ME’ beautifully printed on it in large letters.
It was all very well to say ‘Drink me,’ but the wise little Alice was not going to do that in a hurry. ‘No, I’ll look first,’ she said, ‘and see whether it’s marked “poison” or not’; for she had read several nice little histories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts and other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that if you cut your finger very deeply with a knife, it usually bleeds; and she had never forgotten that, if you drink much from a bottle marked ‘poison,’ it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.
However, this bottle was not marked ‘poison,’ so Alice ventured to taste it, and finding it very nice, (it had, in fact, a sort of mixed flavour of cherry-tart, custard, pine-apple, roast turkey, toffee, and hot buttered toast,) she very soon finished it off.
We live in a world of temptations - on every trip to Booths many things call out to us from the shelves, Eat Me! Drink Me! - and some of them may nourish us and others may be sweet and lovely and fulfilling to the taste. In this world we strive to strike a balance between those things we consume which make us feel good about ourselves, and those things which may harm us. Alice seems wise to this. She measures her response to the invitations offered so temptingly to her by the cake and the bottle. We know that for our flourishing, we might be measured too. This is reflected so well in the prayer which Jesus taught us; the prayer which we shall say together in a moment or two. First, let us bring to mind the prayers of our hearts, for ourselves and our needs…. for others we know in need of god’s care today … for those we love and have gone before us, in particular Brenda Halstead today … for the wondrous, magnificent, ill-treated and joyous world we live in, and all its life … for the Church close to home and all those everywhere inspired buy their God to live lives of love.…
The Lord’s Prayer
Notices
Coda: Who stole the Tarts again
‘Let the jury consider their verdict,’ the King said, for about the twentieth time that day.
‘No, no!’ said the Queen. ‘Sentence first—verdict afterwards.’
‘Stuff and nonsense!’ said Alice loudly. ‘The idea of having the sentence first!’
‘Hold your tongue!’ said the Queen, turning purple.
‘I won’t!’ said Alice.
‘Off with her head!’ the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.
‘Who cares for you?’ said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) ‘You’re nothing but a pack of cards!’
At this the whole pack rose up into the air, and came flying down upon her: she gave a little scream, half of fright and half of anger, and tried to beat them off, and found herself lying on the bank, with her head in the lap of her sister, who was gently brushing away some dead leaves that had fluttered down from the trees upon her face.
‘Wake up, Alice dear!’ said her sister; ‘Why, what a long sleep you’ve had!’
Florists, artists, grown-ups, children, we have loved getting close to the astonishing stories of Alice in the Wonderland which Lewis Carroll created. And part of our great enjoyment of these tall tales is that they oddly relate so well to the tall tales which make up our lives.
The world we live in is driven by fantasies - the fantasy that we can stay young forever, the fantasy that we can infinitely mine the world’s resources without causing lasting harm, the fantasy that putting greater wealth into fewer and fewer people’s hands will somehow benefit all. This relentless fantasy world, it’s the way things are, we’re told. Whereas in truth, it’s nothing but a pack of cards…
Let us hold fast to this: a truth which the Church of England deacon Charles Lutwidge Dodgson would have preached: this is God’s world and because it is so much better than those worlds we imagine for ourselves, God invites us to imagine it with him - he gives us Jesus to show us the way - how by his Spirit we can bring it into being.
Hymn Lord of all hopefulness
Blessing
We knew who we were this morning, but we've changed a few times since then.
May the ever-living, ever-creating God
Who is forever changeless in love and in grace,
Guide our path through this strange world;
Help us journey in joy,
Live in hope,
Love unconditionally.
And may the blessing of God almighty…..
Dismissal
Go into this wondrous world in peace to love and serve the Lord:
In the name of Christ. Amen
Notes
[1] Wikipedia: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
[2] Matthew 6.25-28.
Comments