Lincoln Advent: 1 December

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Advent Prayers, 1 December
Space Project, New Clee

Stand up and raise your heads,
because your redemption is drawing near.
(Luke 21.28)

Now is the time to prepare for Christ’s coming, to welcome the One who is already here.

In Advent, we are invited into the story of salvation. We are asked to take our place in God’s story, so that our lives proclaim the reality of God’s presence in the world.

Advent is a time of deep memories. Amidst the frenzy of shopping, decorating, cooking, working, playing, worrying, dreaming – our present reality can be suspended in an instant as the smell of mulled wine stirs a memory of laughter and friendship or the twinkling lights remind us of our first Christmas tree. We need to give time to these memories: they are part of our story, and part of what God comes to share and redeem. Indeed, it is worth following these memories. Ride them back until we find a space of kindness, compassion, love. Ride them back until pain jabs, and we learn to trust our innate sense that no-one is born for misery: God must have had something better in mind.

Advent is a time to focus on God’s better purpose. We get to follow God’s dreaming. God dreamed once through Mary, who risked everything to make a dwelling place for God. God dreamed through Isaiah, who gave a vision of a world transformed, where the lion could dwell with the lamb. It is worth being enchanted by all this as the lights glisten, and the littlest angel tugs on her panto-wings. It is worth trying to enchant others too: by sharing the story and showing a glimpse of the glory of God. But to truly share God’s dream, we must move from enchantment to engagement. We need to help make God’s dreams real.

This Advent, you are invited to pray for the people of this diocese, young and old, strong and frail, powerful and vulnerable: that we may live out the story of salvation. You are invited to do God’s work: bringing light to others, revealing God’s presence, and helping others respond to Christ’s coming -yesterday, tomorrow, today.

We begin with the people of New Clee: for The Space Project, and The Shalom Charity. These projects offer young people a place to grow and flourish – a place for God’s dreams.

You can find the original post here.

share and share alike

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A friend said she’d like to read the Lincoln blog posts that she’d missed, but was struggling to find the page.  So, I’ve asked permission to post them here as well. There’s a bit of catching up to do (13 days worth), and then I’ll post daily, after they’ve gone up on the diocesan web page.

A bit of context:  This Advent, the bishop of Lincoln wanted something to help the whole diocese pray together through Advent.  The communications team began to put together a booklet, which brought to the fore some of the interesting community projects that are happening around the diocese.  Then I got involved, adding scriptural quotations (for the booklet) and writing daily posts (for the diocesan web page).  These go out in the name of the diocese, rather than my own, and it is most generous of them to let me double post here.

The whole thing has been a great opportunity for me– coming from Scotland, I’m still learning the ways of the Church of England, and getting a glimpse of 24 diverse responses to community engagement was fascinating.   It also gave me the excuse to go to Lincoln and say morning prayer as the light streamed through the most amazing glass.  And — best of all — I got to catch up with an old friend who had been too long absent from my life.

Hurrah for Advent blogs.

Thanks too to the facebook friends who commented on the drafts.  At one point, my editorial team stretched form Washington D.C. to Sri Lanka.

the angels have arrived

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I returned to the Cathedral today, after a long season of wandering the parishes.
It was such a relief.

The sermon offered the Sign of Stop-lights (and was both funny and substantive).
The sung creed was like a homecoming.
The angels arrived for communion with Bairstow’s Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, and kindly brought stories with them.

Here’s the Bairstow, sung by a very different sort of choir:

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks writing a full set of Advent blogs for the diocese of Lincoln.  Just a few more to go, and then I will re-emerge here.

You can find the Lincoln set on the diocesan webpage (daily) or on the news archive page, listed as ‘Advent Prayers’ (they slip into the archive at the end of each day). It’s a set of meditations on the theme Christ Yesterday – Today- Tomorrow, to accompany prayers for (and a celebration of) some of the social justice & community projects around the diocese.  These have been fun to work on, even with the crazy deadlines. I’m grateful to the friend who called me into the project, and the team who waited for me to return from the States.

And of course, this is the day we begin Love Blooms Bright 2012.  It is, as always, produced by a fabulous group of people.   I can’t wait to see what appears.

 

leadership (that makes community)

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This is the fourth post in a series on Music that Makes Community. 

I want to think about the chanted psalm I described yesterday — and indeed the music that we sang in New York, generally — in terms of the sort of leadership that it models in the church.

In the psalm, it was quite clear that there was a leader: one person held the text, initiated the singing and built the foundations for the rest of us.  Our ability to enter into the psalm was based on our willingness to listen to the person leading, respond to him (in this case, him), and accept the premise of a very sophisticated game of ‘follow the leader’.

That’s how it started, at least.  But the leader was improvising just like the rest of us.  He held the text.  He had shaped the idea, and brought certain skills and experience to the task.   He initiated, and we responded — at first.  After a while, though, the flow of leadership changed.  There were times when the leader’s chant began to echo or build on notes that others had offered.  Our ‘echoes’ became his raw data — part of the movement of the Holy Spirit in prayer, the ‘voice of God’ that then filled him and shaped his notes.

We had seen this happen earlier in the day when we were doing a physical improv, mirroring our partners.  After a while, we stole from each other, and the group began to move as one.  In that improv, the experience helped form the group.  Now, the experience embodied God in our midst.

What fascinates me in all this is how perfect a balancing there was between clear leadership and shared responsibility.  We could not have done what we did if the cantor had not given us a clear lead.  He offered us a structure (a chanted Psalm) and a way to engage with it (echo back).  He offered a theological vision (God speaks now, as words jump out) and an invitation to participate in that vision (sing what you hear — share God’s word).  He offered us beautiful chanting that stirred our response and brought energy to the task at hand.

And then, once we’d begun our task, he mirrored it back: listening to us — hearing God’s word there — echoing it so that we could hear it too.  He followed our lead, and led us forward again into the word of God.

There are times when the energy in a room rises, the air becomes electric, and you know you are on Holy Ground.  This was one.

One cannot manufacture those moments.  But it is still worth noting the circumstances:

  1. The leadership was clear: in vision, role and offering — the leader provided the context for our song and prayer.
  2. The leadership was fluid: the group recognized and established the leader’s authority by risking doing what he asked and responding to his song. The leader recognized and established the group’s authority by listening and responding to new leads, and building them into his own work.
  3. God’s word was free to move around the community  —  we moved beyond the human constructs of ‘follow the leader’ into a game of creative response to the initiative of God.

The trust involved in improvising a psalm together is huge.  We had to trust the concept, trust the leader, trust our ears and our voices, and trust what God was doing.  That sort of trust might come easily — if the group is already well formed,  the relationships are secure, and it is generally a trusting group — or it might feel like climbing to the very end of a high and flimsy branch.  Once you are out there, though, swinging on that branch, it is a glorious and liberating thing.

Part of what makes Music that Makes Community work is that we are all out on a limb together.  It is risky for a leader to step out with a text and a drone and to make something up.  It is risky for a congregation to join in, and speak or sing aloud in response to the nudging of God.  And crucially — as we get used to being in that place of risk, we get closer to others who may have to take risks to join us.

And that takes us back to what happened in St Paul’s, when people who came to remember 9/11 found themselves in the midst of an all singing all dancing eucharist.  Tomorrow’s post: the riskiest risk-taking of all.