Together, we are Barnet

The text of words spoken at the Mayor's Civic Service - marking the coronation and celebrating the diversity of communities across the London Borough of Barnet.

Photo from Proclamation - image and credit here

The Worshipful, The Mayor of the London Borough of Barnet, Cllr Alison Moore.  

His Majesty’s Representative Deputy Lieutenant for the London Borough of Barnet,  Martin Russell. 

Councillors, faith leaders and community representatives, all who’ve gathered from across Barnet today.

The words of our opening anthem by Bruckner, Locus iste, a Deus factus est are translated as: this place is made by God.   

The text continues inaestimabile sacramentum; irreprehensibilis est translated less literally as a place that is made holy - where loving-kindness, mercy, justice, compassion are made known.

That sounds like an audacious claim - but one which resonates across faith traditions trusting in the generosity and freedom of a creator God; a claim that invites  human beings to use their freedom and curiosity to bring joy, comfort and hope. 

It’s a claim that may resonate across other forms of life and thought - noticing when love is made visible not only in this quod but in our Borough.

Locus iste, this place, made holy: blessed, enriched, strengthened, united, fun, creative, hospitable. 

At the time of his accession, King Charles talked about a moment of thanksgiving, comfort and hope, and in particular a renewed commitment to bring the margins to the centre.    

Such a renewed commitment was expressed in Archbishop Justin’s words at the Coronation: ‘service’ he said ‘is love in action’. 

The diversity of our Borough has been, is and will be drawn together when we put love into action. It shapes the creative arts and inspires care for the environment. 

Active love embraces the lonely, anxious and vulnerable; the dreamers, activists and visionaries. Such love in action strengthens bonds across different generations, class, gender, sexuality, race, politics, language. 

Service is love in action: Together we are Barnet when we give our lives for others; when we know others will be there for us when we cannot bear the weight alone. 

For over 40 years, His Majesty’s charitable Trust and Foundation drew others into that work in support of education, housing, well-being, and social inclusion. By supporting individuals and communities, we too can make a pledge: to bring the margins to the centre, so that harmony, justice and equity might flourish.

Barnet Together is the conviction and commitment that our society might be strengthened through the choices we make and action we commit to. Our diversity can bind us together in love that serves and hope that becomes reality. 

Today, as we sing God save the King, may we also ask a blessing on the people of this Borough. That Barnet may indeed be  inaestimabile sacramentum: blessed in its diversity.

© Julie Gittoes 2023

Prayer for the King’s Majesty: O Lord our heavenly Father, high and mighty, King of kings, Lord of lords, the only Ruler of princes, who dost from thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth; most heartily we beseech thee with thy favour to behold our most gracious Sovereign Lord, King Charles; and so replenish him with the grace of thy Holy Spirit, that he may alway incline to thy will, and walk in thy way: endure him plenteously with heavenly gifts; grant him in health and wealth long to live; strengthen  him that he may vanquish and overcome his enemies; and finally, after this life, he may attain everlasting joy and felicity through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. 

And the Royal Family: Almighty God the fount of all goodness, we humbly beseech thee to bless Camilla the Queen, William Prince of Wales, the Princess of Wales, and the Royal Family. Endue them with thy Holy Spirit; enrich them with thy heavenly grace; prosper them with all happiness; and bring them to thine everlasting kingdom; through Jesus Christ our Lord. 

Prayer for the Mayor and the Borough of Barnet:  Send forth, O Lord our God, your Spirit of Wisdom and Right Counsel to fill the hearts and minds of our Mayor, Councillors and Officers of this Borough of Barnet. Strengthen them in the pursuit of what is just, merciful, good and joyous for the sake of our communities.  May their service be love in action. Amen.

Blessing: The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up the light of his countenance upon you and give you his peace. Amen.

Ring out, wild bells

 14 May, 6th of Easter: Acts 17:22-31, 1 Peter 3:13-end and John 14:15-21

Tennyson wrote his epic poem In Memoriam following the sudden death of his friend Henry Hallam. The section called “Ring out, wild bells” captures the intensity of his feelings of loss Ring out the grief that saps the mind; but also the hope that the turning of the year and its seasons would mark a fresh start Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring happy bells, across the snow. 

“Bell Sunday” is a new initiative - offering us an opportunity to give thanks for the contributions of bells and bell ringers in the life of the Church.  Long after St Dunstan, their patron saint, began experimenting with forging bells in the 900s, they have rung out to offer praise and call people to worship; marking moments of personal and national significance at times of sorrow and great gladness. 

Here in Hendon, one of our bells carries the inscription:  Gloria in excelsis Deo - glory to God in the highest. As the psalmist puts it, bells join with harps and voices to sing out a glorious noise to the Lord.

Tennyson goes further, suggesting that the ringing out of wild bells echos the call to proclaim the good news of Jesus - the call to repentance, the commandment to love and the nearness of God’s kingdom.

Ring out, wild bells… ring out the false, ring in the true…

Ring out the feud of rich and poor, ring in redress to all mankind.

Wild bells are to ring out strife, want, care and sin; the faithless coldness of the times.

They ring in a nobler mode of life, sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,

The civic slader and the spite;

Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

Our wild bells ringing in the love and obedience of which Jesus speaks: If you love me, he says, keep my commandments. 

It is such a simple and memorable command; yet how often we struggle to embrace it fully. To love makes us vulnerable and invites us to trust. That’s hard when we’d prefer to sit with our own preferences or suspicions. It's hard when the world seems to be bent towards slander and spite, rather than common love of good.

Love flows over the margins and blurs the edges when we’d sometimes prefer neat boundaries of the ability to control what happens; love remoulds us and brings change, when we’d rather not deal with the disruption or effort.

Jesus invites us to love one another as he has loved us: with honest engagement, with a depth of compassion, with a generous invitation and patient, persistent challenge. Even when we see ourselves as most unlovely or unworthy, Jesus rings in love of truth and right.

And don’t we at some level yearn for this - for the common love of good which rings out strife, want, care and sin?

At some level, we yearn for a love that gives to food banks and shares cake with those who are alone; a love that draws people together in their diversity and stops to ask if someone is ok.

Jesus’ words form us into a community centred on God’s all-inclusive commandment to love: to love beyond our preferences and friendships; to love beyond what feels manageable. His call to love is to be pulled towards a fierce hunger for the other, for justice, for compassion. To love until our heart breaks.

For love to become part of the muscle memory of our hearts and minds, we need to practise love as diligently as ringers learn to handle a rope and learn a method.  

Ringers begin with one stroke at a time; getting the measure of the weight and movement; they ring in rounds, sensing when to pull off and when to hold back. They embody technique and get to know rope and bell. 

In the same way we learn to love: practising charity as our heart changes, expands; until we love friends, companions and then the stranger or those we disagree with. 

Ringers model for us how to move into new patterns and changes; they remind us that we don’t do all the work of learning and loving by ourselves. That would be too much to carry. Whereas they practise and trust, learn and build their memory, with dedication and discipline, so do we. Together.

We do so not only in the company of a human band of ringers, but with one who is our advocate, helper, comforter and encourager: the Spirit who lives in and moves through us. The Spirit is a gift from the heart of God to abide with us. 

Such a Spirit is inexhaustible - taking root in our hearts and helping us to be more fully who we are. The Spirit abides in our hearts and minds - allowing the possibility of love in each thought, breath and gesture. 

The Spirit rings in truth in us, rings in remembrance of love and calls us to abide and rest. Peals of bells are all our attention because they spring forth after times not only of practice but of rest. Here we abide: around one table, one food - for the sake of one world.

Our lives, like the wild bells ringing out, have times of movement and rhythm, rest and stillness.  Perhaps we can listen to them and be reminded of God - the one, as Paul quoted another poet, in whom we live and move and have our being. 

What we see in Paul is someone caught up in the Spirit. When he encounters those outside his own frame of reference and experience, his speech, as Jennings puts it  meets divine desire. Then the Holy Spirit will tell you [him, us] what to say in order to create the new in and through your [our, his] words. That new is a relationship aimed at a marvellous joining.

Paul sees the idols as signs of distorted hope - made by human beings and reflecting human longings. However, he does not condemn but rather finds a point of connection which speaks of God’s love for them.  He finds a way of bending them towards what they do not know to be enfolded by God - showing them that they are loved and wanted. 

It is why, as with the wild bells, the call of love rings out sin, selfishness and separation; and rings in truth, love and peace. The ringing out of wild bells expresses something of God’s love and the claim that love makes on us - a claim that changes us. Which is why, to quote Jennings again, God demands of all people the turning-toward that is repentance. A habit for individual, churches and communites.

The love of God in Christ stands between life and death. In baptism, as Peter reminds us, we die in the flesh but are made alive in the Spirit.  Here we find gift and grace; here our hearts are set on fire with justice. This is the hope of love that we are to be willing to give an account of: the call to repentance and the gift of new life, for the sake of the world.

Ring in… the larger heart, the kinder hand;

Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.

© Julie Gittoes 2023

Story all the way down

Sunday 7 May, 5th of Easter: Acts 7:55-end, 1 Peter 2:2-10 and John 14:1-14

It is story all the way down. There is no life without story. We enter story from the time we are born and never exit story even in death. 

Words from Willie Jennings - the black American theologian whose commentary on Acts draws us vividly into the story of the early church.

We are a story telling people. We break the ice in conversations, shape communities and or influence decisions by the stories we tell. 

Some stories will seek to confirm identity or offer us certainty or stability; others will open up questions or stir our imaginations with new possibilities.

Telling stories is powerful because they embody or even conjure up reality - confirming the past, shaping the present and determining the future. 

Today’s readings open up and challenge the kind of stories we tell: 

In Peter’s letter we find ourselves called into God’s story - called to be God’s people, holy, faithful and beloved.

Peter invites us to become like infants - to be in a place of vulnerability and dependence.  This is where we begin to grow into salvation - into that place of healing and wholeness. 

It’s the beginning of a story: there is the expectation that we will explore and grow, but also the reality that we will be finding our way, sometimes stumbling or sometimes reaching out. 

This story is grounded in, or indeed on, Jesus: a durable corner stone which bears the weight, but also shame and rejection, alongside election choice and grace.  

We are built on a foundation which is a living stone - and we too live: we will grow and change, being shaped and honed within a community.

Peter paints a picture where it is safe to grow and learn; a community where sacrifices might be made for the sake of others; where mutual love shapes patterns of life; where we tell a different story reflecting what God has done in Christ - and not only that, what God continues to do in us, for the sake of a future we can only just glimpse.

What matters is God’s appraisal of us  - God’s choice, calling and grace.

To be a community called to the dignity of a holy, royal priesthood, might not be about  having all the answers or crossing our fingers that a fixed response might work.

It is instead submitting ourselves to a process of refinement; refined by the fire of God’s love; to be a continual work in progress through the loving mercy of God.

Our shared pattern of life shaping lives - trusting that if we place our trust in God, we will never be put to shame. 

The communities, churches and households we are part of sometimes reinforce fixed expectations; yet through the Spirit we are called into a new story. 

In Acts, we see Stephen at the moment in his life where his gaze extends beyond this world. He has come to this point because of such a new story. A story that has Jesus at the centre - a story that has reshaped, redirected and reordered his life. 

Image link here

Jesus spoke in stories - drawing all human life and story-telling back to our creator. In Jesus, God entered into our story and drew it into his own body as Jennings puts it. It is this story that Stephen tells when he faces false accusations.

In the power of the Spirit, he tells God’s story of promise, vulnerability and waiting…. of pain, rejection and waiting…  For it is in the waiting that we are drawn into a life of love with God; a hope fulfilled in an embodied word of love. 

Stephen’s life was filled with his Saviour’s story: of Jesus’ words and deeds, life and death; of the Spirit’s movement to raise up and break cycles of despair. 

And now his eyes are drawn beyond the violent fray to gaze on heaven; to glimpse the end of the story.  As his life passes from earthly reality to eternal promise, his words are scattered and love takes root. 

Alongside Stephen the persecuted we see  Saul, the persecutor who’d become Paul.  Jennings writes that Stephen found his way to love. Saul was yet to find his way.

In John, we hear about such a way.  Thomas and Philip are asking lots of questions - they are seeking out something certain that they can hold on to. 

In his response, Jesus is inviting them into a place of trust and prayer, a place where they can dwell and grow in mutual love.

He speaks to these troubled and anxious disciples of a way of truth and life, which leads them deeper into the love of God.

It is a way which seeks out what is just and honourable; a way which builds up and sets us free from shame.

Jesus promises his disciples a place in God’s story - in the unfolding drama of what it is to love and be loved.  All that is through him. In us trusting that Jesus is as God is; and that the Spirit will continue to encourage, comfort and help us in this way. 

In laying down his life for us, Jesus goes to the depths of the grave and reveals the power of the resurrection. The way, truth and life of Jesus is to reconcile all things in love. That is our ultimate reality.

Yet even our frail human bodies can also reflect something of this way of life. God’s Spirit is at work in us - when we show compassion and kindness, when we show hospitality and friendship. We are to walk this way; embrace this truth; to dwell in this love.

Here in this place, we are given a glimpse of a way of love and friendship; we are invited to discover the truth of such love in action; and to rejoice that signs of life are indeed signs of love. 

Here we receive the bread of life, given for us.

Here we are recalled as God’s people.

Here we are refined by the fire of God’s love.

Here we are sent out to tell a story of healing and possibility, of mercy and hope. 

This is a story of life out of death, and a world healed by love’s wounds: we enter into this story which invites us to risk ourselves for those we serve in compassion and courage. 

© Julie Gittoes 2023

Abundant life - a holy vortex

 30 April 4th after Easter: Acts 2:42-end, 1 Peter 2:19-end and John 10:1-10

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry has been described as a deep dive into the souls of a retired couple or as a sentimental tear-jerker undermined by its own implausibility.

As is often the way with films, the reality is somewhere in-between. It is beautifully shot with moments of tenderness, restraint, feeling; sometimes it tips out of kilter, at others we flinch or cringe.

We meet Harold and his wife Maureen, in their sub-urban home with its net curtains and familiar routines. The conversation is as sparse as the house.

Image

A letter from a dying former colleague triggers not only a memory of a person but a life-time of what has been left unsaid in the face of tragedy, grief and needing to survive.  Harold’s response is to write.

So far, so ordinary. Rhythms of life bound by convention. 

Having missed the post and following a conversation about hope with a teenage cashier, Harold’s response is to walk from Devon to Berwick-upon-Tweed. 

To walk 500 miles, as The Proclaimers once sang,  seems for Harold to be highly unlikely.  

Writing in The Spectator, one critic suggests that: ‘Released from his own passivity, Harold is waking up to life.’

There is kindness and judgement, loneliness and company; the burden and security of things; the vulnerability and freedom of letting go. 

There is a media storm of the kind that celebrates what seems remarkable if not fully understood; there’s the intimacy of phone calls home, with awkward truth telling, and the way we never fully know ourselves or each other. 

It unveils the effort and instinctiveness of the ordinary and plots a landscape of faith and redemption.  There are names and voices, being known and led into a process of truth, love, forgiveness; a letting go to find life again.  Life in all its fullness maybe.

During a school assembly, the then Bishop of Hereford, encouraged 600 young people to remember John 10:10 - I have come that you may have life and have it in abundance. It stayed with me because it sounded so full of hope and possibility; a phrase we hold on in the face of the ordinary and the unlikely.

Perhaps though it’s the imagery circling that memorable phrase that we are invited to sit with. Images that are mobile, shifting, multifaceted, familiar yet strange.

We are invited to attend to the voice of the shepherd in the face of danger, risk and vulnerability; to know that voice as we make decisions which shape our life.

Who do we listen to, trust or follow?

Image: Sarah West - Visio Lectio

David Ford describes the way this passage draws us deeper into the Bible and relationship with God which is ‘life in community, vocation of love, trust and compassion; that share in eternal abundant life of God’.  The world is indeed in need of such life. 

We live in a world with a great multitude of voices: voices which make claims about who we are and our worth; voices directing how we should act; painting pictures about who we should view the other. 

Against this, Jesus paints pictures which enlarge our imagination: he names the threats of thieves or indifference of hired hands; but he also promises the faithfulness of one who is at the gate - knowing us and calling by name; leading us and laying down his life in love for us.  In the words of Peter, however much we struggle and endure, we are healed by Jesus’ wounds, by his life.

“My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they know me.”

The basis for abundant life is this God-centred image of justice, peace and blessing.  A love that sets us on the way to be a pastoral people; a people who walk with others and advocate for them.

In the face of all that threatens to consume or destroy, all that perplexes or grieves us, there is also more faith, hope and love than we dare to imagine.  For Harold, it was perhaps less in the validation of his cause by a crowd wearing pilgrim t-shirts, but in the woman who tended his blistered and battered feet, inviting him to rest.

He sees her - and she sees him. Together, embodying something of what the writer Henri Nouwen said: ‘to pray, to listen to the voice of the one who calls us the “beloved” is to learn that that voice excludes no one’.

Here the love of God revealed in the life of Jesus gives shape to our lives through the work of the Spirit. It is when we see, in ordinary and unlikely ways, the ‘miraculous flowing through weathered hands’ as Willie Jennings vividly puts it.

He sees in the book of Acts, a tentative and fleeting moment when in the normal, daily routines of community, the immense implications of life in the Spirit are embodied.

He says: ‘time, talent and treasures, the trinity of possessions we know so well, would feel the pull of this holy vortex’.

In Acts we glimpse what it was like to feel the power of the Spirit drawing our lives, plans, purposes and stories into a new direction. 

They prayed, listened, broke bread and shared what they had. Such a ‘holy communalism’ was a moment of possibility. We know that people will offer up money or possessions to a cause that matters to them. Yet, we are also called to offer up ourselves - bodies bound together and sustained by the body of Christ.

In each Eucharist, we are given just enough. A wafer of fragility and yet abundance. 

In fragments of food, sips of wine and moments of blessing, we are drawn into new life together. We are drawn away from death and towards abundant life; we are prompted to make our own unlikely pilgrimage in seeking the end of poverty, hunger and despair. 

The voice that calls us beloved, excludes no one. And we might continue, it’s a voice that changes everyone. A voice which reminds us that we are bound together in love for the sake of others, for the sake of the world. 

The bonds of communion are given life by the breath of the Spirit - what Jennings calls a ‘holy wind’ which blows through structures and settled ways of life. 

That holy breath stirs up generosity in our hearts - as we look to resource the worship and ministry of this place. How might we give generously of the trinity of our possessions - our time, talent and treasures? Giving that we might serve in the world as a pilgrim people; and sharing that we might draw others in the holy vortex of God’s forgiving, restoring, consoling love.

© Julie Gittoes 2023