EPIPHANY ONE - THE BAPTISM OF OUR LORD
11th January 2004
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
Of course the sinner must repent. But why? Simply because otherwise he would be unable to realise what he had done. The moment of repentance is the moment of initiation. More than that. It is the means by which one alters one's past. The Greeks thought that impossible. They often say in their gnomic aphorisms "Even the Gods cannot alter the past." Christ showed that the commonest sinner could do it. That it was the one thing he could do. Christ, had he been asked, would have said - I feel quite certain about it - that the moment the prodigal son fell on his knees and wept he really made his having wasted his substance with harlots, and then kept swine and hungered for the husks they ate, beautiful and holy incidents in his life. It is difficult for most people to grasp the idea. I dare say one has to go to prison to understand it. If so, it may be worth while going to prison.
Oscar Wilde
A PRAYER FOR THIS WEEK
O Christ, my Lord, again and again I have said with Mary Magdalene, "they have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have laid him." I have been desolate and alone. And you have found me again, and I know that what has died is not you, my Lord, but only my idea of you, the image which I have made to preserve what I have found, and to be my security. I shall make another image, O Lord, better than the last. That too must go, and all successive images, until I come to the blessed vision of thyself, O Christ, my Lord. Amen.
WHACK
A man sat in a pub, just drinking a beer and minding his own business, when all of a sudden, a big oaf came in, knocked him off his stool, and said: "That was a karate chop from Korea!" The man dusted himself down, got back on the stool and had another beer. All of a sudden the oaf knocked him down again, and said: "That was a judo chop from Japan!" The man had had enough of this treatment, and so left the pub only to return fifteen minutes later and, with a huge WHACK, knocked the oaf unconscious. He looked at the barman and said: "when he wakes up, tell him that that was a crowbar from Mitre 10!"
LIMERICKS
The limerick is furtive and mean;
You must keep her in close quarantine,
Or she sneaks to the slums
And promptly becomes
Disorderly, drunk and obscene.
Morris Bishop
A flea and a fly in a flue
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly: "let us flee"
Said the flea: "let us fly!"
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.
Anon
A tone-deaf old parson from Tring,
When somebody asked him to sing,
Replied: "It is odd,
But I cannot tell God
Save the Weasel from Pop goes the King."
Anon
God brought perfect man to fruition,
But viewing the scraps with contrition,
He collected the junk,
And created the skunk,
The snake and the first politician.
Douglas Catley
ALL IN A SAUSAGE SKIN
Fr Andrew Neaum
There was a fat, white, pasty-looking and extremely Anglo Catholic dean of my diocese when I was a child. Whenever my mother cooked sausages for us she would say, as she put them into the pan all pale, pink, soft and pasty looking, "Look, here's Dean So and So before he heads off to the seaside on holiday." When they were fat, brown, firm, crispy and ready to be eaten, she would say, "Look, here is Dean So and So back from his holiday by the sea." As children we thought this an excellent joke. I am still childish enough to think it rather funny.
The Weather Sausage
When I was at theological college we were served huge and fearsome sausages on Saturday nights. They were called "Boerwors", that is: farm sausages, a South African Dutch sausage. They were long, black, spicy brutes, and unlike other sausages contained no sawdust, just a generous proportion of large gristle granules to dilute the coarse particles of real meat. They used to make us burp.
One Saturday night I took a particularly fearsome looking specimen of these sausages from the dining room, and pinned it onto the door of a student who was coming in late that night. I hoped that it would give him a fright hanging there black and morosely comatose to greet him in the dark and that it would remind him of what he had missed.
He was neither frightened nor impressed. He pulled it off the door and threw it out of the window on to the roof of the verandah below. It stayed there for months and proved to be a very informative sausage. It sent out a slow trickle of grease on hot days, went black in sunshine and white in the rain. We all became fascinated by it. You could tell the weather from it. We were sorry when a crow spied it, ate it and burped and gurgled over it for hours in a nearby tree.
Parish Sausages
Sausages played not a small role in the life of the parish church in Ararat. On every first Sunday of the month a proportion of our congregation used to head off for a barbecue somewhere in the district. We walked or swam, drank local wine and devoured local sausages. In the first two of the parishes I was Rector of in Australia, both of them very rural, I was asked to assist parishioners in the slaughter and butchering of pigs, an unpleasant and salutary business. The man I assisted in Ararat made his own sausages and sometimes brought them to our barbecues. They were a vile, mottled, episcopal-purple and pink when raw, but were full of real meat and imaginative spices and so were very tasty when cooked, to those with a sense of adventure.
I have always loved good sausages, except for a short time when I was visiting a butcher regularly in hospital. He told me of some of the indescribably nasty things that he put into his sausages. It put me off them for a while, but not for long. They are far too tasty to leave alone for any length of time, especially crisp-cooked pork sausages. Sausage, egg and chips was a good cheap staple meal when I was a poverty-stricken teacher in London. A meal of sausage and mash, with fried onion and lashings of gravy is so gloriously English and tasty that it dispels any republican sentiments in me. In Shepparton, what a pleasure to discover that in the Europa imported English pork sausages can be purchased, though at a price!
The Sausage And Sin
Sausages are a clever way that butchers have evolved to make unpleasant meat tasty and useful. All sorts of scraps and pieces of meat are stuffed into sausage skins. They are minced and spiced and pushed in tight, and the result, if the butcher knows his job, is delicious. There is no meat wasted in a good butcher's shop. It can all be used. A sausage skin covers a multitude of sins.
A Tasty Metaphor
The Church is a gracious old lady who has attracted to herself many metaphors and similes down through the ages. I would like to suggest a new and tasty if not tasteful one. The Church is like a sausage! I love it. I have never been able to stay away from it for long. I love its buildings, its music, its services, its traditions, its parsons, its bishops, its organists, its choirs, its people, its God. The Church, like sausages, has played a big part in my life. And just as sausages are a resourceful expedient that butchers have evolved to make unpleasant bits of meat tasty and useful, so is the Church a clever way that God has evolved to make unpleasant people tasty and useful. As you find all sorts of scraps and pieces of meat stuffed into sausage skins, so you find all sorts and types of people in the Church - large, small, good, bad, holy, unholy, beautiful, ugly, old, young, sane, insane, high church, low church..... every sort and type, all acceptable and good to be with because God loves them and because they are all trying to love or follow or believe in God.
There need be no waste in God's world. Everyone, every scrap and morsel of a person can be used and made something of in God's Holy Church, even a sausage freak like me.
RELATIONSHIPS
No one involved in a "relationship" ever had a good time. One may be courting, seducing, experimenting sexually, dating, married, keeping company, and so on. But anything called "a relationship" must eventually result in sorrow, as the participants are unwilling to examine and name its nature.
David Mamet
THIS AND THAT
I think that I have mentioned before one of the lovely books that I slowly meander meditatively through in the chapel each morning, "Word from Wormingford" by Ronald Blythe. It is full of beautiful writing. The following little extract talks of people at worship in an English country church being "seized by reverie", of liturgy "playing pranks" and "devout heads... spinning holy day-dreams". This shows a true and profound understanding of the beauty of Anglican liturgical worship and how it works and why we love it.....:
I descend steeply into the cool church..... it smells of baked churchyard and has trapped within it some of the blue of the harebells which, in July, form a kind of cloudless sky at foot level. The heatwave devours the hilltop even at this hour of the morning and we can hear the drone of a barley-cutter. There are a dozen of us to be moved by scripture in this particular sundry place, and moved we are because Andrew has to read the song of Deborah and Barak, a terrible ballad all about a woman tricking a hunted captain into what he believes is a safe haven and then driving a tent-peg through his temple as he sleeps, nailing his head to her floor. Andrew does not stumble at this but approaches names such as ‘Issachar' and ‘Naphtali' warily. Jim used to plough through such verbal obstructions head-on, sending syllables flying in all directions. Surely the elderly women in their summery frocks are going to faint when Jael picks up ‘the workman's hammer', but no. Andrew's ghastly words float over them because they have been seized by reverie and have been struck senseless by sunshine. Liturgy is playing its pranks in their devout heads and spinning holy day-dreams around them. I try to take my mind off the tent-peg by concentrating on the kaleidoscopic colours which the east window casts upon a wall-tablet to children who perished during some Georgian epidemic. I hear Andrew conclude: ‘And the land had rest forty years.' So maybe Deborah had something to sing about.....
On Tuesday we had an interesting meeting to do with reviving "Children's Church". The plan is to begin on the second Sunday in February and to make the 10.30am Eucharist on all second Sunday's a Children's Church day. Anyone who is interested in helping in the monthly team meeting to prepare material for the activity that is a part of the whole worship event please indicate so on the list in the narthex. We also need the names of children to be invited and there is a list for them too.
The aims of Children Church are varied. One is to introduce children to Anglican worship, and so the children are present at the ordinary 10.30 Eucharist up until the talk, and the service remains resolutely Anglican. One of the problems with Sunday School has always been that when properly done, it was so interesting and lively that it innoculated children against normal worship, they could never make the transition from Sunday School to conventional church attendance! Anglican worship, which we love, is nonetheless very much an acquired taste, our children need introducing to it, first to suffer, then to tolerate and eventually to enjoy and love. To deny one's children this process is to risk them discovering the faith only through the more frenzied versions of Christianity which are on offer in church services of denominations or sects noted for emotional and uninhibited community singing, "spontaneous praying" and extremely unsophisticated and often literalistic theology. This they eventually are likely to grow out of, but they will forever thereafter regard such expressions of Christianity as normative and so glorious, orthodox and resolutely sane expressions of the Christian faith and tradition are never likely to be considered as worthy of a possible return to.
A second aim of Children's Church is to teach. It is easy enough to entertain children, or indeed adults for that matter, teaching is more difficult especially in a brief session once a month that has to include worship as well. However, children need to be taught a little of the Christian tradition, of the Gospel and of what a commitment to Jesus entails. This needs to be done in an interesting and indeed entertaining way, but entertainment must never be allowed to become an end in itself. There is a higher purpose. Children come to learn about their Lord and the Christian faith as well as to meet him in worship.
A third aim is to give to children and their family a greater sense of belonging. One of the strengths of the Anglican Church, at its best, is inclusiveness. I am encouraged by how many people I meet in Shepparton who, although they never think of coming to worship with us, still regard St Augustine's as "their" church, and obviously hold it in high regard and view it with affection. Children need to learn that it is their church, that they belong and can turn to it when they feel an urge or need to. Once children feel they belong then there is a chance with barbecues and nativity plays and so on to encourage parents and relatives to attend and begin to feel a part of the church family as well.
This February is notable for having five Sundays, something that can only happen in a leap year. I wonder when last there were five Sundays in February?
This is the last Sunday that the crib is displayed. You will notice that the Wise Men have displaced the shepherds, it being now Epiphanytide. Having the crib beneath the altar has been most effective and widely appreciated. Elizabeth was the one who persuaded us it was the best option and the blue back drop was a masterstroke. Elizabeth has returned to Canberra to attempt to find a job in her favoured field. If anyone has temporary employment of any sort to offer Rachel, she will be delighted. She is a talented girl from a most distinguished and lovely family!
Fr Andrew
WORRY
Worrying is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do, but it gets you nowhere.
Glenn Turner
PARISH COUNCIL
There is, I believe, a Parish Council Meeting this week on Wednesday at 7.30pm. Hurrah.
KATANDRA AND DOOKIE
The Rector hopes to be at the services at Katandra and Dookie next Sunday.
CONGRATULATIONS
Congratulations to Joan O'Reilly who celebrates her birthday on Wednesday the 14th. Also to Andrea and David Muskee and to Justin and Georgia Ganly married yesterday. It would be good if the birthdays and anniversaries of folk at Dookie and Katandra were sent in to the parish office!
ROSTERS
There are revised copies of most Rosters for 2004 available in the Narthex.
CHILDREN'S CHURCH
There is a list in the Narthex for the names of children to whom we can send an invitation to Children's Church on the 8th February. Helpers with preparing activities are also needed.
PRAYER
Prayer List
Liam Bognar, Judy Carlyle, Rita Esam, Peg Galt, Iris Grant, the Harrison Family, Jean Hastie, Fr Wayne Ireland, Ann Mills, Joan O'Reilly, John Perry, Ray Prosser, Rodger Saville, Gwen & Bob Scott, Peter & Eva Swindells, Des Walker, May Wallace, Malcolm Waters, Bruce, Natalie & baby Alexandra, David, Emily, Faith, Gary Midge.
Anniversary of Death
Leslie Gribble, George Watkins, Emily Jean Pleming 12th, Nicholas Auldrige 13th, Margaret Ann Tobias 14th, Keith Dean 16th, Ernest Guyatt 17th.
IMPORTANT DATES
Jan 19th Orthodox Baptism of Jesus
Feb 7th Wedding 2.00pm
Feb 7th Wedding 3.30pm
Feb 8th Children's Church 10.30am
Feb 14th Wedding 3.00pm
Feb 25th Ash Wednesday and AGM
Mar 21st Mothering sunday
April 11th Easter Day
May 18th - 21st Annual Priests' Retreat
May 28th -29th Synod
Jun 5th Ugandan Martyrs - Breakfast
Nov 13th Parish Fair
THIS WEEK
Monday January 12th
Father Andrew's day off
7.45am Mattins & Eucharist - Lady Chapel
5.30pm Evening Prayer
Tuesday January 13th Hilary of Poitiers
7.45am Mattins & Eucharist - Lady Chapel
5.30pm Evening Prayer
Wednesday January 14th
7.45am Mattins - Lady Chapel
10.00am Eucharist - St Augustine's
11.00am Banksia Lodge
1.30pm Hakea Lodge
5.30pm Evening Prayer
7.30pm Parish Council
Thursday January 15th
7.45am Mattins & Eucharist - Lady Chapel
5.30pm Evening Prayer
Friday January 16th
7.45am Mattins & Eucharist - Lady Chapel
11.00am Eucharist - Ave Maria Home
5.30pm Evening Prayer
Saturday January 17th Anthony of Egypt
7.45am Mattins & Eucharist - Lady Chapel
4.30pm Wedding - St Augustine's
6.00pm Wedding - St Augustine's
Sunday January 18th Epiphany Two
8.00am Mattins - Lady Chapel
8.30am Sung Eucharist - St Augustine's
9.00am Eucharist - St Luke's Dookie
10.30am Eucharist - St Augustine's
10.45am Eucharist - St Mary's Katandra West.
5.30pm Evening Prayer