Skip to main content

Three Services

Photo courtesy St. Peter's Cathedral, Hamilton

I went to church three times this last weekend. On Saturday in company with about 1,000 others I went to the chapel of St. Paul's Collegiate School in Hamilton to participate in the farewell service to Archbishop David Moxon. The next day I went to my old parish, St. Francis Hillcrest and was able to take in the main morning service before rushing off to the airport to catch the flight home. Then in the evening I went to the Resurrection service in the Regent Theatre in Dunedin, and again in company with about 1,000 people.

The three events were quite varied. And that former sentence will be my official entry in this years understatement of the year awards. The St. Paul's chapel is a beautiful place with a soaring wood roof. It is light and spacious with the reflected light of a pool playing through a plain, frosted window featuring the words of Jesus arranged to form an enormous cross. The liturgy was considered, intelligent and reverent. People spoke warmly of David Moxon, whose influence on the life of the Anglican church in this country has been unparalleled.There was a lot of colour, and despite the formality and complexity of the occasion I found the time sped past quickly. The hymns were David's favourites and he is a musician. In his sermon, Philip Richardson managed to combine a  farewell tribute and some clever insights on the readings for the day. I was very glad to be there. There was, for me a real sense of God's presence, and the liturgy, the vestments, the beauty of the building and the views out to the water and trees beyond set us in a context temporally and spatially huge.

It was harvest festival at St. Francis, and the familiar octagonal building was decked out with all the usual bunches of grapes and artfully placed displays of home grown vegetables. Being a co-operating parish (that is, encompassing Presbyterians, Anglicans and Methodists) the service didn't follow a pattern usual in many Anglican parishes. When I was there we had over 100 children in the Sunday School,  so we had the readings and the preaching at the end of the service rather than at the beginning so that we could more practicably manage the kids. This practice is still followed. The music, led by a small music group was pretty standard for a suburban church these days, and there was a lively question and discussion time following the sermon.There were many faces we recognised, even after more than 20 years away, and it was wonderful to be back in the community which had meant so much to us and played such a huge role in our formation.

The Regent Theatre doesn't look like a church. Devoid of scenery and props the stage is not particularly handsome though there is a certain period elegance  to the rest of it. Arranged on the stage were the members of the band with the usual assortment of haphazardly placed black boxes, chrome stands and cables. It was loud, and I was in the front row. The songs were a mix of stuff unfamiliar to me and old standards spruced up a bit with fancy guitar riffs and complicated drumming. The largely young congregation sat in the half light and looked at the musicians on the brightly lit stage. From time to time casually dressed guys wandered onstage to contribute to proceedings and wandered off again. It was all as contemporary as the latest model iPhone and it was exuberantly energetic and lively. It was great to see so many churches worshipping together but at times I had to work hard to feel part of what was going on around me.

Then Bishop Justin Duckworth spoke, for a good half an hour without notes, microphone in hand, strolling back and forth,  in his trademark dreads and bare feet and he was spellbinding. He spoke of resurrection and of the way the church seems to have forgotten about it. He told us that the religious, political and social powers had killed Jesus but that Jesus resurrection had defeated these powers and rendered them second rate. He reminded us that if we seriously believed in resurrection we would join the fight against oppression wherever we saw it. He told us that God's call was not to be successful or cool or wealthy but to suffer and to serve. 1000 people sat so still that the only reason you couldn't hear a pin drop was that no-one had thought to bring one. All this varied weekend of church going and this half an hour put it all into its proper place. Vestments or checked shirts or frosted windows or spotlights; none of it matters really, except to the extent that it invites us to follow Jesus in laying down our lives and participating in resurrection. Thanks Justin.

Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…

Maybe a bit off topic but what are your thoughts on Homeopathy?
13 April 2013 at 14:09
Kelvin Wright said…
I can't logically, see how it could work. I think a lot of things work if you believe they will work.
13 April 2013 at 15:57
Barbara Harris said…
The last line of a wonderful poem by an American poet says, " Live the resurrection ".
To me, so often we ,the Church, live only the crucifixion.
15 April 2013 at 11:13
Anonymous said…
Here is an American Parable:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQOtTHmwgm8&list=UU1da07BzY2CA_NVx_X5HTIQ&index=30
16 April 2013 at 11:24
Anonymous said…
Interesting the point about not being able to feel part of what was going on. More and more I'm hearing from diverse sources of how much 'contemporary' worship is being reduced to performance in front of an audience.

In part I'm sure that this is down to highly competent singers writing worship songs that are unsingable by most people. They perform them to themselves and expect everyone else can sing along, but we can't
10 May 2013 at 10:33
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incomp...
10 comments
Read more

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and...
3 comments
Read more

The Traitor

A couple of people have questioned me privately about the Leonard Cohen song The Traitor , and about Cohen's comments on the song, "[The Traitor is about] the feeling we have of betraying some mission we were mandated to fulfill and being unable to fulfill it; then coming to understand that the real mandate was not to fulfill it; and the real courage is to stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself". What on earth does he mean, and why am I so excited about it? For the latter, check with my psychiatrist. For the former, my take on the song is this: The Traitor is another of those instances, as in The Partisan , where Leonard Cohen uses a military metaphor to speak of life in general and human love in particular. Many of us hold high ideals: some great quest or other that we pursue. These are often laudable things: finding true love, finding the absolute love of God, becoming enlightened, spreading the Gospel, writing the great novel or some such ...
8 comments
Read more

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede...
Post a Comment
Read more