St Mary's appeal

St Mary's, Ludgershall

Our ancient church needs your help!

Problems began in earnest on 24 March 2010 when vandals stole much of the lead from the roof of the nave, leaving the timber work open to the elements. With local help and volunteers the roof was quickly made weather-proof - for the time being at least.

But trouble had started much earlier and its consequences are widespread.

Since the building was last refurbished in 1889 the lead has been carefully patched whenever leaks have been detected. Unfortunately these and other repairs have not been successful in keeping water out. Even as the vandals were at work, an alarming report was being completed for the Parochial Church Council. This showed that the whole lead roof needs to be replaced.

The chancel roof is tiled but is not fully accessible. We hope that further inspection will show that it is in better shape. With advice from the diocese a new church architect has been chosen. Richard Oxley of Henley has an international reputation for restoration. As it happens he recently restored the windmill at Brill. He has experience of working with English Heritage whose help we shall need on this major project.

Several times in the past 20 years attempts have been made to treat the death watch beetle in the roof. This has not been successful because of the leaks of the lead roof.

Evidence of the infestation is widespread - for example the brown stains on the walls. Some of the structural timbers have been weakened as a result and earlier repairs need to be made good. It will not be known, until an invasive structural survey is completed, just how extensive these repairs need to be.

The good news is that we may be permitted to replace the lead on the main roof with a surface treated stainless steel substitute.This would look the same and be just as effective but it should not encourage the vandals to return.

Significant damage is being caused by water coming from below too. The stonework is marked by surface crystal growth, deposited by the dampness leaching out the heart of the stone. The disused Victorian underfloor heating ducts no longer keep the foundations dry, and sometimes contain standing water. They also serve as a very damp and unsuitable conduit for electric cables.

The church floor is seriously affected. The wood blocks are damp (from below) and infested by worm (from above). The Victorian tiles are worn and cracked. The access grills and vents of the old heating system are redundant and a source of safety trips. The impervious rendering of the interior walls is coming away because of the damp.

The external stonework is heavily eroded in places and the cut stone needs serious attention. The walls themselves have been re-pointed over the years, but often with strong cement mortar that traps moisture and ultimately destroys the softer limestone. This is particularly evident on the south face of the porch.

How much will it cost and how long will it take to put all this right? The building is listed Grade 1 and we can do nothing without the blessing and permission of the Diocese and English Heritage. Guided by Richard Oxley an application has been made (June 2010).

Priorities, in order, are further investigations, the external proofing of the building and drainage, the internal work such as the floor. We hope for first stage permission and some support from English Heritage by November 2010.

The cost may be £250,000, rising to £400,000 depending on the findings of the further investigations. We need significant help from English Heritage - and other contributions large and small.

Epiphany Sermon

Matt 2:1-12 (All Age talk - sort of!)

Epiphany is a time of tradition, when we celebrate the visit of the Magi – but how well do the traditions relate to the Bible? So Let’s do a little quiz..

How many Kings were there?

0 because they were Magi

How many Magi were there?

We don’t know

Did they visit Jesus in the stable?

No – the Bible says it was a house

Did they visit Jesus when he was a baby?

No – the Bible says he was a child

So how old was Jesus when the Magi came?

We don’t know, but Herod asked when they had first seen the star and then killed off the boys under the age of two.. so he was probably about two

And what was the meaning behind the gifts?

There are two traditions at Epiphany…two stories.. one that I think you will know and the other that you won’t..

The first is that wise men came from the East and brought Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh:

Gold because Jesus is King, and Kings have gold

Frankincense because Jesus is God, and incense is burnt to represent prayers

Myrrh to represent the death that Jesus would endure, because myrrh is used to embalm dead bodies..

This is a tradition that comes from a time when people would allegorise texts – they would find a hidden meaning for each word.

There is an older tradition and it is the one I favour... That magi came from the East and laid down the tools of their trade before Jesus and worshiped him as the one true God, and went away to start a new life. The magi, you see, had lots of Gold because people gave them gold to foretell the future. If someone’s child was poorly and they thought that their child may die, they would pay the magi money to foretell the future and to tell them whether there was anything they could do to save their child. Of course they wouldn’t pay just anyone money, they only paid people that they believed in, and so Magi would come into town and perform magic tricks, they would light fires and pour on frankincense and myrrh, and the smoke would have two effects – the first was that it helped them disguise their magic tricks, so people couldn’t see how they were done, the second was that it gave people a sense of mystery, a sense of the spiritual because when we smell these odd smells we feel that some mysterious thing is happening.

So, the old age was passing – the one of fear and superstition and the magi are symbolic of that. Fatalism, reading fortunes in the stars or on hands or in tea leaves – and the age that Jesus brought in is love – where we practise kindness, where we know there is a loving God and where we live in the presence of that love and not in fear.

Well that is the end of my quiz… so looking at the passage, there was one thing that struck me.. When Herod heard of the birth of the Messiah, he was excited? Joyful? No –afraid.. Well I suppose that was inevitable – after all Herod was a King and the Messiah would depose him. But what about the common people of Jerusalem? The Bible says they were afraid too.

Why were they afraid?

- is it because they thought God would judge them harshly?

- is it because they thought there would be an uprising and the Romans would fight back?

- or is there just something really scary about being before God – with God – a place where we can’t pretend..

Is it sometimes easier to go the route of the Magi – live with superstitions and rules.. be fatalistic and think nothing can change – perhaps paying for things with Gold is an easier route to filling the emptiness than turning to the Messiah and knowing that it will fundamentally change us. Perhaps if we thought the Messiah was coming in the flesh we would be afraid too.

I hope not. I think, for each of us we have the choice between fear and love.. and the Bible tells us that perfect love casts out all fear. Let us set aside all the things to do with the old age, the fear and the fatalism and the suspicion and the darkness… and remember that our God is a God of love, and Jesus was born to be the Light of the World.

I'm not jumping in

Thanks to Estelle

Advent Reflection

Remembrance Sunday Sermon

I have recently made friends with someone who has memory problems. Her mind is sharp, but her memory is terrible, so she will ask me over and over again the same questions – what day is it, what is your name? It is a disability, she can no longer look after herself and she needs to live in a home. It is a stark metaphor to me as to why we need to remember.

Memory serves an important purpose – it keeps us safe – as children we burn ourselves and remember not to do it again. We rely on those who do remember to warn us about dangers. Those in our communities those who can remember the most as a result of their age and often harsh experiences have wisdom and we would do well to listen to them.

Many of us here have been touched by war and by conflicts. In my family the war is never far away because my dad was injured in the war and has no hearing in one ear and limited hearing in the other. It has dogged him all his life, and in later life he has suffered panic attacks. He never mentions the war. He would rather not remember. Also, my Granddad on my mum’s side was injured in the first world war and died when he got home, leaving my gran widowed with two small children. She remarried a cruel man and the agony went on. She was emotionally absent. I think she wanted to forget too. My uncle served in Asia, was captured by the Japanese and returned home almost dead with stories of extreme cruelty. My mum’s cousin was captured by the Germans and imprisoned in Stallag. Add your stories to my stories and we have a lot of pain and suffering to remember, and a lot of ordinary men and women who had hopes and dreams and families and promising lives that were cut short, broken, lost.

Today we remember those who have fallen in all the wars and conflicts, and remember those who have been lost recently. We kneel before God and ask for it to be different. We ask for peace in our world, but we also ask ourselves what we can do differently.

I listened to a talk by a man called Giles Fraser who said that after the Civil War in England, after Catholics and Protestants had burned each other to death over whether the bread and wine were the actual body and blood of Christ, after everyone had become sick of the smell of burning flesh and the fear of reprisals, we declared a peace treaty. The Church of England is the peace treaty. The Book of Common Prayer was carefully worded such that you could believe all manner of theology, but ultimately we all kneel at the same altar and worship God together. Is it really worth killing each other about these things? In the end, the answer was no, and polite dinner rules were brought in whereby no one talked about religion, politics or sex. The capacity to disagree whilst still respecting the other is desperately needed in our world.

The other thing that is desperately needed is equality. Those groups who become radicalised have often been oppressed and marginalised for years. If we don’t want to send our young men and women to war, then working for equality and tolerance in our families, in our villages, in our country and in our world is a very good place to start.

So let us take a moment to remember, remember how dreadful war is, remember those who made and make huge sacrifices for us, and think about how we can work to promote tolerance and equality in our world.

Jesus reads from the scroll of Isaiah

Luke 4:14

Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. ¹⁵He taught in their synagogues, and everyone praised him.

 ¹⁶He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. ¹⁷The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
 ¹⁸"The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
      because he has anointed me
      to preach good news to the poor.
   He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
      and recovery of sight for the blind,
   to release the oppressed,
    ¹⁹to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."^[e]

 ²⁰Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, ²¹and he began by saying to them, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."

 ²²All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. "Isn't this Joseph's son?" they asked.

 ²³Jesus said to them, "Surely you will quote this proverb to me: 'Physician, heal yourself! Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.' "

 ²⁴"I tell you the truth," he continued, "no prophet is accepted in his hometown. 

Jesus wasn’t a carpenter. I don’t think so. When I hear people say that he was, I am intrigued – why do they think that? Yes I know his dad was a carpenter, but I think Jesus was a rabbi.

You see, the Jewish people sent their children to school. At the age of six they sent their boys and perhaps their girls to learn the Torah. They would memorise the Torah – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy…. all off by heart. At the age of 10 the best ones would stay on at school, those who had managed this feat. However, most would go off and learn their father’s trade at that point. I think Jesus was still at school aged 12, because we learn about his visit to the Temple, when he was left behind, and how amazed the rabbis were amazed at his questions and his understanding. Presumably he was asking them about the scriptures.

Those that stayed would go on to memorise the rest of the Hebrew scriptures – Genesis all the way through Malachi, off by heart. They would stay at school until they were fourteen or fifteen, and then most would go and learn their father’s trade. However, the very best, who had accomplished this would carry on with their learning. I can’t imagine it was many, a tiny percentage.

These few would go and find a rabbi and become a disciple – I disciple doesn’t just want to know what the rabbi know he want to be like the rabbi is. Now the rabbis had different understandings of the scriptures, different interpretations, and that rabbi’s teachings were known as that rabbi’s ‘yoke’. So if you wanted to follow a particular rabbi, you wanted to take on that particular ‘yoke’. So, aged fifteen a boy would find a rabbi and go for an interview. He would be grilled, and at this point most would fail, however, if they were really impressive, then the rabbi would say ‘come and follow me’. And then the kid would leave his family and his village and his friends. Each rabbi would travel, and go from town to town, teaching the scriptures, followed by his disciples. By the end of the day the disciples would be covered in whatever the rabbis would have stepped in. And so there was a saying ‘may you covered in the dust of your rabbi’.

The rabbis were the most respected people, and hence if you had a child in your village who had managed to be so learned and find a rabbi, how would you feel? Pretty good. Your village would be on the map, your villagers aren’t stupid, they are clever. And I believe this is what happened to Jesus. He was the best of the best of the best. He left Nazareth aged fifteen, he was a disciple until he was thirty, which is the age at which they were expected to find their own disciples. This passage is set after he is baptised and before he has called the disciples. He comes home at the end of his training, when he no longer has to be in the dust of his rabbi.

Now Nazareth was a very small place and quite remote – everyone would know everyone and probably be related to everyone. I can imagine that this was the first rabbi they had ever had. They were proud of him. They heard reports that he had preached amazingly in the synagogues in the area. They probably hadn’t seen him since he was fifteen. They were all loving seeing him – wow hasn’t he grown? Doesn’t he speak graciously?

And then Jesus says something that at first seems paranoid, he says ‘no prophet will be accepted in his home town’. He then preached a sermon. He has read a scripture that is radically inclusive, inclusive of the poor, the oppressed, the blind, the prisoners. And then if you read on in the scriptures he tells them that God loves the foreigners, the outsiders, the Gentiles as much if not more than them.

And their reaction? They dragged him out of the synagogue, out to the edge of the cliff that their village was built on with the intention of throwing him over. He escaped. Wow – overreaction or what???

And so.. the moral of the story is that Jesus started his manifesto proclaiming inclusivity and healing, he wanted to embrace the outcasts, the criminals, the poor, the oppressed, the people who are different to those who were in the synagogue. He then illustrated this by saying that God loved foreigners and demonstrated this in history, and it made people mad and want to kill him.

This could sum up Jesus’ ministry all the way through. He said God loved the unlovable and that made people so uncomfortable that they wanted to kill him.

So the first thing to note is that the trick is to be like Jesus and not like the ones who hate. Who makes us uncomfortable? I noticed a couple of groups this week, one was some people who argue that selling sex for money is good, and the other was a group of who say that women shouldn’t be vicars, and have a strong desire to outline exactly what is proper for a woman to do. Both times I had an emotional revulsion that is different to just disagreeing. I wanted to shut them up rather than engaging, or agreeing to differ. It is those revulsions that tear our world apart, not disagreement, which can be generous and constructive. I needed to repent of those feelings, to recognise them for what they were and not justify them.

At the moment, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams is in India, and in a that sermon he preached he said:

"Sometimes we have listened to our own unconverted hearts and used the church of God for our own ends, welcoming people like us and rejecting those who make us uncomfortable. And when any of those things happens, the Church begins to fall apart. The wounds in the Body get wider and deeper, and we find ourselves giving great energy to justifying our decision not to be together. As we stop listening to one another, we stop listening to Christ. Whether this happens in the name of nationality or tradition or pride of achievement or purity of teaching, the effect is the same tragedy."

So having decided that we are not going to be on the side that is revolted by people, but be will be on the side that includes people, what does that mean to us? Well I think it is Good News for two reasons:

The first reason is that we are included. We are the foreigners, the Gentiles that Jesus is talking about. It is us that he loves and us to whom the Day of the Lord’s Favour has been announced. We are the ones who are released, healed, given sight to. For so many people there is the fear that if others knew what we were really like they would reject us, the fear deep down that we are unworthy, the reality that we can be nasty and we are ashamed. We can be oppressed by these fears, in prison if you like. Jesus wants to set us free. He knows what we are like and includes us anyway.

The second reason that it is good news is that we have a job to do, and it is a great job. It is to make the entire world a better place. It is to go round freeing captives, healing the blind, helping the poor. We are to be Jesus’s disciples, covered in his dust, completely dedicated to the mission he has given us, wearing the Yoke of his teachings and enabling all to be included. Of course some people won’t like it, and it will make them very cross. But I can’t think of a better way of living my life than this.

The Ten Lepers

Luke 17:11-19

A pastor starts each confirmation class with a jar full of beans. He asks his students to guess how many beans are in the jar, and on a big pad of paper writes down their estimates. Then, next to those estimates, he helps them make another list: Their favourite songs. When the lists are complete, he reveals the actual number of beans in the jar. The whole class looks over their guesses, to see which estimate was closest to being right. He then turns to the list of favourite songs. "And which one of these is closest to being right?" he asks. The students protest that there is no "right answer"; a person's favourite song is purely a matter of taste. He then asks "When you decide what to believe in terms of your faith, is that more like guessing the number of beans, or more like choosing your favourite song?"

When I read the gospels, the stories are always odd in some way,  they perplex me. The gospels do not offer us rules, they give us something to wrestle with, to chew on. They are odd. The way of faith that Jesus offers is not prescriptive – it is more like our favourite song than the number of beans in a jar. Sometimes my atheist friends argue with me – they say the stories are so ambiguous in the Gospels that we can take anything from them. They say that the diversity of Christian beliefs is so varied that it is impossible to pin us down. Precisely, I want to say – it is a journey, not a destination. I offer that to you as a health warning for my sermons. When I preach I have been wrestling with a text for a week and I offer my musings for you to chew on, but they are just that – musings… not definitive rules. It is a journey of faith, not certainty, and I believe there are no right answers.

So what about today’s passage – simple? Jesus heals ten lepers and only one comes back to say thanks and Jesus commends him – right? Well… my understanding is that all ten lepers had faith – they asked Jesus to heal them, he told them to show themselves to the priests and on the way they were healed, and so one of them failed to do what Jesus asked and came back to say thanks, and Jesus commended that man and said that his faith had saved him. Saved him from what? Not the leprosy is it? Anyway, what faith? Why does it take faith to go back and say thank-you?

Mmm… so Jesus tells them to do something, one of them doesn’t and he gets commended? Oh and he is the disgusting foreigner who worships on the wrong mountain and has the wrong religion too. It reminds me of a parable by Pete Rollins, of a kind man in a city who one night is woken by someone knocking on his door. It is a man seeking refuge having done the unspeakable crime. He lets him in and goes to bed. Soon afterwards, more men are knocking at the door, they say that God’s law requires for the man to pay with his life for the unspeakable crime. The kind man tells then that he is well aware of God’s law but will not let the criminal be killed. He goes back to bed only to be woken by the elders of the city who command the kind man to release the criminal. The kind man is pretty determined and says no, and goes to bed. So finally, he hears a knocking at the door and when he opens it God is standing there. God demands that the kind man hands the criminal over, but the man refuses. He says that the God that he knows is compassionate and merciful, and he requires God to act within his character and to have mercy on the criminal. To this God replies, ‘you know me better than anyone in this city, and you are right not to release the criminal to me, you are a man of great faith'.

Last week the reading told us about how we can do amazing things with just a little faith. Today’s passage speaks to me of how we can break away from the crowd with a little faith. The ten lepers knew what they wanted and they wanted to be back in society and without their disease. They had enough faith to ask for a miracle, enough faith to move a mountain, and that was great. But the one leper had enough faith to break away from the crowd, break away from the law. When he was healed he didn’t want to go and show himself to the priests to fulfil the law, he wanted to celebrate, and to thank God, and thank Jesus. He was the only one who ended up truly free to be and do his heart’s desire. The nine lepers were saved from their disease, the Samaritan leper was saved from the law.

It reminds me of a passage in Chapter 3 of the book of Galatians:

You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort? Have you suffered so much for nothing—if it really was for nothing? Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law, or because you believe what you heard?

Paul is worried that the Galatians are missing the whole point, others are telling them that faith and freedom in Christ wasn’t enough – they had to abide by the Jewish law too. People usually take refuge in the law when they get frightened of living by faith. You know where you are with the law, but living by faith can be a bit of a risk. Is my faith one of following the rules? Is my God a hard task-master, or a loving and forgiving God.  Am I one of the nine lepers, or am I like the Samaritan? Perhaps I need the courage to live by faith, perhaps the courage to be myself.

So may you know that God has given you the gift of faith

May you not be afraid but find salvation and freedom

And may you know joy like the Samaritan Leper

Amen