Moving On

The blog's author is moving to the Diocese of Llandaff in the Church in Wales. She will be installed as Dean of Llandaff Cathedral on Saturday 2nd March 2013. Llandaff's association with St Teilo dates from around 546 and the cathedral is dedicated to Ss Peter and Paul, and Ss Dyfrig, Teilo (whose tomb is situated in the presbytery) and Euddogwy. Llandaff is on the banks of the River Taff, about two miles from the centre of Cardiff.  Thank you all for reading Archdeacon in the Dales over the past two years. Look out for a new blog from Llandaff in due course!



A Celtic Blessing

On our hearts and our homes, the blessing of God.

In our coming and going, the peace of God.

In our life and believing, the love of God.

At our end and new beginning,

The arms of God to welcome us and bring us home.

                                                                                      The Iona Community, Shorter Evening Liturgy



Farewell Sermon

Farewell Sermon
Evensong, St Mary's Richmond
20th January 2013

1 Samuel 3.1-20; John 1.29-42

The Old Testament reading, tonight, reminds us that God can speak to anyone. Do you really believe that? God may call or stir the heart of whomsoever God pleases. The youngest person, the most unlikely, unpromising person, the outsider. Or, perhaps, just the reverse. God may call the person everyone expects - the one who has been trained or who has special insight or vision. With the story of Samuel, we have both. God speaks through a combination of a young, inexperienced boy who works in the temple and an elderly priest who has served God for many years.

Have you noticed how children sometimes get a bee in their bonnets about something? And then they go on and on about it...but often there's a kernal of truth, something that needs to be attended to. Here's a story about just that.

When David Shiffler was three years old, he and his family went on a camping trip to the new Mexico desert. He and his dad had been watching The Land Before Time, a cartoon adventure in which a group of children meet some real dinosaurs. So David was really keen to hunt for dinosaur eggs. He went digging with a toy trowel and found a green stone which he confidently told his father was a dinosaur egg. His father took the stone back home and put it in the garage with the rest of the day's kit. After David had badgered him about it for weeks, Don Shiffler finally gave in and sent the stone to palaeontologists in Colorado who told the family that, yes, the stone was a dinosaur egg. Not only, that, it was in fact the oldest meat-eating dinosaur's egg ever found in North America, twice as old as the earliest previously known specimen. The egg found by three year old David convinced scientists that these particalur dinosaurs, called therapods, had lived in the Jurassic age, something that had not been suspected. 

Like Samuel, the boy David had a persistant hunch that somethiong was important but he needed the adults to help him work out what it was.

Enthusiasm often comes from the young. Andrew, Jesus' disciple (presumably in his late teens or early twenties) rushes off to find his brother straight away when Jesus calls him. 'The Messiah himself has spoken to me! Come and see!' The enthusiasm of youth with its willingness to act! Wisdom comes with age (well somtimes!) The elderly Eli can discern the mark of God in what Samuel is experiencing. He has seen this kind of thing before. Samuel is not dreaming or hearing voices; God is disturbing his conscience until he stops running to Eli and listens.

God can and does speak to us all. Not very often, perhaps. Not as often as we would like, or when we would like, but God can speak to and through anyone who will listen. Anyone who will stop long enough to be attentive. And then, when God does speak, it may be that we need the help of someone else to interpret the message - the help of a wise friend or someone who has studied the ways of God, someone who knows the scriptures as Eli did. Or someone who thinks and prays a lot.

How does God speak? Well, in many and diverse ways.

Maybe through an idea or a hunch that won't leave us alone until we attend to it. Samuel got up three times to investigate where this strange voice came from.

Maybe God speaks through a trusted friend's advice or urging. 'Come on, come and see Jesus,' Andrew urges Simon Peter. Together they went, stayed the evening, and their lives were changed for ever.

Maybe God speaks through our sense of history or tradition, our sense of what is right and wrong within that. A profound knowledge of his tradition was probably what helped Eli to interpret God's word to him and his household through the message that Samuel delivered, and to understand that things had gone wrong and needed to change. 'He is the Lord, He will do whatever seems best to Him,' says Eli. It must have taken a great deal of humility and courage for Eli to take on board Samuel's unplalatable message and utter those words. Sometimes God challenges us in uncomfortable ways to face up to things we'd rather avoid.

Maybe God speaks to us through our knowledge of Scripture. Samuel probably knew what was already written about the House of Eli. God's call prompted him to warn Eli to take what was written in scripture seriously.

Or maybe God does speak to us directly, just occasionally. Perhaps when we are very far away from God or in great distress. James Ryle is a well-known evangelist whose life was transformed when he was in prison. Here is the story of how God spoke to him.

At the age of seven, James Ryle was put in an orphanage. His natural father was in prison, his step father was an alchoholic and his mother couldn't cope. It was a grim place, and, not long after his arrival, two boys ran away. James says, 'I can still hear the sounds of their protests as they were beaten for having run away. As I lay in my bed, I pulled the covers over my head and whispered a simple prayer to the God I did not know. 'I promise,' I said, 'I'll never run away.'' As the years went by, James got tougher and more  independent and, by the time he was fourteen, he had had enough of the orphanage. With two friends, he jumped the fence and ran away. As they ran across the fields, something happened which James really wasn't expecting. In his own words, 'The voice of the Lord spoke in my ear, stopping me momentarily in my tracks. 'You promised.' That's all I heard but it was enough. I was dumbstruck. My first thought was, 'I cannot believe that you would bring that up at a time like this.' That was the first time James heard God's voice. He carried on running. But years later, when he was in prison and heard the voice of God again, he remembered that day - the day he realised that God does speak to people.

There is nothing we can do to make God speak to us. We can only expect and hope that God might. We can hold ourselves open to hear and to act on what we hear. Or see. Elizabeth Barrett Browning  wrote,

'Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
And only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit around and pluck blackberries.'

I think the blackberries are a reference to Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale where the Pardoner says, in a throw away line, he cares not if men's souls 'go ablackberrying in hell.'

Samuel, Eli, Andrew and Simon Peter did not disregard an approach by God. They were ready to stop in their tracks, take off their shoes and listen when God spoke to them. They were willing, not only to honour God's presence, but to have their lives shaped and changed by what they heard and saw.

As an archdeacon you go round a lot of churches. I was at two this morning. An ecumenical gathering in Scorton to mark the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity and a Communion service at Brompton where the youngest member was about eight. I enjoyed watching her put her heart and soul into reading all the words of the hymns and singing enthusiastically. Those two churches were full of people to had trudged or driven through the snow, as you have tonight, beacuse they love worshipping God, or they need to worship, or they want to want to worship.

What makes our churches come alive and stay alive? What makes them indispensible to the communities in which they are set? Well, at the heart of every faith-filled church and at the heart of every Christian life is that direct sense of relationship with God. Some of us chatter away to God. Some of us find God speaks into our hearts and minds when we are still. Some of us think of God as our Father. Some of us talk to Jesus. Some of us  have that sense of God's Spirir searching our spirits and hearts. Probably, we all do most of these things some of the time.

We do what Samuel did and stop for a moment to attend, 'Speak Lord, for your servant hears.' Direct relationship with God.

For the sake of our churches, we ought also to do what Samuel did next and share what we discover with each other. Recapture the enthusiasm, even the excitement, of youth. Talk about what God seems to be saying to us. Often it is only through talking about an encounter with God to someone else that we begin to discover its real significance. An encounter with God, a prompting by God's Spirirt may be something for us and us alone but, often, it's more of a gift for others. 'So Samuel told everything and did not keep anything back.'

There may be some changes ahead for the Archdeaconry of Richmond and for our Diocese. Big changes if we join up with the Archdeaconry of Craven and the Dioceses of Bradford and Wakefield. Small changes happen all the time as people come and go, parishes join together, new kinds of church and new kinds of worship emerge. Whatever the future holds, keep in your sights the desire to have that sense of direct relationship with God. You can always recognise a person who listens and talks with God. You can always tell a church where lots of the members are engaged in doing this. It is the means by which God's Spirit renews the church and changes the world.

And now, to Him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or conceive by the power that is at work among us, to Him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus, throughout all ages. Amen.  

Farewell


Life seems to have been ridiculously busy over the past two weeks with talks to give about the Dioceses Commission, training days for area deans and lay chairs, meetings at Church House and the usual run of services and other meetings. As well as that, organised by Vicki and the good folk of Christ Church Harrogate Centre, we have succeeded in moving the Archdeaconry office to Harrogate. My successor, the Revd Nicholas Henshall, has now been 'in post' for three days he is contactable on nicholas.henshall@riponleeds-diocese.org.uk 

So, sadly, it is time to say 'goodbye' on Archdeacon in the Dales. Thank you to all who have read regularly and to those who have dipped in occasionally. Thank you to all who have commented, encouraged or admonished either on the bolg or by e mail or when we have met. I now realise the potential of digital space to create community. Yes, it is a different sort of community from the one that meets face to face, and it not unrelated to that community as it brokers introductions of people with similar interests and concerns. It is also a community that can lobby for things. I have been astonished how many casues or concerns I have been drawn into through the online community and how much difference can be made by using the internet to organise debate, protest and mutual support. It is also an effective way to get into deep conversations with people about matters of faith. And it can be fun!  

I was delighted to see so many at my farewell service at St Mary's Richmond on 20th January despite the appalling road conditions. A huge thank you to all who braved the elements and also to those who sent their apologies - having broken my arm in the snow in 2009 I am always pleased when people decide to stay at home rather than risk their safety. I cannot reply to everyone individually, but I do thatnk you you all most sincerely for your thoughtfulness, love and friendship. St Mary's choir once again sang a superb evensong and the hospitality flowed. Thank you, too, to John Chambers, Antony Kirby, Colin Hicks, Gillian Lunn and the refreshment team for organising the occasion. It was good to be among freinds and, though we will miss you all a great deal, I am sure we will be back from time to time to visit - we definitely have North Yorkshire on our (short) list of places for future holidays!

Someone asked me what my most abiding memories of the Archdeaconry will be. 'Too many to say,' is the answer, but here are some:

• Slithering around on the ice in Aldbrough St John's on the way to an induction and being rescued by two kind people - one in a landrover and the other who had braved the elements to walk across the ice rink that was the village road.

• Visiting the church at Kirkby Wiske to take a harvest service and finding it almost entirely surrounded by water.

• Carols by candle light and harmonium at Thorton Steward.

• Arranging to meet a farmer in the fog 'at the third cattle grid' on the moors above Nidderdale. I had my doubts, but we connected up OK!

• Chips sitting on the wall with the bikers at Hawes after an evening meeting.

• An open air ordination at Stalling Busk on a sultry summer's evening over looking Semerwater. (I had to remind the congregation that even the mosquitoes are God's own creatures.)

• Complimenting a vet on his goat, only to discover it was a Norwegian sheep!

• Stopping the car in numerous places (The Stang, Buttertubs, the road from Leyburn to Grinton above Swaledale, the road down from Green How across Bewerley Moor to Pateley) just to thank God for the majesty of the land and to drink it in for a few moments.

• Going to countless churches and homes and schools and receiving a warm welcome.

• The wonderful food - I can truly say I have never tasted better food than in Yorkshire!

• Worshipping with 12 people or with 350, using the Book of Common Prayer or a powerpoint projector and Twitter, in a Grade 1 listed building or a tent, sitting on bales.

• The liveliness and willingness to serve of the people who identify themselves as Christian in every community.

Thank you all for 6 years I will never forget. I will keep you in my prayers, especially over the next few months as decisions are made about the future shape of the Church of England in Yorkshire, and hope you will keep me in yours!