Category: Thought for the Week

Happy 9^th Day of Christmas! The Church has always taken a long view of Christmas. Partly this is to do with the way it organises its calendar, it needs something to fill the space between Christmas Day and its next big marker, Epiphany, on January 6^th when we remember the visit of the wise men to the infant Jesus. Of course, it allowed for a 12 day Christmas party, a break at the coldest time of the year and it allowed the serious religious types plenty to time to be pious; up to a point. The tail end of Christmas was dominated by what has become known as the feast of fools, when a choir boy was allowed to become Bishop for the day and, according to popular tradition, even the most straight-laced vicar was encouraged to take part in, or be the victim of pranks and jokes. That at least is how the festival is often portrayed and, due to some rearrangements of the calendar in the 18^th century, it may have given us our modern April Fool’s Day. However the truth is  more interesting. When the festival was becoming popular, the word “fool” was also to those who led simple lives, the humble and those at the bottom of the social pyramid. Originally it was the “minor” clergy who were celebrated by being given the positions of honour whilst the bishops and the like would do the menial work. Today, we might think of the “fools” as being the unsung helpers who clean churches (or community buildings), who visit the lonely and the sick, who deal with the all the paperwork that accompanies everyday life. A feast of fools, when we celebrate the overlooked, still has things to teach us.

Rev David Poyner

In recent years, Christmas seems to have got longer. For many people, the holiday lasts a week until 2^nd January. This is the case at the university where I worked, although the extended holiday was driven less by the wish to give staff extra holiday than a desire to save heating and lighting costs across the campus. Those who work in retail have a rather different experience of Chirstmas, as it has become a festival of shopping. As the song, “The Twelve Days of Christmas” reminds us, there is nothing new in this. From early times, Christmas was celebrated over an extended period; the twelve days are the period from Christmas Day to January 6th, Epiphany, which in the Chirstian calendar marks the visit of the Wise Men to the infant Jesus. For the most part, the twelve days were largely observed as a time for partying and celebration; a welcome break from the dark and cold just after the shortest day on December 21st. There are some important religious days included within the twelve days, some of which act as a reality check to the theme of goodwill and jollity; St Stephen on the 26th, the first Christian to die for his beliefs; Holy Innocents on the 28th, marking the massacre of children that King Herod is said to have carried out in an attempt to kill the infant Jesus. I suspect few apart from vicars really notice these. However, somewhere, between perpetual sack-cloth and ashes and eternal frivolities is a balance in which we should strive to live.

Rev David Poyner

I am in the middle of the round of Christmas carol services. By Christmas Day I will have led 6 services as well as attending another with friends. But this goes with being a vicar. Carols take all forms, ancient and modern, simple and complicated in their message. Some have very little to do with the stories in the Bible about Christmas. But they are sung, often by those who would not consider themselves to be religious. Music can move us in ways that words alone fail to do. The Holy Spirit has  ways of reaching to people that they, I, do not expect. I do not worry too much about the words in carols, I am happy simply that, as they are sung, the Spirit moves.

Rev David Poyner

This coming Sunday is traditionally known as Gaudate Sunday, from the Latin reading that was said before the priest celebrated mass. Gaudate is the Latin word meaning rejoice and the reading was from one of St Paul’s letters; “Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say rejoice”. Two weeks before Christmas, it is not always easy to find the time to draw breath, never mind rejoice. This coming week I am off to Belfast for a scientific meeting; back on Thursday, carol service on Friday, then Sunday, then Monday… I am sure it is much worse for all with big families. However, we are really missing something important if we have no time for joy at Christmas. The conventional piety is that we ought to feel gratitude at God’s gift to us of Jesus but I’ve never been very comfortable with that approach; it uses the language of duty and obligation, not of joy and rejoicing. For me, that comes in the words and music of Christmas or the crisp winter days. However it works for you, I pray (yes, really…) that you will experience rejoicing this Christmas.

Rev David Poyner

Advent covers the period over the four Sundays before Christmas, so it usually begins at the very end of November; a fact unknown to most makers of Advent Calendars. It is a time of preparation, but not just for Christmas, but also for the Christian belief that Christ Jesus will return to earth to bring this world to an end and replace it with what he called the “Kingdom of God”. This is not a simple doctrine and the church has always struggled to understand it fully, as do I. At its heart is the idea that this world remains imperfect, but one day perfection will come. So we wait and prepare, as Christians have done for the last 2000 years. Some might say that this is evidence that Jesus was deluded; we are waiting for an event that will never come. My counter to this is that God deals with eternity; 2000 years or 2000 million years are all alike on that time scale. Particularly in an age when we crave instant results, this is an alien concept. However, Advent speaks with its own quiet voice about a God who is beyond our understanding but who reveals himself through love; the reality of a world where God’s time is not our time. We need to set aside our preconceptions to enter into this world; the four weeks of Advent are a time when we are reminded to do this.

Rev David Poyner

A couple of days ago, I was with a small group of people from neighbouring villages. We were sharing stories of past times, told to us by our parents and grandparents. We were all local; a century ago our grandparents would all have known each other and could well have met in the same way to share stories told to them by their grandparents. In this part of Shropshire, local ties are still very strong; it is not often I go to a church on this side of the Clee Hill and do not have some kind of family connection with it. But I also know that there has always been movement between communities; new faces were always arriving in search of work and sons and daughters moved away to make their own way in life. The arrival of coal miners from East Shropshire, 200 years ago in Highley and Billingsley, would have seemed like a big change, although some at least stayed to enrich the communities. And so to the flags that now proliferate… I am proud of my own local links and have no problem with celebrating this. But I also recognise the value of outsiders, the importance of generosity to newcomers. I am happy to fly a flag, as long as it is to celebrate, not to exclude.

Rev David Poyner

Today has been a frustrating day; tried to do a lot but it feels as though I have done nothing and I am now short of time. The one thing I did do was meet up with Kina, my gaffer as vicar, although I doubt she sees herself like that. We periodically meet to exchange thoughts and report on what we are doing. At the end of the meeting, she told me that, as we prayed, she had a vision of a bumblebee. The bumblebee is small and individually insignificant. It is a fragile insect, but actually part of a much greater whole, the nest. As an individual, it simply does the little it can, oblivious of the greater whole. But without individual bumblebees doing their bit, the nest would fail. And without nests of bumblebees, our crops would fail as they are some of the main pollinators. Kina did not know that one of my sins of omission was that I had not written this article today; I was not sure what to write about. But I do now….

Rev David Poyner

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