Author: svbenefice

As I write, the rain is incessant and is forecast to continue all day, so perhaps this is not the best time to write about the wonders of nature. However, we have had some very pleasant autumn days and I have really noticed the colours in the leaves. After the  drought in the spring and summer, I did wonder if any leaves would last until autumn, but I need not have worried. The colours seem particularly rich this year. The author of Psalm 8 famously wrote how the heavens proclaim the glory of God. As a scientist, I am often wary of arguments that the natural world somehow proves the existence of God; the world follows physical rules and they, at least at one level, explain how it operates. However, I still think Psalm 8 has a point. I am a scientist because I love the beauty of nature. I seek to understand what I see in terms of biology, chemistry and physics, but when I have seen the autumn colours this year, my response has been emotional. I have simply rejoiced at the beauty and that emotion connects me with what I call God, even though I believe that God works through quantum mechanics and evolution by natural selection. Emotion and intellect are not in conflict; they work together.

Rev David Poyner

When I was at vicar school memories were fresh of the TV comedy series “Rev”, about a hapless vicar trying to run a parish in London. Most people thought this was a comedy; I thought it was a training manual. A decade later, I am still following the instructions I learnt from it.  One episode started with the hapless Rev Adam and his deputy on Remembrance Sunday, standing alone at a war memorial now surrounded by high-rise flats, observing the two minute silence. Nobody else was there; it was just them remembering. And so, this Sunday, a member of the congregation will be in Billingsley Church on Remembrance Sunday. He will ring the bells just before 11am, then pause for 2 minutes and ring the bells again. At Sidbury, a member of the congregation will be at the soldier cut-out, at the head of the drive to the church. He will read the exhortation “At the going down of the sun….”, observe the two minute silence at 11am and then end with the Kohima epitaph, “when you go home…”. I imagine both will be alone; I will be leading remembrance at Glazeley so cannot join them. It really does not matter. On Remembrance Sunday, at 11am, they will be acting on behalf of their communities to remember the sacrifice of past generations. In fact they will not quite be alone; alongside them will be all the company of Heaven.

Rev David Poyner

November is a month for remembering, particularly the dead. It starts with the two Christian festivals of All Saints and All Souls and then moves to Remembrance Sunday. Somewhere in the mix is All Hallow’s Eve, “Halloween”, with alleged links to memories of a pagan past. In our society today we largely try and avoid thinking about death; we prefer to speak of people “passing away”. But we cannot avoid it; it will happen to me, it will happen, dear reader, to you. November can remind us of our mortality. So what, if anything happens then?

I do not really know what happens to us when we die, at least not in any detail. For much of Old Testament times there was no clear concept of any kind of worthwhile afterlife; just vague references to a place of shadows called Sheol. By the time of Jesus, there was a much stronger belief that the dead would rise again; as a Christian I believe this is what Jesus showed. But Jesus himself was vague on the details, as are most New Testament writers. I do not need to know the details of what happens, how it happens, what it means to have a “resurrection body”. All I need to know are the words I proclaim at every funeral; Jesus’s declaration that he is the resurrection and the life, St Paul’s insight that nothing, not even death, can cut us off from the love of God. As a recently deceased theologian said, when asked about what happens when we die; “The God of life will prevail”. There is nothing else I need to know.

Rev David Poyner

Some may recognise the name of Marianne Budde; she is the Bishop of Washington who preached at the inauguration of President Trump back in January; her sermon, on Christian values, did not go down well with the president. These are extracts from a blog she wrote in June; I would encourage you to read it in full (Hopelessness is Not an Option – by Mariann Budde).

“Earlier this year…. I was invited to lead a morning Bible study on Matthew 28:1-10 with 4,300 participants and also give an evening address. It was deeply humbling and inspiring to witness that level of unity, compassion, and hope that reverberated amongst the attendees….. it is essential for Christian leaders to speak and act with humility in the wider society in which we live, for we are in need of the same forgiveness, mercy, and grace that we are called by God to embody for others. If the continued response to the sermon I preached on January 21st has revealed anything, it is that simply professing a faith rooted in mercy, dignity, honesty, and humility is like water in the desert for parched souls…. We’d be made of stone if we didn’t feel discouraged some days and deeply saddened by what we see around us. But remember that hope isn’t something we need to conjure on our own. It is a grace that God gives, allowing us to face evil and death, yet still believe that the life-affirming Spirit is always at work within and around us, bringing about good…. This is a time for us as Christians to be present in as many places as we can and offer what we have to give…. For Christians, hopelessness is not an option — not because of us, but because of Christ’s dwelling in us and our ultimate hope in our true home in the love of God. We have our north star. In that faith, we go on. We are the ones now. For this hour, we are here.”

Rev David Poyner

A new exhibition has recently opened featuring art associated with the iconic 20th century composer, Benjamin Britten. I do not particularly like his music but he was a towering figure in the cultural life of this country in the mid-20th century. He was commissioned to write religious music, especially “War Requiem” for the consecration of Coventry Cathedral but I do not think he would have called himself a Christian. Jonathan Evans, reviewing the exhibition for the Church Times, opens with a quotation at Britten’s funeral from Bishop Leslie Brown; [Britten] believed deeply in a Reality which works in us and through us and is the source of goodness and beauty, joy and love. He was sometimes troubled because he wasn’t sure that he could give the name of God to that Reality.” It seems to me that a great many people are in the same place as Britten; quite a few in or around the edges of the churches in which I minister. I call that Reality God but I am not sure that God is really that bothered what name people use for her or him. At least in my opinion, it is much more important that people recognise and engage with that Reality; I pray that in our churches, we help people draw nearer to that Reality and to understand it more deeply. As a Christian, I trust the Holy Spirit to do the rest.

Rev David Poyner

I recently received an email from a clerical colleague. It was an invitation to a meeting. Immediately there came another email from the same colleague, trying to correct the date for the meeting. Unfortunately that date was still wrong. I took some delight in replying to point this out, until I recalled that earlier in the week I had sent an email around all members of a PCC (including my colleague) with the wrong time for a meeting that evening… At times like this, the words of a classic song come to my mind:
Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble
When you’re perfect in every way
I can’t wait to look in the mirror
Cause I get better lookin’ each day
To know me is to love me
I must be a hell of a man
Oh Lord, it’s hard to be humble
But I’m doin’ the best that I can

I must go now to admire myself in the mirror.
Rev David Poyner

The day after the killing of two worshippers at the synogogue in Manchester, a day that will almost certainly see more civilian casualties in Gaza, it is difficult for me to find any words. But this morning, I heard the Bishop of Manchester, Dave Walker, speak out about what perhaps is the worse danger of all; that moment when we forget those who are our enemies are also humans. As a Christian I believe we are all made in the image of God. Last week, I wrote about the murdered American political activist Charlie Kirk, a man noted for his controversial views. At his funeral, his widow, Erika, gave a powerful address; she publicly forgave his killer because that was the way of Christ. It was too much for some at the funeral, indeed the sentiment is too much for many. If I suffered grievous wrong, it might be too much for me. But she understood the shared humanity of victim and perpetrator and recognising this is the only way for ultimate healing between individuals or peoples.

“That man, that young man – I forgive him. I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it is what Charlie would do.”

Rev David Poyner

Hypatia is not a person who is well known, but in 415 in Alexandria in Egypt, she was a celebrity. She was a leading philosopher, noted for her learning. She was also a pagan. In that year, she was attacked by a mob and killed; some attributed her death to rabble-rousing by the Bishop of Alexandria, St Cyril. Cyril was undoubtedly a bruiser, although it is not clear if he really was behind Hypatia’s death. None-the-less, by any standard, the murder of Hypatia, for her beliefs, was an inexcusable act of brutality. I am sure everyone has head of Charlie Kirk, the US political thinker, recently murdered whilst giving a speech; another inexcusable act of violence. The link between both is that their deaths were due to their beliefs. Can either be called martyrs? Hypatia, as a pagan, was clearly not a Christian martyr but could a case be made that she was a martyr for freedom of thought? Some have called Charlie Kirk a martyr; I cannot see that he was killed for his religious beliefs, although he was a Christian. Like Hypatia, perhaps there are stronger grounds for freedom of thought. The wider issue is that when someone is murdered because of their beliefs, the murder is always wrong. The beliefs, be they religious or not, need us to examine them; we may or may not think they are worthy.

Rev David Poyner

I’m in the middle of harvest festivals at the various churches at which I serve and a friend recently sent me this poem by EE Cummings. It speaks to me.

I am a little church (no great cathedral) far from the splendour and squalor of hurrying cities

– I do not worry if briefer days grow briefest I not sorry when sun and rain make April

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;

my prayers are prayers of the earth’s own clumsy striving

(finding and losing and laughing and crying) children

whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness.

Around them surges a miracle of unceasing birth and glory in death and resurrection:

over my sleeping self float flaming symbols of hope, and I wake to a perfect patience of mountains

I am a little church (far from the frantic world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature

– I do not worry if longer nights grow longest;

I am not sorry when silence becomes singing winter by spring, I lift my diminutive spire to merciful Him Whose only now is forever:

standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence

(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

This weekend is Ride and Stride, the annual fund-raising event for the Shropshire Historic Churches Trust. I offer one of my favourite poems by R.S. Thomas by way of response.

The Chapel

A little aside from the main road,

becalmed in a last-century greyness,

there is the chapel, ugly, without the appeal

to the tourist to stop his car

and visit it. The traffic goes by,

and the river goes by, and quick shadows

of clouds, too, and the chapel settles

a little deeper into the grass.

But here once on an evening like this,

in the darkness that was about

his hearers, a preacher caught fire

and burned steadily before them

with a strange light, so that they saw

the splendour of the barren mountains

about them and sang their amens

fiercely, narrow but saved

in a way that men are not now.

Rev David Poyner