Many hands make light work

Here at St Luke’s, we love to give all our members the opportunity to get involved in the running of the church. In fact, one of the secrets of our success is that so many of us play a role in making the magic of St Luke’s happen – plus it frees up our clergy and staff to concentrate on the bigger picture.

Volunteering is also a brilliant way to get to know people. It’s all too easy to get lost in the crowd in a growing church like St Luke’s, but lending a hand is the quickest way to develop friendships and become part of the community.

Whatever your skill or interest, there’s something at St Luke’s you can get involved in. Below are just some of the options available. Speak to the revelant coordinator (if you don’t know who they are, ask someone to point them out) or contact Pat on patriciatomlinson@mac.com and she’ll put you in touch. Most roles only involve an hour or two of your time, every couple of months. Alternatively, if you have an idea for something new, chat to Dave and Pat.

Many rotas will be starting again after the summer holiday. If you’d like to get involved, we’d love to have you on board!

*Welcoming: Provide a warm welcome and distribute service sheets. See Mike Dark.

*Coffee rota: Refresh churchgoers after the service. See Nina Barnsley.

*Readings: Deliver Bible excerpts and other readings in services. See Adrian Pearson.

*Prayers: Lead the congregation in praying for ourselves and others. See Denise Ward.

*Sound: Ensure we can all hear what’s going on! See Jif Thompson.

*Sunday school and youth work: Helping our children and young people grow and develop while having fun. See Susie Holland.

*Traidcraft stall: Sell fairly traded goods after the main Sunday service. See Lucy Blair.

*Choir: Make a beautiful noise and lead the congregation in worship. Skilled musicians sometimes needed too. See Justin Butcher.

*Socials and entertainment: Help make our concerts, parties and special events happen. Coordinators vary.

*PCC: Join the committee that helps run the church (annual elections). See Dave Tomlinson.

*Fundraising: Various events throughout the year. Listen out for notices or suggest your own ideas.

*Gardening: Keep our green space looking beautiful. See Jean Willson.

*Nightshelter: Cook, care, entertain or do the laundry (plus more) for our annual winter shelter for homeless people. Coordinators vary.

*Outside the four walls: From community campaigning to delivering collections to the local food bank, singing to dementia patients to promoting a credit union, there are countless ways we make a difference in our community. Listen out for notices.

All Aboard the Ship of Fools

'We are a ship’s company, even if there are times when we’d dearly like to make some of the crew walk the plank…' A talk by Malcolm Doney on Sunday April 17th.

Ahoy there, shipmates! It’s very good indeed to be back here in the nave of St Luke’s. It feels like home. Meryl and I have been attached to the place for over 25 years, so it’s faaaamly.

There’s a reason I mentioned the nave. It’s because the word comes from the Latin ‘Navis’ which means ‘Ship’. If you look above your heads for a minute, and use your imagination, you could see that this might be the inside of an upturned hull of a boat. This isn’t a particularly good example, but it’s very obvious in many churches.

That’s because there’s an enduring tradition which sees Noah’s ark as an emblem of salvation. Here we all are gathered into a floating zoo, tucked up safe and dry from the terrible storms raging outside, and bound for an eternal landfall. We’ve been excused from the terrible judgment of God, imposed on the wicked people that surround us.

This metaphor, rather like Noah’s ark, creaks a bit. Doesn’t entirely hold water, but we’ll come back to that.

First, let’s do a short “Previously on Noah” to set the scene. Life on earth after Adam and Eve were hoofed out of the Garden of Eden, got pretty wild. In the course of just two chapters in Genesis, Adam and Eve’s descendants built cities, discovered how to use of bronze and iron, and developed cultures with art and music,

Then it gets all a bit Game of Thrones. The planet becomes dominated by a series of figures, who are possibly interchangeable, referred to as “sons of God” and the Nephilim. Maybe they’re fallen angels, but, anyway, they arrive on earth, and have sex with human women who then give birth to a superhuman race of giants or “men of renown”. There may have been women of renown too, but this isn’t recorded. I love the Old Testament! It has the best stories.

(Old-timers in the congregation might recall the Fields of the Nephilim, an 80s Gothic Rock outfit . . . from Stevenage. Where else?)

Anyway, violence and evil is the order of the day. And God curses the day he made humankind and decides to “blot them out” – all except Noah who is a beacon of goodness.

This story forms part of a pattern in Genesis. There are three times when God despairs of his creation and decides to start again: Adam and Eve’s disobedience, followed by expulsion from Eden; the evil and violence of this dark period, followed by the flood, and then the Tower of Babel followed by the fragmentation of language. If you remember, this last one was when humans, post-Noah, who all spoke the same lingo, started to build a huge tower in their own honour. God thought people were getting too powerful for their own good, and decided to fragment their language and scatter them abroad.

But the story of Noah is the most dramatic and the most draconian. This is not a nice Sunday School story. God is so remorseful, in such despair, that he is prepared to destroy his creation – to kill all but eight individuals on the entire planet. Forget “The animals went in two by two, the elephant and the kangaroo, Hurrah, Hurrah.” This is genocide.

God, the story goes, wants to start again, with a bunch of people who are prepared to do what they’re told. As it happens, things go wrong shortly after the ark has landed. Noah goes on a drunken bender, which involved unseemly nakedness, and the cursing of generations to come.

What kind of God is this? We have to realise that these early Genesis stories forged as part of a defining myth that was largely put together when the Israelites found themselves wrenched from their Promised Land, and exiled in Babylon. This ragged, migrant community were clinging on to their identity and wondering how they – God’s chosen people – had ended up, surrounded by their enemies.

It was hugely important for them to see their God as someone who intervened, who rescued. He had saved them before, and would save them again. It’s easy to get the idea from the Old Testament of a genocidal God, who despaired of his creation. But these characteristics were a by-product of a desire by a despairing people for a deity who would take their side against the playground bullies. The danger is that God looked like an old bastard. But he at least he was their old bastard.

Elements of the story of Noah’s ark were borrowed from Israel’s new Babylonian neighbours. There was another boat-builder called Utnapishtim who had escaped a similar flood in the Epic of Gilgamesh, a Mesopotamian narrative, written a thousand years or more before. His ark may have been a giant circular coracle, two-thirds the size of a football pitch. The Israelites made parts of this epic their own, and gave it a different theological spine. The story fitted their lived experience, in a fertile crescent where flooding was a regular feature.

Stories like these had deep personal resonance. They still do. I began by saying that the ark, in the life of the church became a symbol of the saved. We have been rescued from the sinful world, transported through the waters of baptism and into a brave new world. And at times in the past – when Christians were a persecuted minority, this might have been watertight.

I remember, when I first started coming to St Luke’s in the 1990s, this was a kind or ark for many people who had fled their evangelical past, under the impression that they’d lost their faith, and they need to replace it with a new one. It was a place of safety – it may still be for some of you. But I’d suggest that we are no longer in exile to the same degree. This is not St Luke’s contra mundum. We don’t need a lifeboat, we need to be in the swim.

But there’s still a sense in which being part of a faith community feels like it might have been like for Noah’s family. The novelist and priest Frederick Buechner describes it better than I can:

“Just about everything imaginable is aboard, the clean and the unclean both. They are all piled in together helter-skelter, the predators and the prey, the wild and the tame, the sleek and beautiful ones and the ones that are ugly as sin. There are sly young foxes and impossible old crows. There are the catty and the piggish and the peacock-proud. There are hawks and there are doves. . . Most of them have no clear idea just where they’re supposed to be heading or how they’re supposed to get there or what they’ll find if and when they finally do . . . It’s a regular menagerie in there, and sometimes it smells to high Heaven.”

The Church Universal is hardly a happy ship right now. There are disputes over sexual orientation, sexual practice, the position of women, abortion. There’s vitriol, judgment and phobia. I don’t know about you, but often I find myself spiritually, and ethically, closer to people who profess no faith, than those who profess mine.

There is another nautical image which comes to mind when I think of Christendom, and that’s the Ship of Fools. It’s a parable invented by Plato, and also the name of a Christian satirical website dear to my heart. The ship of fools is a vessel whose control has been wrested from the pilot, by those who know nothing of sailing and have zero navigational skills. Sound familiar?

I’m guessing that for a lot of us – when it comes to issues of life and faith – often find ourselves at sea. Even if we’re not totally at the mercy of the elements, we’re still buffeted by a shifting weather and sea conditions – relationships, career, finance, physical health and mental state all affect us.

But we aren’t sealed into a vessel by an interventionist God, who’s  micromanaging our universe. Unlike Noah and his menagerie, we’re not just passengers. That has terrifying echoes of Syrian refugees packed into second-rate vessels with inadequate food and safety equipment – abandoned by the crew – and left to fend for themselves. God help them.

But we do know that – on a stormed tossed boat – you need shipmates. We haul on the ropes together, sing the old shanties, retell the old stories, keep a weather eye on each other. On a fair day, we watch the mainsail fill with a following wind. We are a ship’s company, even if there are times when we’d dearly like to make some of the crew walk the plank.

Alongside Noah’s Ark, and the Ship of Fools, there’s a third maritime image that I find affecting and helpful. The disciples are in a fishing boat on the sea of Galilee. Jesus is with them, but he’s asleep in the stern. Out of nowhere, a gale blows in, with the waves rising steep and the wind howling in the rigging. Even these seasoned fishermen are scared.

But they are not alone. They’re in the company of the unflappable, figure of Jesus, who stills their fears and calms the waves. His presence, his character, his life binds them together. He’s not the skipper, or the navigator. The disciples, the ships company – us – decide among ourselves who does what. In collaboration, in prayer, we make our decisions, we raise the sails and set the course. We manage our own destiny. But we do so through our trust in this remarkable figure who has demonstrated to us that God is not Noah’s old bastard, who steers the ship by remote control, but someone who is in the same boat, in the same sea, in the same wind, and who also waits for us ashore with the fire lit, and breakfast cooking

Bon voyage.

Peace

'Peace be with you on the dark Fridays, the confused Saturdays and the joyous Sundays.' A talk by Sarah Roweberry on the Sunday after Easter.

'I grew up in a church, but I’m still getting my head around Easter. So when I heard that today’s passage was about doubting Thomas, my gut reaction was; brilliant!  I’m an expert on doubt!

But since then I’ve started to doubt that too.

Thomas seems to me to have been unfairly branded…calling someone a doubting Thomas usually has a slightly insulting tone to it, when I can’t help thinking he’s more like perfectly reasonable Thomas.

Because let’s be honest, it’s a fairly incredible story, for Thomas, and for me. It was then and still is in now.  We took the day where we commemorate pretty much the worst thing a group with power could do to a single person, and we called it ‘Good Friday’ either we’re cruel in the extreme, or we’ve given away the ending in the ultimate spoiler. We can only call it good because we’ve been told that Friday isn’t the end of the story. But what was it like the first time around? Imagine how it actually felt for Thomas – and I’m going to guess it wasn’t good.

What was it like to have put your complete trust in Jesus, give up life as you knew it to follow him, get excited about a revolution, a new world, a better way of doing things, only to see him so brutally, violently killed? Would you wonder whether the whole story was a big sham? That you’d put your faith in the wrong person, that this God you thought was by your side had instead forsaken you?

I think about Palestine most days, but particularly at this time of year. I spent 3 months living in the occupied West Bank as a human rights accompanier, being with Palestinians and Israeli peace activists as they struggled for a just peace, or just plain struggled to maintain their existence. All of these places that had somehow been part of our collective memory as Sunday school regulars; weren’t just scenes from a book anymore, they became places to me. Physical places full of real people that have families and hopes and dreams and despair. I was there at this time of year, and more than occasionally, the feeling of being forsaken by God was viscerally real.

Early one morning in the days before Easter, I visited families whose homes had been violently raided by the Israeli military in the middle of the night. The village had been picked on most likely because it still, to this day, holds a weekly demonstration against a road block that cuts them off from their main road, and against the occupation more widely which means that half of the agricultural land of the village is due to be lost behind the separation barrier.  Some families had people arrested, but in many , heavily armed soldiers had arrived in the dead of night, literally turned houses upside down and then simply moved on to the next place.  Some of the homes that had been raided had young children and the incident had obviously been traumatic for them. The mess and damage left behind were overwhelming to me, it seemed to be the most hopeless situation I had witnessed so far. I doubted what I was doing there, and in that cloud of despair, whether I would ever feel hopeful again about peace.  A despair appropriate for Easter Saturday.

But in the midst of it, the first thing people would do is to offer us something. To make coffee whilst broken glass lay over the floor, or to run out to buy juice whilst their sofas still lay upside down.

I was stuck in Easter Saturday. And they were proving that kindness is always good news – that it might be possible to light a candle rather than curse the darkness. The women at the tomb didn’t know Jesus was going to be alive –but they went anyway. Thomas didn’t believe the other disciples, but he hung around anyway. They were fearful for their lives- perfectly reasonable given what they had just seen happen to Jesus. And for some reason he stayed around rather than running away. The Palestinian families I visited didn’t have a lot of reason to hope, but they shared theirs with me anyway. Small acts of hope that allow us to experience a glimmer of Easter Sunday. And so when I read today’s passage again, I thought of these families and realised that maybe it’s not about doubt at all, maybe it’s about life.

And this is why community matters – because sometimes you’ll be perfectly-reasonable-Thomas, and sometimes you’ll be his bunch of mates that caught a glimpse of a better world and carried on believing in it even when times were bleak.

What is your doubt holding you back from? What is your fear stopping you from doing? From believing that you are loved beyond measure? From saying hello to the neighbour that you think might be lonely? From reprioritising your life to do more of what’s important to you?

Jesus doesn’t say much in this passage, but ‘Peace be with you’ was important enough to say three times. The peace he’s talking about, it isn’t a quiet, absence of a quality, the slightly awkward greeting we make weekly in church as we try to decide whether to go for a handshake or a hug just before communion. Jesus is talking about shalom:  a word that means wholeness….encompassing that abundance of a life that Jesus promises earlier in John.

We even get told that the whole point of this passage is that we get to hear it so that we believe, and that ‘By believing, you may have life in his name.’ Believing is no use in and of itself. But if we believe and that means we can capture a lot more life: Life – all of it, everywhere, in all directions. The Greek word used to describe the kind of life Jesus meant had extra dimensions of "superabundant," "overflowing," "a quantity so abundant as to be considerably more than what one would expect.”

That would be a life free from fear and doubt. But this passage tells me that God knew we wouldn’t manage that. So Thomas is proof that it’s ok to doubt if you have a bunch of mates who will tell you the good news anyway, and let you stay around even when you don’t believe it.

Of course we would doubt such a ridiculous idea that love can win, that another world is possible when sometimes it seems that all of the evidence suggests otherwise. But Thomas is there to say, you know what, I know it’s bonkers – I couldn’t believe it either. But I’m here to tell you that’s it true. Those families who showed me hospitality when the weight of the world was heavy on their shoulders. They were ordinary people doing ordinary things in extraordinary circumstances, to show us to stop getting hung up on doubt, and keep focused on life.

And just like with doubt, I’m certainly not an expert on life. But maybe between us we’ve got a pretty good shot at making it abundant.

Peace be with you on the dark Fridays, peace be with you on the confused Saturdays and peace be with you on the joyous Sundays.

Peace be with you on the days filled with doubt and the days overflowing with life. Peace be with you. Amen. '