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FROM THE RECTOR

July 2008

Dear Friends,

How were your school assembles?  Or your chapel ones, if you were lucky enough to have such a thing at your school?  I sometimes meet people who say that they were turned off religion for life at school.   I can understand that.  Daily sport turned me off the idea for ever, so I can understand the same happening in some situations with religion.

But sitting here in my dog collar writing for the parish magazine I can hardly say that happened to me.  And across the mists of time the other day came a line remembered from one of the hymns we used to sing, though I can't remember which one it was.  "Change marches onward;  may all change be blessed."

Maybe that hymn was in the "Songs of Praise" hymnbook.  It has the sort of optimism about the future that is typical of it and is  now very dated.   On the whole nowadays we are more nervous about the future, and change is always unsettling.  That has led some to see faith as a sort of bastion against change.  And as they hurry back into Fortress Church and bang the door to with a turning of locks and a shooting of bolts, they can be heard shouting defiantly through the heavily-fortified window, "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, and today, and for ever.".

 And so he is, as their quoting Hebrews 13:8 very properly reminds us.  Christ is always the same, in that his faithfulness, his love and his grace never fails and is always to be trusted and built upon.  As Hebrews says in the same chapter, he "will never fail you nor forsake you." (13:5).   He is the same.  But the way that faithfulness is expressed, the way we meet it in our lives, the way the Church seeks to communicate it, that changes all the time.  When I was little, when for example I was confronted with that school worship, certainly Christ had things to say to me.  He has things to say to me now, all those years later.  But I don't expect him to say the same thing.

The uncomfortable fact is that change is built in.  It is built in to our world, and in to our experience.  And despite an understandable taste for tradition, it is built in to the life of the Church as well.  So when it happens we don't need to be too nervous about it.

Change is happening for Holy Trinity this summer as Lynn leaves us for Harlow.  And of course for Lynn herself, as she moves house and starts work as vicar of her own parish.  Maybe you are coping with change in your own lives too.  Moving house yourself maybe (one, they say, of the most stressful events we ever have to deal with!).  Or dealing with change in your personal circumstances, or in the family, or at work.

In all those change situations, we don't need to seek to find re-assurance in the past, and we don't need to be phased by the inevitable feelings of loss in the present.  Because God is out there in the future as well.  He is there before us, he travels ahead of us;  we don't need to "take" God into new situations because he is there already..  So the same Letter to the Hebrews that says Christ is always the same commends to us all sorts of change and new experiences.  "By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance;  and he set out, not knowing where he was going." (11:8).

God is always inviting us on towards his new thing for us.  Certainly it is not always a comfortable thought.  Often we are happy where we are!   But if God invites us on, it is always towards a greater joy and our own greater happiness, despite the ups and downs of the journey.  So Anglican priest and poet RS Thomas, in many ways quite a traditionalist, at least as far as worship was concerned, wrote these words: "He is such a fast God, always before us and leaving as we arrive." *

It would be handier, more convenient, easier, to be able to pin God down.  To lock him up, as it were, in Fortress Church and regard ourselves as holding the key.  Instead of that, we are invited to meet him on the journey.  So here is a little Orthodox prayer, maybe to use as we ponder the changes to come in our own lives:

O Saviour, who journeyed with Luke and Cleopas to Emmaus, journey with your servants as they now set out upon their way, and defend them from all evil." **

With best wishes,                                                                       

Michael Ballard. 

* "Pilgrimages", in RS Thomas Collected Poems, Phoenix 1993 p. 364.

** quoted Callistos Ware, "The Orthodox Way", Mowbrays 1979 p.11.