Tag: Methodist Recorder

What can we sing in a distorted world? – Written for ArtServe and originally published in the Methodist Recorder (March 2024)

What can we sing in a distorted world?

Language and music are taut and strained. How can we compress into a phrase a modern pieta, or a father cradling body parts?

What can we sing?

We stand in the rubble of a distorted world where dust never settles, light filters through, flickering, faulted. Shadows lengthen.

Creation is cloaked by human action, or indifference.

And, again, what can we sing?

Perhaps we should be silent?

It has been said that there can be no poetry after Auschwitz. And we turn up on Sunday morning to offer praise and thanksgiving or, expecting a still, small voice,  a gentle stroll beside still waters. Have we forgotten? Perhaps. Or are we too young? Since October the seventh our  slumbering memories have been re-awakened. And what do we sing? At times like these I wonder at the inability of our Christian churches to lament. Its absence in these times should shock.

I turn to two Psalms, one communal; one individual.

Psalm 137

By the rivers of Babylon—

there we sat down and there we wept

when we remembered Zion.

The nearest we get to these words, a reprise of Boney M singing ‘By the rivers of Babylon’. Notice they never use verses 8 and 9:

Happy shall they be who pay you back

what you have done to us!

Happy shall they be who take your little ones

and dash them against the rock!

Like a hybrid car shifting gear they move to something more comfortable: May the words of my lips and the meditation of my heart…’ They want something deemed ‘acceptable’.

Think of the horror of war, images that can’t be broadcast for what they portray.  What would we feel? Might we not want vengeance? This Psalm says that such emotions are legitimate, human. How can we admit this in our churches? We need to know that we are still held by God when we have witnessed acts of deepest hatred and want to hit back, to wreak havoc.

But a warning. The Psalmist grasps this yet it can never be a justification for repeating the horror, simplistically, ‘because the Bible tells us so’. An ‘eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ should be consigned to the past.

Psalm 22

‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me’.

This is personal, now. The cry we hear from the cross, from the lips of Jesus, words of a Psalm uttered in desperation in the throes of death: words just for Good Friday?  They are strong enough for a hymn writer to pen: ‘the Father turns His face away’. And sometimes it feels like that. Yet God does not turn away, will not leave us in distress. Nevertheless, we may still feel the reality of personal desolation. If the Psalmist felt this emotion, and Jesus expressed it, then it is common to humanity and not to be condemned. It is cry of wretchedness though not a matter of doubt, rather of supreme faith. That is the foundation lament, a certainty of the presence of God with us in spite of all, even in persecution or impending death. We only complain when our expectations are not met – a train is late, food has gone mouldy, a friend lets us down. In faith we have expectations of God, God with us,  always, in every circumstance or situation. Yet sometimes we feel desolate, abandoned, as though God has gone away. And then we too can lament, we can groan from the depths of our being. And at such times we utter the deepest, most sincere prayer we may ever voice, ‘God help me!’ This is no blasphemy, but a heartfelt, visceral cry of need undergirded by a subconscious sense that when all else is absent, there is a name on whom we can call.

So what music, what language, can we borrow, can we use? Perhaps Gorecki’s Third Symphony? Or a hymn like this? – ‘When loneliness oppresses me’ from Hymns of Hope and Healing/Unravelling the Mysteries sung, maybe, to KINGSFOLD?

1	When loneliness oppresses me; 
	when darkness fills my soul; 
	when grief and weeping overwhelm 
	and none can make me whole; 
	in angry fear I call to you.
	When will you hear my cry? 
	This heavy burden on my heart 
	must lift, or else I die.
	
2	When close companions melt away, 
	afflictions have no end, 
	I cry for help to empty air, 
	darkness my only friend. 
	O God, why have you left me here? 
	When will my troubles cease? 
	If you refuse to hear my prayer, 
	how will I find release?

Hymn - Marjorie Dobson
© Copyright 2012 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, www.stainer.co.uk. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

When strangers are unwelcome – those needing asylum

When strangers are unwelcome 

When strangers are unwelcome 
the church’s heart beats slow, 
the lost who run from danger 
have nowhere left to go. 
No words of grace are spoken 
while, looking on the world, 
the heart of God is broken: 
love’s banner tightly furled.

The people at our borders 
who need compassion now, 
reach out for care and shelter, 
but rules will not allow 
these ones to seek asylum:
we put up legal walls.
Before we’ve even met them 
we disregard their calls.

Then images from scripture speak 
judgment on the church, 
and call for clearer thinking 
as values seize or lurch. 
The Christ that we would worship 
would turn the world around, 
and shake us from our comfort, 
our certain, solid ground.

Then shatter walls and windows 
and let the church reach out, 
and not with Psalms and anthems, 
but anger, let us shout 
condemning every outrage 
that demonises life, 
and break the laws that damage, 
evoking human strife.

Andrew Pratt 30/7/2021
Words © 2021 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London, England copyright@stainer.co.uk . Please include any reproduction for local church use on your CCL Licence returns. All wider and any commercial use requires prior application to Stainer & Bell Ltd.
Metre: 7.6.7.6 D
Tune: AURELIA; KINGS LYNN

Inspired by a front page item in the Methodist Recorder 30/7/2021 involving an interview with Rev Inderjit Bhogal.

Covid-19 and communion – Methodist Recorder May 1st 2020

The following article was submitted to the Methodist Recorder and published under the head: The crucial challenge facing us all. It expresses a personal view but is written from the perspective of Methodism in the UK. I am re-publishing it here, being aware that not everyone reads the Methodist Recorder.

Central to our faith is an understanding that God is love, and an expression of this is our capacity to see Christ in others and represent Christ to them. If Christians use this as a lens to test their response to Covid-19 it might produce some interesting reflections. An early response to the virus was to set up networks to distribute food to vulnerable people. That makes sense in that it mirrors early Christian care in Acts. Following Peter’s Pentecost sermon the people repented and began an exploration of what it meant to live differently. They met to share their meals in their homes, with the affirmation that they held all in common and distributed help to those who would otherwise be in need.

This has led me to wonder how different the church might be after Covid 19. Just how willing are we as individuals, and as an institution, to risk embracing change, renewed after some form of repentance, or will we reassume our old ways.

As we approached Easter, the denominations entered discussion and debate as to how, in lockdown, they could worship. Hitherto this had been corporate, taking place in dedicated buildings with formalised liturgies and, sometimes elaborate, ritual. The degree to which this formality had been concretised over millennia was evidenced by the form and tradition of the words and the actions that accompany them. In addition, in some denominations liturgical dress itself has been determined down to the nature of the garments, how they are prepared and worn. For some this is significant, but it lacks the simplicity that I read of in Acts or the Gospels.

As Christians sought to celebrate the Eucharist this Easter we witnessed the Archbishop of Canterbury in his kitchen with his wife presiding at a liturgy while fully robed. Nothing could be further from an ordinary meal shared in a family home and it had the feel of having crossed over into a TV cookery show. I don’t say that in criticism of the Archbishop who is as much captive to culture, tradition and expectation as any of us. Others tried to ‘gather’ virtual congregations who were expressly directed not to share bread and wine and were, by definition, separate from one another. Still others provided recorded presentations of worship or contemplation. At the same time those who can’t access the internet have been offered varied fare by radio, television or in print.

All of our attempts to maintain worship are laudable, but perhaps miss a crucial challenge. The first worship of the early Christians was, arguably, under lockdown, took place in family homes, with no sense of hierarchy or superiority of any participants. Probably they decided amongst themselves who would break the bread. Maybe culture dictated the eldest male. I’m not sure it was a religious or theological choice. Perhaps Mum decided?

(See https://twitter.com/ruthmw/status/1256317999792832512?s=21)

For us at Easter, and for the immediate future, a truly refreshing sense of repentance of misunderstanding could be to encourage the acted parable of people sharing a meal of bread and wine organised by and participated in by family members, or individuals, themselves at home. This might be regarded as radical or innovative, if not wrong, yet it would actually be more closely historically grounded than our authorised acts of worship to which we have become accustomed Sunday by Sunday.

All this would lack would be an assurance of ‘authenticity’. It would be outside of the authoritarian control of those who ‘know’ how it should be done. We still haven’t learnt the lessons of colonialism from a negative point of view, or liberation theology as a positive. Putting it another way we seem to have re-learnt the Pharasaism that Jesus criticised. I recollect a story of Jesus. A beast of burden had fallen into a ditch. But it was the Sabbath. Human rules said it should be left there. Jesus countered that. Our human rules say that special authorised people like me have to Preside at communion. Far nearer to Pharasaism than to Jesus, I think. Reading scripture carefully, from where we are under lock down in a 21st century world, might well take us to a very different place than that in which the church finds itself. There is talk of a new Reformation. Interestingly, some other denominations are nearer to this than Methodism. Perhaps we are clinging too much to John Wesley’s authoritarian governance, rather than owning his willingness to risk breaking rules when this is what the Gospel, the love of neighbour, required.

Rev Dr Andrew Pratt (Supernumerary Presbyter and one time Acting Principal of Hartley Victoria College).