103! Celebrating a special birthday.

Being a minister enables me to share in important moments in the lives of others. Baptisms, weddings and funerals are examples of this as is walking with someone through a significant life experience.

For me this often takes the form of being with people during final ilnnesses. Yet there are incredibly bright moments to be shared with the elderly.

An example was yesterday when I spent about half an hour with Aline who was celebrating her 103rd birthday. The joy on her face was wonderful to behold. And making the occasion extra special was the glorious reality that Aline is a very mentally alert lady to the extent that if I reach her age I want to be like her.

The day brought back memories of Doris who was one of my members on the Isle of Man. I recall only too well her 102nd birthday. But my own Great Aunt Minnie takes some beating. she lived to be 107 1/2 and I would not have dared to lightly disagree with her until the last couple of years of her life.

Yesterday was also a day for faith. I always pray with Aline when I visit her. I didn't have to make the offer yesterday as she made sure that prayer was not forgotten. We gave thanks for the 103 years of her life and entrusted the future to God's loving care. I certainly hope that means another such gathering next year.

Sometimes being a minister feels like swimming against the tide. Yesterday I was reminded of the joy of my calling. It is great to spend time with such a special person and to sense that God has been at the heart of the story of her life.

Moving on

We always knew that we wouldn't stay in Bideford forever. Indeed I expected to leave last August but our circuit kindly gave a two year extension. But now I know that our days in North Devon are numbered.

Just over a week ago I told the Circuit meeting that I would not be seeking any further extension and that my ministry in the Bideford Methodist Circuit would end in August 2011. My reasons are twofold. Firstly I need to move on to a new beginning to apply what I have learnt in North Devon in different context. I am at present particularly interested in mult faith engagement and possibly student work. Secondly I think this is the ideal time for the circuit to revisit the question of what its ministry needs are.

Sometimes I think I am almost autistic in that I struggle to cope with change. Yet change is an important part of our lives. We cannot stay still or we fossilise and bring no life to those we are called to serve.

So now I enter the stationing process. Its outcome may well be a surprise for me. Yet at these times I have to trust that God is at work in the stationing process even if its outcome is other than what I currently wish for.

But all that is in the future. I will not know our future destination until near the end of this year. Until then I need to keep my focus on the place where I am currently called to serve, a place that I can honestly say I will be sorry to leave when that day comes.

The Daily Mail Song

For your edification The Daily Mail Song which focuses on a particularly nasty British institution which serves the needs of the permanently angry.

HAT TIP: Methodist sex symbol Richard Hall.

Hope amidst the storms - A sermon for Lent 3 YearC based on Luke 13: 1-9

I find life to be so unfair. In my ministry I have seen far too many good people suffer unjustly. I have seen too many good people go to the grave at far too young an age. And when I turn on the television I see the totally unfair consequences of violence emanating from other people or even within the crust of this planet. Life just is not fair!

And as I rail against the unfairness of life, another anger wells up within me. This time it is at the dreadful reality that too often Christians spout total rubbish at such times when silence would be a better option. Think back for a moment to September 11th when the world watched those events at the Twin Towers with horror. Yet within days we had the unedifying spectacle of two leading American Christian leaders, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, claiming that this was God's means of punishing the tolerance of homosexuality in America - pass the sick bucket!

And before we get complacent and say that they sometimes think strange things across the pond and anyway these were not our type of Christian leaders, pause for a moment. Back in 1755 there was a major earthquake in Lisbon. Over 30,000 people were killed. Our very own John Wesley who at times fits Clement Attlee's description of Winston Churchil being "fifty percent genius, fifty percent lunatic" had no doubts as to the cause of this tragedy - it was God's judgement on the Roman Catholicism alleguiance of Portugal. And as for brother Charles, his earthquake hymns, inspired by the tragedy of Lisbon and a series of smaller earthquakes in London a few years earlier, remind me of a man who has taken to many mind altering substances, with their emphases on such happenings as a necessary preulde to our long desired deliverance.

These interpretations are quite frankly not worth the light of day. They should be mocked without mercy. And in the case of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake they were. After a disaster which killed many and destroyed the best part of 30,000 buildings a number of clergy asserted that the disaster was divine retribution on the city for its wicked ways. The poet Charles Kellogg Field responded with a memorable diitty based on the remarkable survival of A.P. Hotaling's whiskey warehouse on Jackson Street, a street where a number of nearby churches had been levelled to the ground, writing;

If, as they say, God spanked the town
For being over frisky,
Why did he burn the churches down
And save Hotaling's whiskey?

Ridicule richly deserved! For such a concept of God is a concept of a cosmic tyrant rather than the God of love who is revealed in Jesus of Nazareth. How much truer to the gospel is the example of William Sloane Coffin the American minister whose son was killed in a car accident at Boston Harbour. Coffin angrily rejected the voices that spoke of wondering how this was the will of God, preaching just days later that as his son went into those deadly waters, God's heart was the first to break at the unfloding tragedy.

But yet the idea that the ills that hit individuals or societies are in some way morally merited has hung around the Judaeo Christian tradition like stinking fish. Its roots lie in what is sometimes called Deuteronomistic theology which against the background of the Babylonian exile and the accompanying devastation of Jerusalem, sought to argue that these things were righteous judgement on the sins of the people. And yes there are swathes of Old Testament literature that back this view. But by no means all Old Testament sciptures endorse this - we sometimes forget that scripture can represent debates within the community. An example to the contrary is the book of Job where we see the reality of unmerited suffering and the critiquing of those would be comforters of Job who speak out of the Deuteronomistic tradition.

Now let's look at Jesus. He is approached by those who would seem to hold to the Deuteronomistic theology. And they have stories of suffering to share. One story relates to a killing of Galileans at the Temple. We know not why and indeed while such an act is in keeping with the religious insentitivity of Pontius Pilate, we have no independent evidence of such a massacre. The other story concerns the collapse of a tower near the important water source of Siloam. These are happenings that would have disturbed many people and doubtless religiously orthodox people would treat these events as warnings regarding the consequence of sin. Yet Jesus is having nothing of this interpretation. Those who suffer he says are no worse than anyone else. Indeed all of us have limited life spans. Jesus himself will soon suffer at the hands of the very same Pontius Pilate. He will share in the unjustness of life itself.

Soon there comes a parable of a fig tree. To his hearers a fig tree would represent Israel. Most interpreters see the owner as God and the gardener as Jesus. Its telling at this point shows God not giving up on humanity and striving alongside us through Jesus. And this is grace that God through Jesus goes on and on being committed to all of us creatures.

So this morning I want to suggest that we liberateour understandings of God from the slander of the rough, tough, unfeeling potentate whose iron rules are always ready to condemn us. Instead we need to see the God of grace who longs to work to our good, the God who in Jesus comes alongside us. And soon we shall see that this means the total self giving of Calvary where Jesus gives his very life for us. And why? Because of love! Because of love!

I do not believe we live in a perfect world. I do not believe we live in a fair world. These are not necessary for a biblical understanding. But I do believe we live in that which God makes available to us, namely the best possible world for human growth and development. And ultimately for all its shadows it is a good world because even when the clouds are at their darkest, God is present with us and God is loving us. No arbitrary ruler is this God but a help in times of trouble who even when the earth shakes or we fall into the waters of death, is present and who is the very first to weep and experience the heartbreak that accompanies true love.

Happy St Pirans Day

I love this song. This is rooted in the Camborne Redruth mining area. Graham Hart gives it a contemporary feel.

Worst worship song I've heard.

And if that's not bizarre enough for you why not try the offerings brought to you by Dave Faulkner and Richard Hall whose modesty prohbits him from revealing himself to be the man at the front in his clip.

And before anyone says it Dave, Richard and myself are by virtue of showing this garbage unfit to be ministers. Bring on the disciplinary charges!

Michael Foot - a life well lived

It was during the February 1974 General Election that I persuaded my father to take me to an election meeting at the Redruth Community Centre. A Labour sympathiser I wanted to hear a politician who had wowed me with a televised speech from the Labour Party Conference some months earlier. That man was Michael Foot.

Sartorial elegance was in short supply but my first impression was of a man who seemed interested in people and who was not too big to help with moving chairs so that more people could sit down in the crowded hall. The first speech by Michale Dalling who was the Labour Parliamentary Candidate was pretty good stuff. But when Michael Foot rose to speak without a note for the best part of the hour, I could feel the hairs on my neck stand up. This was a speech of passion. It was a speech that communicated the power of words to move the listener from passivity into commitment.

A few years later I briefly met Michael Foot when he came to speak at rally in Falmouth. My desire to hear him can be best appreciated by the fact that to be there in time I endured one of the Silver Jubilee events that seemed to litter the year of 1977. I had the opportunity to talk to a man who by now was a hero of mine even if the dog he proudly walked was let's say an apology of a dog in terms of size. Now I saw a man who was courteous yet rather shy. Kindly he signed a Labour Party Young Socialists publication which to my shame I later mislaid. By the time he spoke from the rostrum the shy man had given way to a tiger of an orator.

In my opinion Michael Foot represented the best of politics. He cared about those at the bottom of the pile. He was determined to ensure that the degredation of the 1930s should never be repeated. and he was in his own words an "inveterate peacemonger." In his retirment this veteran of CND would join those rallying against Blair's Iraq War. Indeed like many of those who looked back to the 2nd World War and the Depression his politics had about them a strong sense of calling to create a better world. Totally incapable of being spun Foot's passion seems light years away from the exagerated petty differences and social climbing that are so dominant today.

Much is being written about Foot being happier on the backbenches than dealing with the responsibilities of government or leadership. I think some of what is being written is unfair. As Employment Secretary Foot contributed greatly to the social contract between the Labour government and the TUC. His role as Callaghan's deputy in keeping the pact with the Liberals alive was surely a monumental contribution to have made. And even during his leadership, the picture is more complicated than often admitted. I do not believe for a moment that the Gang of Four would not have left under another leader - indeed some of their supporters reputedly voted for Foot to succeed Callaghan so that he might recieve the poisoned chalice that leadership would inevitably be. Now that the 1983 Manifesto with its nationalisation of banks appears little other than commonsense rather than a suicide note, just maybe people will realise that at at difficult time of divisions it was Michael Foot who saved the Labour Party.

Foot was more than just a politician. He was a great book man, something he inherited from his father Isaac. Few more cultured men have walked the corridors of power. His 2 part biography of Aneuirin Bevan is one of the great works of political biography. Also impressive is his publication "Debts of Honour" even if he doesn't convince me of the case for Randolph Churchill ( whose son Winston has dies this very week) his somewhat colourful opponent at Plymouth Devenport or for that matter the dreadful Lord Beaverbrook. Yet this book is significant for any understanding of Foot for surely no reader can miss out on the generosity of spirit that is at the heart of this great man.

Not for a moment would I deny that Foot made mistakes. His devolution proposals were every bit as flawed as those that became law some 20 years later. His hasty judgement regarding Peter Tatchell over "extra parliamentary action " is highly questionable. And I would also regret his support for Thatcher's war over the Falklands which brought much bloodshed and a thoroughly nasty change to the psyche of this country. But let's be clear that Foot got many more things right than wrong and where his record can be challenged his sincerity cannot.

So today we mourn the loss of a man of high principle, a man for whom the flames of freedom and socialism burnt brightly. No shabby selling of conscience in his life for Foot leaves us with a message that dreams and visions should indeed be pursued. He reminds us at a time when the reputation parliamentarians is down there beneath estate agents et al that the engaging in a battle of ideas with words conducted with honour, is a worthwhile and noble profession. Yes Michael Foot was just the sort of decent man who can be a role model to those who would turn from sham politics. He was a hero in an age in which debate could be conducted with good manners and burning conviction. Amd all this with the spirit of hope that only a dedicated fan of Plymouth Argyle could perfect!

Michael Foot was a convinced humanist unlike his lay preaching father. Yet I think more important than whether Michael Foot believed in God is the question of God believing in Michael Foot. And so I believe that Michael Foot may be getting a mighty fine surprise for surely God can but love thislovely man whose life showed more of the ways of Christ than many of us who claim the name.