Good Friday sermon

The Good Friday sermon used some ideas taken from Steve Chalke's article in the book Consuming Passion, edited by Simon Barrow and Jonathan Bartley. This was one of those sermons, which when you are half way through it, you realise you only have a partial understanding - I suppose inevitable when you consider the topic. But the idea of the Cross as the essential element in salvation has always struck me as odd. That was one event in time. Was Abraham saved? And what about prehistoric man? Were they saved? (An interesting thought, that. It leads on to the redemption of the whole creation.) And the idea of the Cross as a sort of legal transaction also struck me as odd. Law is a human creation. God is not constrained by law, but defines what is good and right. (IMHO at any rate!)

But if you say that salvation was there from the beginning of time, what is the point of the incarnation? And what is the point of the Cross? Tentatively, I would say that it is a miracle and like all miracles, it is a message, a sign, a revelation. God does not intervene to change the course of history. I would say that God intervenes to show us how we can change the course of history. As such, the Cross is about the biggest sign there could be.

So I would go along with the idea that Christ bore our sins on the Cross, but not with the idea that he died that we might be forgiven. Forgiveness is there already, but the way to it is the way of the Cross.

The enduring melody

The January issue of The Clock (our parish magazine) often tends to be short of copy, so when Caroline rang me a day after the deadline to say that we didn't have a Dear Friends (the introductory letter) I decided that one had to be produced pronto. My mind was full of Michael Mayne's book The enduring melody at the time, so the article was all about not defining people by the illness they are suffering - we may be ill, but we are still part of the human race. It was against the "Does he take sugar?" syndrome.

Having composed the letter and sent it off, I started having second thoughts. For a start, it is not a particularly cheerful theme for the new year issue, but I also thought I was going too far into the separation of soul and body. In fact illness can dominate your life: a serious illness becomes part of you whether we like it or not. And in fighting illness, our spiritual nature has a great influence in the healing process. The body is not a machine and our spiritual life cannot be separated from our bodies. This of course raises all sorts of problems, like what happens to us when we die: there is a lot more on this in my web site, but I think that in practice many of the problems can be resolved by thinking about how and in what situations we are using words like the soul.

When we are talking about goals and purposes for life, we don't pay too much attention to the body - unless your goal is to be an Olympic athlete and that alone. But if you are talking to someone who is ill, you want them to use their spiritual resources to make them better. And if you are talking to someone looking after a sufferer from Alzheimer's then you have to recognise that the soul is ebbing away and that ultimately looking after them is like putting flowers on a grave - a mark of respect for a life that is no more. Sometimes we think of the soul as being separate from the body (that is, we are only thinking about the spiritual aspects of life) and sometimes we need to recognise that the soul is simply one aspect of the body.

The environment blog

Amid all the turmoil just lately, I have been busy setting up web sites for the village, including one for the Colwall Greener group. We won't let up on environmental activity in the church, but this is where the activity of the village will be centred, so I shall delete our own environmental blog, having transferred all the posts to the village one. The new blog is run using WordPress which means it is entirely hosted on the village web site itself and so you don't have to open a Google account to contribute.

Black and white

Following on from his column in the Church Times, I followed up Andrew Brown's blog at tinyurl.com/2orrr6 He was evidently a bit taken aback by the response. The original article was about Richard Dawkins being somewhat less than objective in his remarks on Mary Midgley's review of The Selfish Gene. This sparked off an inordinate number of comments in the Guardian's Comment is Free blog of an almost religious nature. People leapt to the defence of Dawkins as though their faith was imperilled, although Andrew Brown's original comment was factual, verifiable and perfectly justified. Everyone seemed to immediately think this was a shot in the science versus religion, or should I say Dawkins versus religion, wars and took sides accordingly, with little attempt to understand what Brown had actually said and regarding him as a dyed in the wool religious person, which of course is incorrect.

Three things strike me:
1. Dawkins is rapidly developing into a cult, only stopped by the fact you can't say Dawkinsism.
2. Religious discussion, particularly ones of this nature, simply degenerate into a you are wrong, I'm right, slanging match. How are we ever going to get out of this? It even happens between Christians. There's something deep in human nature here, to do with identity, I suppose.
3. It is really depressing that so many comments on blogs in general are abusive and incoherent, ungrammatical and miss the point. I blame television, myself!

The virtual churchyard

The aim of this would be to make web space available for people to commemorate their loved ones who have died. It would be one web page on the web site, directly accessible from the navigation buttons, with a nice banner and a list of all those commemorated, each one linked to a web page. There would also be instructions on how to add to the list (mainly get in touch with us first).

Each web page could contain a variety of information: pictures (no more than three and not too big), text such as reminiscences, stories, favourite poems and possibly some short audio extracts in MP3 format. All this from a number of people who knew whoever is being commemorated.

There needs to be some rules. We (the rector or his rep) need to control what goes on and there also needs to be an owner who must be a close relative of the deceased who will also control what goes on. However, I think the intention should be to allow anything which was not defamatory or would infringe copyright, so no theological objections. (Well, almost no!) The intention is to leave some memories, not an obituary. This might be difficult to achieve.

The idea would be to keep the churchyard going for as long as we have a web site and someone to maintain it. If we should run out of our ration of web space, I think it would be worth simply buying some more.

I would like to try this idea out for the All Souls service. I am preaching then so I can use the sermon to describe the idea and then leave a contact form at the back of the church for me to follow up later. We only need a few peope to start. Once people have seen some good examples, I think they will want to add to them.