This is a meditation on the writings of St Julian of Norwich, and was prompted by the formative readings.

I also feel that it fits in with Kingdom Expectation - we need to be coming to God knowing both that He is able to make things happen and that he WANTS to do so.


Opening Prayer

Lord God, Maker of all that is.
We praise you for the immensity and the breath-taking beauty of your creation.
the heavens on a starry night laid out like a carpet,
the colour of the mountains as the morning sun hits them,
the sea as waves roll in on the shore.
We worship you for the care with which you made your creatures, the hundreds of bones in each of our bodies,
the senses with which we take in your creation,
the finger prints that make each of us unique,
Help us to know your presence with us. Amen.

Meditation on a Hazelnut

The most surprising thing about Christianity is the Incarnation of Jesus. God becomes human in Jesus and makes himself known.

When you think about the God who made the Universe, this is not what you would expect of Him. What you would expect is a God far from us. He is the infinite creator.

I don't know about you but I have a problem with infinity. Do you remember the definition of parallel lines from your school days. Parallel lines meet at infinity.

I can remember that the first time I heard that, I thought it was madness. Parallel lines go along next to each other - they never meet.

Lets try another: an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters will eventually write the complete works of Shakespeare. Apparently in 2003, an experiment to test this was performed with six Macaque monkeys, but their literary contribution was five pages consisting largely of the letter 'S'.

So I find it difficult to come to terms with an infinite creator.  To get some of a feel for the idea, we are going to start where Saint Julian of Norwich started. She took a hazelnut and held it in her hand and imagined that it was all that had been created.

 [Take a hazelnut in your hand  - if you don't have one, then imagine you did...]

So consider if you were God, you had created everything that existed, and you could hold it in your hand like that hazelnut.

In St Julian's day, you might have thought of that as "the heavens and the earth". The heavens were just a bit of sky, so the hazelnut that you hold in your hand is our planet. It is eight thousand miles across, but God can hold it in his hand.

Look at that planet you hold, where does that leave people? - as invisible microbes on the surface of the hazelnut - As it says in Psalm 8, "when I consider the heavens, what is man that thou art mindful of him?"

But since St Julian's time, we know more about the creation. Copernicus told us 200 years after Julian that the earth goes around the Sun which is nearly 100 million miles away - look again at the hazelnut. If what you hold represents the solar system, then people are less than an atom of the hazelnut.

We now know much more than that. We are part of a galaxy called the Milky Way. The Milky Way contains somewhere between 200 billion and 400 billion stars, some much bigger than ours. It is 100,000 light years across the Milky Way.

That's 600,000 million, million, million miles across. Imagine the hazelnut in your hand is our galaxy containing those hundreds of billions of stars. Our sun is just an atom in that hazelnut. "What is man that thou art mindful of him?"

We have at least one more step out to make.
Our galaxy is one of some 100 billion galaxies in the known universe. We don't know how big the universe is, but based on what we can detect,  we estimate that it is at least 93 billion light years across it. That is roughly 500,000 million, million, million, million, million miles.

If the hazelnut in your hand represents all that has been created, then it is a creation of incredible size and great wonder. Within that creation, we are insignificant compared to the size of our planet; our planet is miniscule compared to our galaxy; and our galaxy is lost among the billions of other galaxies in the universe.

Even the universe represented by the hazelnut does not give us the measure of God - that is merely his creation.

Try to put yourself in the place of the great creator, holding this nut, this universe. He has the power to make a creation 93 billion light years across, made up of billions of galaxies, and to hold it in the palm of his hand. That is our God. Praise be to his name.

That is the transcendence of God, his remoteness from us. It is no wonder that the Old Testament prophets say "his thoughts are not like our thoughts, neither are his ways like our ways".
How could they be - he can see so much more, understand so much more, do so much more.

As we seek to understand God, we hold the transcendence of God in tension with his immanence - his wish to reveal himself to people. Psalm 8 is a good case of this: 

"When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,
what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?"

And with what we now know of the extent of the heavens - how much truer that is.

But it goes on to say "yet you have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honour. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet:"
God who created all things has concern for individual people and gives us a place of honour and trust over creation.

Consider again your hazelnut, representing all that is created. 93 billion light years of universe, including us, known by name by the infinite God who comes in human form.

St Julian says that in this little thing, she saw three lessons.

Firstly that God made it.

Second, that God loves it.

And third, that it is God who keeps it going.

That is the God whom we can trust with all the concerns of our lives.

Give thanks for music-making art,
and praise the Spirit's choice
of members called and set apart
with instrument and voice.
With work and wisdom, skills hard-won,
life-giving and life-long,
they celebrate what God has done
and lead the people's song.  First verse of hymn by Brian Wren

Brian Wren is a British minister who has been working in the USA for a long time. He has written a good number of traditional hymns like that quoted above and his inclination is not towards modern music.

He has written a great book called "Praying Twice", that I discovered while doing Essentials Red. It is available on-line at books.google.co.uk, but that is a pain for reading books, so I bought a second hand copy on Amazon for 50 cents plus 5 dollars postage and packing. It was well worth the money.

The early chapters look at music in worship from God's people through the millennia, and at what comes together in worship and how to make it better.

Chapter four is entitled "Some demand a driving beat: contemporary worship music".
Wren does a great job of looking at the characteristics of "popular" music, and key objections to it. He observes "Negative responses are not new. Popular music has often been ridiculed by the older generation of the day and by church authorities. In 1805 the waltz was popular, yet derided by cultural despisers. In 1899 a pundit raged against ragtime: 'a wave of vulgar, filthy and suggestive music has inundated the land... It is artistically and morally depressing, and should be suppressed by press and pulpit..".... he gives other examples of past popular music being reviled.

He then considers the objections of one classically trained musician (Calvin Johansson) who lists the characteristics of the gospel and the characteristics of pop music. Johansson argues that the two sets of values are completely different, and thus  that pop music has no place in church - "to use pop music as a medium for the gospel message is wrong". Wren does a great job of dissecting Johansson's analysis and coming to a rather different conclusion.

There is much more in the book - Wren is an accomplished hymn writer and has several chapters on the art of writing for worship that I suspect would be helpful to many of you songwriters (hard for me to tell for sure, as I don't write, but I found it enlightening).

The book is well worth a look at the copy on google - you may find it interesting, and want to buy it from Amazon as I did.

My worst worship experience - ever!

Having read through all the material in Essentials Green week One on Intimacy and Integrity, I was challenged to get real in my walk with God, but also had a nagging feeling that something was missing in what was said. It eventually came to me that the emphasis was perhaps too much on the vertical dimension of intimacy and not enough on the horizontal intimacy.

We gather in worship because God can work in us together in ways he cannot as individuals. Our society undervalues the corporate dimension to intimacy - God working in us and revealing himself to us through those with whom we have a close relationship. We  need to be doing the things that will build up that intimacy with each other - sharing our lives, our experiences, our feelings - both in our worship services and around them.

I don't know whether this will help as an illustration, but I want to tell you about my worst experience of worship. It could be an illustration chapter in a book entitled "How to close your church in five years".

We were on holiday in Nova Scotia the year before last, and decided to go to the picturesque white church on the corner that Sunday - it looked lovely, and we could walk there from where we were staying. As we approached the church, we saw that people were gathering around a gazebo just outside the church grounds. There was no sign saying the service was out there, but we went over and asked some people "Is this where the service is this morning?" The answer sounded like "Humphhhh!", but I think it was supposed to be "Yes". No "welcome, where are you from" or "hi, it's great to have you", staples of the North American church, just "Humphhhh!" and turn away.

There were chairs arranged around the gazebo, and so we picked what looked like a reasonable set of chairs, and I said to the people next to them "Is it OK if we sit here" - again, the answer was  "Humphhhh!". I was beginning to think that the whole church had a speech impediment, but that theory was disproved when someone came up to the people a couple of rows in front of us (who were also visitors, I think), and said "Would you move somewhere else, because I want to sit next to my relative?"

The service started with a singer and keyboard player given a rendering of John Lennon's Imagine: "Imagine there' no heaven..." (then we might as well go home - 1 Cor 15:16-17). It was a church that shared with peace with a handshake, although the only person who offered my family his hand was a six year old boy.

I don't think there was much about God in the service, but if there had been, I would not have been in a position to hear it because of the level to which that congregation failed to be open. The following week, we were again in the same town (after a glorious week in the Cape Breton highlands failing to see any whales). We didn't have a car at that point so the choice was the same church again or nothing. We chose to stay at home and read the bible rather than repeat the experience.

On the bright side, as well as discouraging one another from meeting with God, we can also draw each other in, revealing to each other the God who has revealed himself to us. May we be the people who do that!

For the Institute of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen's University, Essentials Red Online Worship History Course with Dan Wilt

I have chosen to submit an Advent service that I ran last Sunday evening for our regular OpenSpace evening service aimed at 16 to 25 year olds. I wasn't originally planned to preach then, so when I inherited the service, I decided to apply what I had been learning on Essentials Red.

I have annotated what I did at the service - words in italics are comments on the content. Congregation was about 40 people from 14 to 80, but majority under 25.

This page is a summary of what was in the service, and it is followed by the content. 
All songs / readings  / responsive prayers were projected, with pictures of candles being projected when there was nothing else needed.
Welcome / Light in the darkness

Song
     Light of the world 

Prayer

Advent Reading 1 - Isaiah 9: 2, 6,7

Discussion

Prayer

Advent Reading 2 - Luke 1:26-38

Discussion

Prayer

Songs
     All heaven declares
    Blessing and honour

Advent Reading 3: Luke 2:1-7

Short talk

Prayer

Songs
     O come,  o come Immanuel
     Great is the darkness

The Grace
 
----Now the content of the service----


Welcome

Today is the first sunday in Advent. Advent is supposed to be a season of waiting. Over four weeks, we wait for and look forward to Christmas. We get ready for God's coming.

In our society in general, that time has been reduced. We have Christmas parties before Christmas, we sing carols or have them played at us in shops from the middle of November.

OpenSpace also shortens Advent - because next week is the last week of term, we will have our Methsoc  [student society] Carol Service then, so this week is Advent for OpenSpace. We are going to spend time getting ready for God's coming.

[Lights out - wait]

For many years, the people of God waited in the darkness. They waited for a sign. They waited for a Saviour. They waited for God to break into their lives as he had promised.

When the time was right, God sent his Son.
[Light candle - mental note: next time make sure not to light fingers too...]
Jesus came into the world as the light of the world, that we might all share in his light.

Song
     Light of the world  you came down into darkness (Tim Hughes)

Prayer
    Lord Jesus, light of the world, be our light.
    Shine in our world,
    Shine in your church,
    Shine in our hearts. Amen.

Intro
Tonight is structured around three advent readings.

The first of these is from Isaiah chapter 9. It comes after a chapter full of doom and disaster. Israel has turned away from God, and trusted in chariots instead and it will be judged. After all that talk of judgement, Isaiah says that there is a future and a hope.

Advent Reading 1 - Isaiah 9: 2, 6,7: God promises the Messiah

In this reading, Isaiah is looking forward to the coming of God's chosen one. He can see what God is going to do as if it has already happened, but he is still waiting for it to come about.


Discussion [Projected questions to discuss in small groups]
[Questions:
What do you most look forward to about Christmas?
Are there other areas of your life where you are waiting for something to happen?
How patient are you in those situations?
]

[We quite often discuss things in OpenSpace, so this is not a strange experience for people in the service]

Isaiah never saw his prophesy come true.  Jesus was born some 700 years after Isaiah died, reputedly sawn in half for prophesying against the state of the world in his day.
Israel was ravaged by Assyria, and eventually many of its people were taken into exile in Babylon. Isaiah and his followers never saw God's promises come true, but they held to them and lived by them.

Response [I say words in mixed case, they respond with words in capitals]
As farmers wait for the rainfall
As prisoners wait for freedom
WE WAIT FOR THE COMING OF GOD

As exiles yearn for home
As peacemakers yearn for justice
WE LONG FOR THE COMING OF GOD

As travellers search for shelter
As disciples look for answers
WE PREPARE FOR THE COMING OF GOD

Glory in the wilderness
Glory in the wastelands
SHOUT AND SING FOR JOY

Strength for the weary
Courage for the fearful
SHOUT AND SING FOR JOY

Shelter for the traveller
Justice for the hungry
SHOUT AND SING FOR JOY

[Taken from "Candles & Conifers: Resources for All Saints and Advent" Ruth Burgess, Wild Goose Publications, 2005]

Prayer
God, our Father, you spoke to the prophets of old of a Saviour who would bring peace.  You helped them to spread the joyful message of his coming kingdom.
Help us, as we prepare to celebrate his birth, to share with those around us the good news of your power and love.  We ask this through Jesus Christ, the light who is coming into the world. Amen. [Don't know where I got this from, but not me originally...]

Advent Reading 2 - Luke 1:26-38: Gabriel and Mary

Discussion
[Question:
Mary is told by the angel that she has "found favour with God".
What do you think were the implications of that favour as a potential unmarried mother at 14?
]

God called Mary to a difficult path. Her answer was "I am the Lord's servant, may it be to me as you have said", or as the version we usually use at Christmas says "Let it be to me according to your word".

In the Methodist church we have a Covenant Prayer once a year, where we are invited to renew our commitment to God. We are asked to say: "we take upon ourselves with joy the yoke of obedience, and, for love of you, engage ourselves to seek and do your perfect will... I am no longer my own but yours. Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will; put me to doing, put me to suffering;"

God calls us to live out our covenant with Him. Are we prepared like Mary to say "yes" to whatever He asks us?

Here is a prayer of response to God:

Prayer
When the world began   
GOD SAID YES.

When Jesus came  
 GOD SAID YES.

When we were born 
GOD SAID YES.
GOD SAYS YES TO LIFE AND LIVING.

God calls us  
TO BE LIKE MARY.

God calls us  
TO LIFE AND LOVING.

God, when you call us, help us to say yes.
WE ARE YOUR SERVANTS,
LET IT BE TO US ACCORDING TO YOUR WORD. AMEN.

[Taken and then adapted from "Candles & Conifers: Resources for All Saints and Advent" Ruth Burgess, Wild Goose Publications, 2005]


Songs
     All heaven declares the glory of the risen Lord
     Blessing and honour, glory and power (ancient of days)

Advent Reading 3: Luke 2:1-7 Joseph and Mary go to Bethlehem

Short Talk
Are any of your Christmas memories about church nativity plays? Mine range through small boys as Joseph picking their noses while in front of the whole church (small boys who are now qualifying as Methodist ministers), to the year Linda Sims decided that as she couldn't get proper sheep or donkey costumes, she would introduce a pantomime cow to the nativity.

But perhaps the richest area for things to go wrong in a nativity service is the story we have just heard. Mary and Joseph have travelled from Nazareth to Bethlehem, and they are tired. She is heavily, heavily pregnant - at that stage when her belly button sticks out, and she feels this baby must really be a baby elephant. Mary and Joseph knock on the door, and a small child opens it.

"Hello, what can I do for you?"
"I am Joseph and this is my wife Mary and we have nowhere to stay and we are cold and hungry and she is about to have a baby - can we come in."

The innkeeper child knows that "sorry we have no room" is the correct answer, but forgets it in imitation of his mother who always copes in this situation. "Come on in, we'll manage somehow".

That child, who has just ruined the plot of the nativity has also shown us mercy and hospitality that we would do well to imitate as we await God's coming.

In Mexico, the Honduras and other Latin American countries, this story of making room for God among us is commemorated in the practice of "posada" or shelter.

[Start of extract from "Hospitality" by Ana Maria Prado, chapter 3 in Practicing our Faith, edited Dorothy Bass, Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1997.]

Each Advent , the young and old reenact the story of Joseph seeking lodging for his young wife Mary, who is weary from travel and heavy with child. For nine nights in a row, children and adults assume the identity of the weary couple or of the innkeepers, processing around the inside of the church or through the neighbourhood, moving from one designated site to the next, in the ritual of Las Posadas.

At each station, an ancient exchange is repeated. Those playing the role of Joseph and Mary approach the inn, knock on the door a say in a loud voice "En nombre del cielo, buenos moradores, dad a unos viajeros posada esta noche. - In the name of heaven, good people, give to a traveller shelter this night.

From inside, a chorus of voices responds "This is not an inn- move on: I cannot open let you be a scoundrel!"

As Joseph moves from one inn to the next, the innkeepers grow angry and even threaten violence, while the night grows colder and the young couple's weariness turns to exhaustion.
"We are tired, travelling from Nazareth, I am a carpenter named Joseph" the anxious husband implores. Finally, he even reveals his wife's true identity, begging for posada for just one night for la Reina del Cielo - the Queen of Heaven - but to no avail.

For eight days this scene is reenacted. Finally on the ninth day, on Christmas Eve, Joseph's request moves the heart of an innkeeper, who offers the young couple all that he has left - a stable. Yet the stable is enhanced by the love with which the innkeeper offers it, and this humble place becomes the birthplace of Jesus.

In an outpouring of joy and festivity, those gathered on the final night celebrate the generosity of the innkeeper and the posada given to Mary and Joseph in song and dance, in food and in drink. Sweets and toys from the pinata shower the children and the community remembers again how the stranger at the door can be God in disguise.

In this way, every December, Hispanic communities relive in their flesh the gospel truth that "the Word became flesh and lived among us". He was in the world and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him.  He came to what was his own and his own people did not accept him.

[End of extract from "Hospitality"]

He comes to us today - he comes as servant offering us his freedom, he comes as Lord and invites us to follow him, he comes as the stranger, and invites us to show him posada.

In the watching, in the waiting, in the living - may we recognise him in his coming. Amen.

Prayer
An ancient promise is coming true
GOD'S LOVE LASTS FOR EVER

A secret mystery is being revealed
GOD'S LOVE LASTS FOR EVER

A little child will soon be born
GOD'S LOVE LASTS FOR EVER

God of promise
God of wisdom
WE WILL WAIT WITH YOU

God of justice
God of integrity
WE WILL WALK WITH YOU

God of mystery
God of glory
WE WILL LAUGH WITH YOU

[Taken from "Candles & Conifers: Resources for All Saints and Advent" Ruth Burgess, Wild Goose Publications, 2005]

Song
    O come, o come Immanuel - traditional plainsong form hymn
[Introduced and explained as not familiar to most of congregation]

Collection

Final prayer
Holy One,
we wait for you to come to us again,
baby-small and vulnerable,
to grace our poverty, our humanity,
with a heartbeat, a breath and a cry.

Holy One,
you wait for us to notice you again,
baby-small and vulnerable,
here in these people and in this place,
present in a heartbeat, a breath and a cry.

May the guiding Spirit once again
bring together your waiting and our waiting,
to lift up the vulnerable,
and confirm the beauty of our humanity,
each heartbeat, each breath and cry,
bringing to birth renewed lives
filled with everlasting hope. Amen.

[Lovely prayer - again, found in a book rather than written by me, but so appropriate for the service.  By Janet Lees, in "Shine on, star of Behlehem: a worship resource for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany, compiled by Geoffrey Duncan, Canterbury Press 2001.]

Song
     Great is the darkness (come Lord Jesus)
[A modern song with a strong advent theme, with the last verse culminating in Christ's coming again in glory]

The Grace

For the Institute of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen's University, Essentials Red Online Worship History Course with Dan Wilt

Phil, the token Australian on our Essentials Red course (I'm the token Welshman), asked a question in the discussions a few weeks ago that didn't get much of an answer, so I thought I'd write about my experience.

Phil asked "Does anyone have any experiences or stories to share in relation to using some of the written and ancient prayers in a contemporary service? We don't tend to use these in my current church but I love the depth and richness in these prayers."

I make quite a lot of use of such prayers, and perhaps the best resource I have found is the books of David Adam. He is (maybe "was" now) the Vicar of Lindisfarne, and has written many books of Celtic prayers and meditations - both with his own words, and traditional ones.

If you just wanted one place to start with his work, try "The Open Gate: Celtic prayers for growing spirituality", published Triangle Books. It has prayers appropriate for all the different times in a service, but perhaps the ones I use the most are the ones for Preparation - getting ourselves ready to receive from God. Here is one that can be said as a lead/response prayer.

In you we live and move,
In you we have our being
We are in your love,
Enfolded in your peace
Surrounded by your might

Open our eyes, Lord,
Enlarge our vision
Open our heart, Lord,
Increase our faith
Open our minds, Lord,
Deepen our understanding

We are in your love
Enfolded in your peace
Surrounded by your might
In you we live and move
In you we have our being. Amen

David Adam has also written/assigned prayers to every Sunday of the church year. As there are three different years of bible readings in the Church of England, there are three books. I only have one (David Adam, "Traces of Glory", SPCK Press), but it is also a great resource when you want something suitable for a specific Sunday. Here is part of the prayers for the 1st Sunday of Advent:

Come Lord, come down, come in, come among us.
Enter into our darkness with your light.
Come fill our emptiness with your presence.
Dispel the clouds and reveal your glory.
Come refresh, renew, restore us.
Come Lord, come down, come in, come among us. Amen.

I've been thinking about the way in which what we do in our worship services reflects what we think about the way God works and what we think is important.  In week 3, Dan talked about the changing emphasis of worship services from the taking of sacraments to the dominance of teaching. Perhaps the most significant sign of that changing emphasis is in the structure of the worship service. In many protestant services, that structure might be seen as:

- approach to God
- preparation for teaching
- sermon
- final hymn

The abrupt end of the service after the sermon, even if the final hymn is one where people sing their response to what they have heard, emphasizes the centrality and completeness of the sermon - we built up to it, had it, and now we can go home.

I wrote in my last blog entry about prayer stations (http://essentialchris.livejournal.com/957.html). We use them in our OpenSpace services as part of an extended time of worship after the teaching / preaching. They give people opportunities to respond to anything God has spoken to them, whether through the preaching or through other parts of the worship service. They are not the only way of doing this - experiential meditation, sacramental acts such as communion,  or even a time of silence might be other ways of achieving the same goal - giving people time to meet with God in the light of the preaching they have heard.

For the Institute of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen's University, Essentials Red Online Worship History Course with Dan Wilt

I am ambivalent about the place of public prayer in any service. In part, I think back to attending my parents' Anglican church as a choirboy at age 7 - cassock, surplice and ruff: I looked angelic! The prayers at the Eucharist took a good four pages of the prayer book, and I'd be thinking "only three more pages to go, only two more pages to go...".

I gave my life to Jesus in an independent evangelical church, where the prayers were much more "free", but where I could recite some of the repeated public prayers along with the person praying as if they had been a written liturgy.

The preachers in our present church are generally much more imaginative, and occasionally participative, even in the more "traditional" services, but still there is an emphasis on being "prayed at", that I am not convinced draws people easily into worship.

At OpenSpace, our 6pm evening service, we have tried to break away from that. Some weeks, the main prayers will be spoken or led by a leader, but much more often, they will be strongly participative, often through the use of prayer stations - areas of the worship space where something has been set up as a focus for  prayer.

The selection of prayer stations would be made to be appropriate as response to the specific service, but we often will have several, and some of the kinds of station that we have had are:

- a bucket of mud, to put your hand in and appreciate your sinfulness, and the work of Jesus in cleansing you;
- maps of town, country and world, where people can write prayers and stick them in appropriate spots (maybe accompanied by projection of  current news stories);
- large sheets of paper where people can draw or write their praise or thanks to God;
- candles to light while praying for specific people God brings to mind;
- prayers of confession brought together and burned;
- writing our names on stones and bringing them together in a pile symbolizing the church, and praying for the church as a whole;
- places to come and kneel in submission to God's call;
- making crosses from driftwood and meditating on what Jesus did for us;

Our congregation averages about 40, and some of the exercises need a lot more planning and space when the numbers are over 60, but we feel that this kind of prayer is more engaging than much of what is done in services.

Such exercises often then benefit from some words from the leader at the end, but if those words sum up the experience that the worshippers have been through, then they tend to strike home in a way that the words alone without the experience would not have.

Prayer stations- give it a try!

For the Institute of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen's University, Essentials Red Online Worship History Course with Dan Wilt

My experience yesterday made me think further about the issues of forgetting and remembering.

Yesterday was the first time that I have ever been scheduled to preach on Remembrance Sunday. In the U.K., the nearest Sunday to 11th November is earmarked for remembering the dead of two World Wars, and increasingly, those who have lost their lives in conflicts such as the Falklands, Afghanistan and Iraq since then.

I was preaching in a small out-of-town chapel where the numbers barely reach double figures, but where the welcome (and, thankfully, the chapel) is warm. Start of service was 10am, and Remembrance is usually observed at 11am. Because of the size of the congregation, we were likely to be finished in less than an hour. I asked the predominantly over-70 year old congregation what they wanted to do. They chose to take a break after the sermon, and have coffee, then come back together at 11 for prayer and silence and the final hymn.

Not only the act of remembrance was important to them (having lived through the second of the wars), but also the SHARED aspect of the Remembrance, not just with those present, but with all the others also observing the Remembrance at the same time around the country.

It made me think of the obvious parallel with the Lord's Supper. We do not all choose to observe that remembrance at the same time, no could we with a world-wide church. But perhaps when leading we could stress more the through-time-and-space nature of the remembering that we are doing. For many there would be value and comfort in stressing the relationship with those who have gone before, and for others, the vision of the Church "terrible as an army with banners" would give a different view from the faithful dozen or so meeting weekly in a small chapel.