My Dual Role - and how I realised EVERYONE can benefit from spiritual care

 

This is the talk I gave at the EMBT UK NAP conference on Friday 18th October.

Good morning, I’m Fi and I‘ve been a haematology-oncology nurse for 24 years. I started work as a newly qualified D grade in September 2000 on the haematology and transplant unit at The Christie in Manchester (my hometown) after falling in love with haem as a student in Liverpool. 

In January 2007, after returning from maternity leave when I had my second child, I became a band 6 and I’ve now been a sister for over 17 years – and my baby has just turned 18. 

So, I’ve been around a while, I’ve seen a lot of developments, I feel like I have a lot of knowledge and skills, and I’m still completely in love with haem and transplant, and I’m particularly passionate about supporting early career nurses so that they hopefully stick around like I have. It’s so important to have skilled and experienced staff on our units and if we nurture our teams, we’ll hopefully retain those who like me find the most job satisfaction at the bedside.

I’m also a Church of England priest. 

 

I was brought up in a church-going family, which was already a bit weird 30 odd years ago when I was still in school, and like a lot of teenagers I stopped going as I had better things to do and many of the things I perceived as the teachings of the church didn’t sit well with my own values, particularly those around the role of women and the inclusion of the LGBTQ+ community. 

But then, compelled by something and newly married, in March 2002 I started attending my local church, which had a woman vicar – one of the first – and I learnt I was allowed to believe in things like evolution and that there’s an incredibly wide breadth of beliefs in the Church of England - so wide that I’m sure there’s a C of E community for anyone who follows the Christian faith. I was incredibly lucky that my local church was, and continues to be, progressive and inclusive.

It became a huge part of my life, I had the kids, and I was feeling compelled again, this time drawn to a more formal leadership role in the church, and it felt like that was a call to the priesthood, which made no sense with my vocation as a nurse – I’m sure many of you feel that nursing is your vocation and you can’t imagine being anything else.

I subsequently learned about something called an MSE or minster in secular employment. MSEs are priests or accredited lay people (lay means someone who isn’t clergy) where it’s recognised that their priestly work or ministry is actually in their place of employment, and I met MSEs who were nurses, solicitors, vets, dentists and even tax officers! I went through a very lengthy selection process (it took about 3 years), started training in September 2013, was ordained in 2016 and priested in 2017.

I’m also now a Chaplain at the Christie. 

I’d worked as a staff adviser with the team since 2010, so when I was ordained I took up an honorary chaplaincy role. I have to be very careful and very strict with boundaries, so the honorary contract formalised and authorised the work I was already doing. 

In 2019 the opportunity arose for a paid role within the team, I dropped my nursing hours to 30 per week – the biggest career decision I’ve ever made - and I work one day a week as a chaplain - I’m now the deputy lead for the service.

So that’s a whistlestop tour of how I got here, and I guess what I’ve been asked to convey is how the dual role informs each of my jobs, where there’s overlap, where’s there’s clashes and how it can benefit patients and staff in a transplant setting. I’m pretty sure this is an entirely unique combination of roles within the same trust, but I truly believe that each makes me better at the other.

My personal belief is that each one of us has a spiritual life that needs to be fed, what this needs is as different and unique as we are. For some it may be our faith. If like myself you work in a tertiary or regional centre, you’ll know the joy of working in a diverse, multi-faith and multi-cultural environment. Those of us with a religious faith might practice or express that in vastly different ways.

 

For others our spirituality might be fed by music, literature, nature, poetry, pets, craft, hospitality, baking, meditation – it’s vast, and as a nurse who’s always worked with patients in isolation I’ve always been keenly aware of how our patients can feed and care for their spiritual life whilst isolated from most of the things which nurture and ground them, and what we can do to help.

 

Spirituality is anything that helps us connect- with ourselves, with others, with our world, and (if we have faith) with God or a Higher Power. Spiritual need, and even distress, kicks in when these connections are compromised or broken. 

The role of a chaplain is in essence to walk alongside the patient and assist them in whatever way is right for them to care for their spiritual needs, which keeps a person grounded in who they are at their very core. 

 

They way I explain to people how our chaplaincy service at the Christie works is that we’re the one person who goes to the patient’s bedside with absolutely no agenda, each of us who goes to see a patient in our various healthcare roles has an agenda to meet- an assessment to do, information to obtain, bloods, tests, observations, something to administer, and this is true of the wider MDT as well.

As a chaplain you’re meeting your patient where they are, as who they are as a complete person, not the one aspect of their care I may be concerned with as a healthcare professional but as someone who just wants to check “how are you today, is there anything you want to talk about?” 

We’re the privileged witnesses to and holders of people’s stories, the number of times I’ve gone to a bed side and felt the overwhelming honour of someone sharing their story or that of their loved one.

There can be misconceptions of why we’re there due to perceptions of what a chaplain is, we introduce ourselves as being there for spiritual support, and very little of what we do is religious care. Mostly we give pastoral support, and around 1/3 of the patients under our care are not religious.

 

In 2023 we had a total of 1138 patient contacts, from 10 different faiths or world views, we had 398 new referrals, assessed 127 patients in the last days of life and this was between our 3 paid team members, who between us make up 1 full time equivalent, our Roman Catholic cover 2 days per week and 2 honorary chaplains from minority faiths. This year the numbers are already much higher as our volunteers have finally returned post covid, we try to have a volunteer assigned to each ward and visiting weekly to help build those therapeutic relationships.

 

So, does being a chaplain make me a better nurse? 100% yes. In chaplaincy you’re journeying alongside someone in a different way to how you do as a nurse, and it changes your perspective. The patients who as a nurse we find the most difficult or frustrating -  you know the ones I mean - are often the ones that as chaplains we do the most work with, it helps you to understand their complexities, the origins of those complex, frustrating and obstructive behaviours and therefore how they need us to work with them to achieve the healthcare goals necessary.

I may have known a person for months or years as a nurse, but then the richness of what I learn about them through their significant chaplaincy conversations teaches me things about them I would never have otherwise known and might in some cases transform how we care for them medically. 

One of my boundaries is that, unless it’s an emergency I don’t give religious care on the ward I work on, but this is one of the important ways my work as a nurse informs my chaplaincy – by identifying those patients I’ve worked with as a nurse who will benefit from chaplaincy input, and I’m almost always right! Giving that opportunity for someone to open up and release into the world the things they’re holding inside is transformative.

We’ve very carefully chosen the chaplains who do see the patients on the transplant unit. We have Rabbi Lisa (who sadly has just left us to take up a Rabbinical post in Birmingham), who has extensive training in mindfulness and was employed with a specific focus on the teenage and young adult patients on my unit, which alongside our haematology and transplant programme houses the regional TYA oncology unit.

Our volunteer chaplain is Mary, a retired GP who’s a humanist, she focuses on the adult patients and as well as her medical knowledge has the unique perspective of just returning to us after fighting for her life in ICU. It’s had a huge impact on how she empathises with patients. 

When we recruit Rabbi Lisa’s replacement our focus will be on the needs of the TYA and non-religious patients, including the many going through transplant under our care.

For my chaplaincy work with the oncology patients in the rest of the hospital my nursing knowledge gives me the ability to quickly assess where a patient is at medically as I often don’t even know their diagnosis. I process what they’re attached to, how they look or the snippets of medical information we’re given about them. All these things I’ll interpret in a much more clinical way than my non-clinical chaplaincy colleagues. 

Most of the patients who end up in our care are long stay – at least 3 weeks – and my long experience with long-stay and isolated patients has created the empathy to hopefully understand where they’re at and what they may need. 

The other way the roles complement each other is in my passion for staff support, which is part of my focus within chaplaincy and a huge part of my nursing role. I’ve recently completed PNA training, and the skills honed through this seamlessly feed into chaplaincy, where we also offer debrief after complex or traumatic events, and support staff as individuals and as groups.

Since coming into post, I’ve tried to raise our profile amongst staff as another means of support, entirely separate from nursing structures. We’ve supported staff through cancer and other illnesses, through caring for family members, abusive relationships, disciplinary hearings, pregnancy loss, the death of colleagues, racist abuse, financial struggles and many other things. All our staff data is anonymously recorded.

Chaplaincy might not be someone’s first choice through difficult life events and traumatic work experiences, but chaplains work at the cliff face of trauma and grief. And we have a ritual for any occasion! Something deep within us as humans seems to crave ritual, and we can come up with something religious or secular for any purpose. My colleague Andrew developed a secular service for staff to use to say goodbye to patients who’ve died, knowing that with our long-stay patients staff often grieve deeply. 

Every November I take part in a day where we invite the families of TYA patients who’ve died to collectively remember their loved ones.

In conclusion, in my experience, my two roles seamlessly inform the other, how could they not if I’m to be an authentic practitioner within each role? I’ve avoided clashes by ensuring my boundaries are firm within each role and by helping raise awareness of what good spiritual care can look like.

All means all

May I speak in the name of the One God, Speaker, Word and Breath. Amen.

Today is Disability Awareness Sunday, coming at the end of Disability Awareness Week, which began last Sunday. It’s a day when hundreds of churches focus on disability inclusion within churches, what it means and what it might look like.

The Christian Disability Awareness organisation Through The Roof tell us “churches are often not aware of the many barriers disabled people can face on their journey to join, or be fully included, in church communities. Accessibility of church buildings isn’t the only barrier – there are lots of social and attitude barriers too, which are easy to overlook.

In a UK survey by Scope, 2 out of every 3 people said they felt ‘uncomfortable’ speaking with disabled people, and 3 out of every 4 disabled people reported experiencing negative attitudes or behaviour from others.” Just yesterday Mike and myself popped into Nandos for lunch, the young man we met at the door looked flustered by Mike being in a wheelchair and never once spoke to him directly.

I wasn’t sure if I was the right member of our team to preach today, even though I live in a household with multiple disabilities – some more obvious, others more hidden, their stories aren’t my story to tell. 

As many of you know our team has a variety of lived experience with disability, so if anything I say doesn’t feel correct then I welcome you and anyone here with lived experience to challenge and question, that’s how we grow together as a community.

And there’s another caveat I want to add – disability is a word with such enormous scope. It covers physical differences – congenital or acquired, surgical or degenerative - some of these are more obvious than others. It covers sensory deficits – hearing and sight being the most common but conditions which cause loss of sensation in the hands or feet can be hugely challenging in day-to-day life – how we turn the pages of a hymn book or climb the step to the communion rail can limit church inclusion.

There’s intellectual disabilities (a term I don’t like but I don’t know a better one), mental health conditions and neurodivergences – a category so broad and individual that each person’s needs will be vastly different, this makes it hugely difficult to know how to be the inclusive space and community which meets such a vast range of difference.

In our gospel reading today Jesus tells us that if we welcome a child we welcome him. Many preachers take this example and speak of the innocence and simplicity of children, that with the disciples argument about greatness the greatest is actually the person often considered the least, but others have read this symbolic act differently.

Professor Eugene Boring, in his commentary on Mark, writes, “In the first-century Mediterranean world, the characteristic feature of children was not thought to be their innocence, but their lack of status and legal rights. Jesus is not teaching a lesson about being child-like but speaking to the issue of status. 

Embracing children, contrary to their cultural evaluation as nonpersons with no ‘rights,’ was characteristic of the historical Jesus and early Christianity, who accepted the least and the lowly without asking what benefit they could receive from such people. Placing a child in their midst, Jesus speaks directly to the disciples. The child is not a prop or visual aid for a lesson Jesus wants to teach but belongs with the congregation; those who receive [even a child] receive Jesus, and those who receive Jesus receive the one who sent him.”

Now I don’t want to patronise, other or misrepresent, and I don’t consider people with disabilities to be “the least”. Many, maybe most, people with disabilities in the UK feel empowered and fulfilled, able to live full lives with some appropriate adjustments. Coming off the back of the Paralympics we know what can be achieved when funding and support are given where it’s needed (and hopefully Team GBs results give us hope we’re doing something right), but we also know that when cuts are made to government spending or local services, people with disabilities are disproportionally affected, and poverty disproportionately affects people with disabilities.

We know our world, our buildings and public spaces, outside of compulsory legislation, are designed for able-bodied neurotypical people – something we wouldn’t even notice until it becomes an issue.

There’s also a darker side to the way public life and policy affects people with disabilities - NHS and benefit cuts, the pandemic, the way PIP and Disability Living Allowance are assessed and awarded have all led to disproportionate numbers of excess deaths, partially due to not receiving timely or appropriate care but also people have taken their own lives due to the additional physical and psychological strain put upon them. They have been made to feel, like the child in our gospel reading, like nonpersons with no rights.

In the gospel reading Jesus tells his disciples that greatness in God’s eyes comes from being a servant to all, and for today our focus is on how we serve people with disabilities both inside and outside of our community.

We’ve made a step towards this service by joining the Inclusive Church Network. Their statement, which we aim to follow, is “We believe in inclusive church – a church which celebrates and affirms every person and does not discriminate.

We will continue to challenge the church where it continues to discriminate against people on grounds of disability, economic power, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, learning disability, mental health, neurodiversity, or sexuality.

We believe in a Church which welcomes and serves all people in the name of Jesus Christ; which is scripturally faithful; which seeks to proclaim the Gospel afresh for each generation; and which, in the power of the Holy Spirit, allows all people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Jesus Christ.”

To concentrate on serving and welcoming all, we’ve begun to look at our building, materials and services. We’ve undertaken extensive risk assessments which try and account for multiple areas of disability, and they’ve been undertaken by people with disabilities. 

Being a part of the Inclusive church network doesn’t mean we’ve got it sussed – especially with a very old and listed building to account for – but it’s a journey, a statement of intention and we know there’s going to be bumps along the way. We also know with the huge scope of disabilities we’ll miss something, so we rely upon our relationships as a community and the disclosure of our community, to tell us where we can do better or even where we’re getting it wrong. 

This takes all of us and it takes a commitment to noticing and to communicating.

There’s another aspect to being an Inclusive church and that’s challenging the systems, whether that’s church systems or the wider systems of government and legislation. 

To relate this to how we tackle for example racism, we know it’s not enough to not be racist, we need to be actively anti-racist, challenging behaviours and systems which discriminate or oppress, and lifting the voices of those affected.

Within our community we have representation within the Diocese disability group, but it takes more than that one person. 

To actively serve people with disabilities we need to be actively anti-ableist, to challenge behaviours and systems which discriminate or oppress them and find ways of raising up their voices to be heard, using the privilege of able-bodied people to lift up those who ableism affects. 

And this takes each one of us, it takes awareness and a knowledge that being servants of all means ALL. 

Amen.

Come away to a deserted place and rest a while

May I speak in the name of the One God, Speaker, Word and Breath. Amen

I’ve heard today's gospel reading described as a white bread sandwich with the tasty filling removed! Those with keen ears may have noticed that in-between Jesus having compassion for the crowd, and then jumping out of a boat we didn’t know he was in, we should have had 2 of Jesus’ most famous miracles; the feeding of the 5000 and walking on water.

The miraculous is removed and we’re left with the ordinary (well, we do have a bit of healing at the end, but a basic level healing of the sick I suppose is pretty routine for Jesus and the 12 by this point).

There’s plenty of stories which get repeated year upon year as we jump from Gospel to Gospel, getting each of the evangelists’ take on the life of Jesus, but its another 2 years before these miracles appear again in the cycle of Sunday readings. What are those who devised the cycle urging us to concentrate on here?

I’d like to take a quick poll of the congregation, and I’d like you to be honest. Who is tired? Who is feeling weary, or beyond weary. Hands up, don’t be shy….

Yeah….me too! I think about 75% of adulting is saying “I’m tired”. If you come across a fellow adult who isn’t weary it almost feels suspicious! I do try and make a conscious effort in church to not say I’m tired but I fail every time.

I don’t ever want to give the impression of a world-weary priest who’s always busy and doesn’t have time for my St Michael’s family but I’ve utterly failed at that because people thinking I’m super busy is pretty much 80% of my conversations. So I come to apologise for that as I’m not sure, if we look at our reading from Jeremiah, if that’s the way a good shepherd should be leading their flock. But it is the reality in the ordinariness of our lives.

Jesus recognises this in the disciples. He sees their weariness and leads them, or at least tries to lead them, to a place of rest. They’d had no down time, no time to eat and he knew they needed to take some time to recover if they were going to be of any use in ministering to others. Unfortunately, they didn’t get the opportunity for rest as the crowds found them, but the important take away is that recognition that rest was needed, not just for the disciples but for Jesus too. This isn’t the only time we see Jesus seeking rest away from the crowds so he can quiet his mind and truly feel rested, prayerful and connected to God.

We concentrate so often on Jesus as Word, as Christ, as our miraculous God incarnate, but I love to contemplate human, fleshy Jesus, and flesh, our bodies, become tired, and overwhelmed.

Self-care has become an important term in our modern world and within my work as a nurse and chaplain recognising burnout or compassion fatigue in my colleagues is a key skill.

We can’t be compassionate practitioners or ministers if we don’t first care for our own needs. Part of my work is helping others to recognise what they need to care for themselves.

If we develop these skills early in our careers, we’re far more likely to develop resilience and positive coping strategies, leading to longer, happier careers and an increased sense of care-satisfaction. If any of you have been tended to by a health professional with compassion fatigue, or a burnt-out priest, it’s not a positive experience.

Hopefully some of you have read my introduction to this month’s newsletter, where I wrote about Sabbath and Sabbatical.

If we go back all the way make to the creation story, Humans were created on the 6^th day, and then we immediately are given the Sabbath day, we haven’t even done anything yet! God has woven Sabbath rest into creation and yet we are so bad at listening to God and to our own bodies on this matter.

And as humankind loves to create rules and structure we’ve made our Sabbath day into something where we do more. This is what Renita Weems has to say about Sabbath:

Once upon a time Sunday was a special day, a holy day, a day different from the other six days of the week…. This was a time when people like those I grew up with still believed that it was enough to spend six days a week trying to eke out a living, …

fretting over the future, despairing over whether life would ever get better for [us]. Six days of worrying were enough. The Sabbath was the Lord’s Day, a momentary cease-fire in our ongoing struggle to survive and an opportunity to surrender ourselves to the rest only God offered. Come Sunday, we set aside our worries about the mundane and renewed our love affair with eternity…. 

Sunday held out to us the promise that we might enter our tiny rough-hewn sanctuary and find sanctity and blessing from a week of loss and indignities. Remembering the Sabbath where I grew up involved delighting oneself for a full twenty-four hours, ultimately in good company, with fine clothes and choice meals.

 The Sabbath allowed us to mend our tattered lives and restore dignity to our souls. We rested by removing ourselves from the mundane sphere of secular toil and giving ourselves over fully to the divine dimension…We sang, waved, cried, shouted, and when we felt led to do so, danced as a way of restoring dignity to our bodies as well. We used our bodies to help celebrate God’s gift of the Sabbath. For the Sabbath meant more than withdrawal from labor and activity. It meant to consciously enter into a realm of tranquility and praise. 

Sunday was set aside to recultivate the soul’s appreciation for beauty, truth, love, and eternity.The Lord’s Day allows us to bring our souls, our emotions, our senses, our vision, and even our bodies back to God so that God might remember our tattered, broken selves and put our priorities back in order.. 

 

Incredibly powerful stuff. It shows us that Jesus-focused rest is far from ordinary or mundane, it’s a miracle within itself. A miracle where our very souls are healed.

But we’re realists, we know sometimes our experiences of worship can be transformative and transcendental, but that’s probably rare.

So I invite you to contemplate Weems’ words and discern for yourselves where you might carve out that sabbath experience in your own lives, where we can fully be with God in a restful and restorative way, because I believe if we can do this, and do it regularly, it can be transformative as we go out into the world, going about our lives, as Christ Followers and God seekers. I’m more than happy to talk to anyone about this, how we can try to find those sacred moments is the whirlwind of our lives.

This now brings us back to shepherds and flocks, Jesus recognising our need for rest and Huw’s looming sabbatical.

Hopefully some of what I’ve said this morning goes some way to explain why a sabbatical is needed, in order for a shepherd to be able to continue to lead their flock in a fruitful way. It’s a time, as Weems writes, of surrender and offering, a time when a priest can give themselves fully over to God,

to be renewed within their very soul, to be able to have the tools to continue to serve and minister as God intends.

As we contemplate Huw’s upcoming Sabbath time, I invite you to pray with me now.

Holy God, life giver, lover of souls, creator of all that is and all that will be, we give thanks for Huw and for the opportunity which Sabbatical offers. May he be rested and renewed by your Spirit in his mind, body and soul, and return to us filled with your love, light and grace.

We pray for ourselves, for our whole community, that we too may find Sabbath renewal and with it see more clearly your purpose for our lives, growing an ever-deeper love for you, your world, and its people.

In name of Jesus,

Amen.

Accepted, Nourished and Rested

Holy God, Speaker, Word and Breath, may you breathe life into my words this morning. Amen.

I was quite upset a few years ago when my manager said to myself and my fellow sisters that we were not to “Mother” the newly qualified staff nurses. They’re adults and should be treated like adults. I was upset because I knew the comment was indirectly aimed at me.

I started in the department as a newly qualified 22-year-old who’d gone straight from school to university and was now undertaking the job that, yes, I’d trained 4 years for, but also was the most terrifying thing I’d ever done, until I started to stand up here that is. I felt completely out of my depth.

The leap from student to staff nurse is huge, any other medical professionals in the room will I’m sure agree. They’re support programs in place, but nothing beats care and nurture by a person who takes you by the hand, understands what you’re going through and walks beside you through it.

Enter Caroline. Caroline is one of the best nurses I’ve ever worked with: highly skilled clinically, compassionate but firm, completely professional, and one of life’s natural nurturers. She’s not that much older than me, but she was the work mum I needed, and as I grew in my career, she was the template for how I myself wished to nurture future new nurses.

We still work together now, though her role has changed and she works in a different department. Whenever we see each other there’s a hug and a catch up, she always makes me feel seen and cared for with the added dynamic of us now being equals in our roles. Even if we didn’t still see each other, I will never forget how her care helped form the practitioner I’ve become.

Fast forward to being told my providing this nurture to other staff was’nt OK. Last year we had about 15 new nurses join our team, the majority of who are newly qualified, 21–22-year-olds, straight out of uni. I know how they feel, and I want to support them in the way that feels most natural to me.

The good news is the management team now value our individual styles of supporting the team, whether it’s the feistier sisters who fiercely advocate for them, my male colleagues who have a more big-brotherly approach, or my gentle mothering and guiding.

Mothering comes in all guises and in many different areas of our lives. We may have an amazing relationship with our own mothers and yet still have other maternal figures – or we might have a tense or fractured relationship and have found that nurture elsewhere. 

 We might be a mother who mothers beyond our own family – my kids have a lot of LGBT and neurodivergent friends, they know they’ll always be accepted, fed, and given a bed at our house.

We might be a mother who has difficult relationships with our children, but have found we provide that parental role to someone else in our life.

You may have found maternal nurture from your father or another male role model, you may be a man who, like God, has been both father and mother when needed. Mothering Sunday can be joyful and it can be painful.

In today’s readings there's a mixture of blood families and found families. I’ve often wondered how Eli coped having a toddler left on his doorstep; he had to be mother, father and teacher to Samuel, and though Samuel maintained a relationship with Hannah it was Eli that was there day to day.

Paul is writing to a community who he has a difficult parental relationship with. In his previous letter he accused them of being children still fed on milk, not ready for solid food. Bridget Nichols writes that "in this 2nd letter Paul’s tone is maternal, echoing the voice that comforts the hurt and disappointed child, in consoling the children who have not grown up much since he admonished them in his earlier letter."

And then we have the achingly painful gospel reading. A few weeks ago, we heard Simeon’s prophetic words at Candlemas, which now come to fruition. He told Mary a sword will pierce your own heart, and here, with other women from her community, and the Beloved Disciple, she’s watching Jesus die, unable to do anything to stop it.

Jesus, enduring the pain of crucifixion, has the added agony of watching his mother watch his suffering. It’s so brutal, even with the knowledge of what follows on Easter Day, to read and reflect upon this. Mary is losing her son, which a few different choices could’ve prevented, but they both know it must be this way.

Amid his suffering Jesus provides consolation for his mother and his friend, telling them they’re now mother and son, a new family is being formed and emerging from all this pain. The literal translation is the beloved disciple received Mary "into his inner life-setting."

The gospel models for us a mother-child relationship borne out of circumstance and trauma, I’ve seen this in my professional life. Patients become friends, patient’s families become friends, and sometimes, in the circumstances where a patient dies, support comes from the only people who could possibly understand each other’s loss and pain.

The best churches, I think, are built upon relationship and I think it’s an amazing strength of our congregation. There’s an array of inter-generational friendships, some with that parent-child dynamic, right here among us. I’ve felt held, loved, and encouraged in a beautifully maternal way by so many of you. I hope as I grow in age and wisdom that others feel this care from me.

I would even say that inter-generational friendships are one of the biggest strengths of the church as a whole. As with the family-like communities which were built in the aftermath of the events of that first Easter, we hopefully continue to build communities where we actively ensure that each generation is nurtured, valued and encouraged to be an active participant in the life of the whole.

We know this isn’t always the case, it’s easy to make someone feel unwelcome or pushed away, yet it can take the smallest of kindnesses to make someone feel welcome, included and valued.

I also believe that healthy inter-generational relationships build empathy. Church congregations bring together people from so many different backgrounds and form friendships that encourage us to look at difference differently, an amazing thing in a world where the over-arching message is one of division.

What we’ve got right here is counter-cultural, it’s rebellious, it rejects the message that we should conform to particular ways of thinking and living. It’s proof that the best way of spreading the gospel message of rebellious hope, beyond these walls, is through building relationships which model our values in the wider world.

The message we have to share is that the mother church is just that, a mother, which sees the whole person, accepts the whole person, respects the dignity of each child of God and actively seeks ways to nurture them, and to walk with them through all life’s chances and changes.

So, as we recall today those who’ve mothered us and those we’ve mothered, let’s remember this community, this mother church is also mother to our whole parish family, those who walk through the doors and those who don’t. Let’s continue to spread the message that in this family they always be accepted, nourished, and find a place to rest. Amen.

Becoming Ourselves

Won't get the chance to preach this today as I'm isolating at home with Covid, but as it was written I thought I'd share it.

Well, today’s readings take us on quite a journey, and perhaps take us to places we’re not entirely comfortable with. 

In Deuteronomy we have a prophet promised, a text we might interpret as referring to Jesus, and then some uncomfortable reading about the fate of false-prophets. 

From Revelation we have mystical, mysterious and mythical verses. John’s writing in this book can never be taken at face value, but again our interpretation would be that this poetic birth refers to Jesus.

And then in the Gospel we have Jesus beginning his ministry, he’s been baptised, spent his time in the wilderness and now he’s ready to go public. Mark’s account of this, as we heard this morning, includes a demonic possession and exorcism, and whilst our contemporary interpretations with our modern, scientific minds would try and interpret demonic possession as something more worldly, we do a disservice to the gospel when we don’t acknowledge that the world we’re shown here is one that does believe in demons, there’s 4 exorcisms in Mark even though it's the shortest of the gospels. This probably leaves us, like those present in the synagogue, asking “what is this”.

But I’m not, you’ll hopefully be glad to hear, planning on analysing the nature of biblical possession this morning. I must admit when I read the texts for today I was thinking, like the synagogue congregation, “what is this” and more pressingly, what does this say to us today, on this final Sunday of Epiphany as we come to the end of the Christmas season? 

The mystery and joy of the Incarnation and of the Christmas story are intimately woven through these readings. We have Moses promising a prophet from amongst God’s own people, our very human Messiah, but then we have John’s poetic, mystical retelling of God being born of a human woman, a child who escapes evil and returns to God.

The Gospel reading brings these two things together and shows us the reality of what the incarnation means as Jesus stands up to publicly declare his ministry has begun, and is immediately confronted with something we’d interpret as evil. An evil which immediately identifies who Jesus is, and an evil which Jesus immediately overcomes.

The possessed man is restored to who he was or who he should be, which is what I think a relationship with Jesus, the incarnate God, does for us. We each have a concept of God the Father, or the creator, whichever language you find the most helpful, and for me that aspect of God is awesome and endless and everywhere, so vast and entwined in everything, for all time, that it can be hard to comprehend.

In Jesus God becomes knowable, relatable, and we have a person with whom it becomes more comprehendible that we can have relationship with them, a relationship God wants to have with us, the ultimate goal of which is for God to delight in us and for us to delight in God. It’s a relationship of healing and restoration where, as it deepens, we get closer to seeing ourselves as God sees us, and move closer to fulfilling our potential as the people the creator created us to be.

Jesus restored a demon-possessed man to his true self.  Our demons might not be quite so literal but this is God’s deepest desire and yearning for our lives. Whilst we might not believe in evil as it’s presented to us in today’s gospel there’s many things in the world and in our lives we would perhaps call evil.

There’s the big things like war in the Middle East, child soldiers, institutional racism and misogyny, human trafficking and climate destruction, all huge evils in our world, but what I’m reflecting upon today is more personal, more everyday. Things which touch us personally. What are the evils in our everyday life that interfere with our relationship with God? 

Each of us have to deal with things which can prevent us from fully leaning into our relationship with God. Things that are preventing us from being the “us” God knows we can become. Some are bigger than others, such as addiction or illness, chronic pain or mental health concerns. But there’s also the more mundane, the things we think are a barrier between us and God, and because we believe they are a barrier, they are.

Short tempers, bad parenting choices, bad financial choices, sexual shame. The evil in these things can be how our less than ideal choices make us feel about ourselves, or how we judge others we see exhibiting them. A bad choice doesn’t make us a bad person, but we can convince ourselves that we are, and that makes the barrier between us and God.

One of the things Huw wanted to instil in us when he arrived is that it’s ok to be vulnerable and it’s ok to make mistakes. It’s all part of being human, and in many cases it’s how we grow and learn. I can’t help thinking about how in today’s gospel Jesus expels evil from within a congregation, a community which probably had complexities, relationships and came together in ways not too dissimilar to our own.

The life Jesus models for us – the life the Trinity models for us – is one of community. We’re not just called to be vulnerable and break down the walls between ourselves and God, but also with each other. To grow as God intends is to grow personally but also communally. 

Growing together is how we work towards a world where those bigger evils simply cannot exist, to model a way of living and being in the world that rejects evil by accepting each other, with our flaws and idiosyncrasies, knowing that with Jesus as our companion through life we’re standing with the source of all love and all power, we stand with a God who chose to come and stand here, with us, and share our lives, to live as we live.

As these last few days of the Christmas season pass by and we head so quickly this year into Lent, we go from Jesus standing by us in our wilderness, negotiating day-to-day life, to us standing by him in his wilderness, along with all the evil he was confronted by. This is what it means to be in relationship, to journey together, to share the highs, lows, sadness and celebrations, and as we live and grow, with Jesus and each other, we move ever closer to that revelation of hopefully seeing ourselves, and each other, as God sees us, fully ourselves, fully loved by God and knowing there is no evil that in that relationship, the eternal dance of love, cannot be silenced and cast out.

The Things That are God's

In today’s gospel we see two usually opposed groups come together to try and trick Jesus. On one side we have the Pharisees, with influence over the Jewish community and on the other the Herodians, supporters of the puppet king with an allegiance to Rome. Jesus can’t win this argument- if he says “pay taxes” the already subjugated Jewish people will turn against him, if he say’s “don’t pay taxes” the Herodians will report back to the Romans, through whom Herod maintains his power.

Jesus has no interest in winning or losing arguments and won’t be caught in their trap, but he does need to satisfy his hearers. This is such a famous passage that even now it’s repeated like a proverb “render unto Caesar”, or as we heard in this translation “Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s”. This has been manipulated many times over the centuries to support all kinds of economic policy and government legislation, often divorced from the final part of what Jesus said, which is actually the important bit:

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

The coin is a symbol of The Roman Empire, the oppressor and coloniser. The coin belongs to Caeser because it bears his likeness. If the same theory is applied to what Jesus is telling us belongs to God, it’s that which bears God’s likeness, which of course is us, and all God’s people. All people.

The combined forces of the Pharisees and Herodians tried to trap Jesus in a man-made power system, but throughout the gospels we see Jesus subverting where man thinks power lies to demonstrate where power actually lies, where God’s power lies.

We have God made flesh, made as vulnerable as a newborn baby, born not in the royal palace where the Magi went to look for him but in an out-house where the animals sheltered. 

And now to further disrupt the status quo, Jesus explains that as the emperor’s wealth is in the thing that bear’s his image, God’s wealth is in the thing that bears God’s image. God’s greatest asset is us, the people who bear that image and whose wish is to grow more in that likeness, and give back to God what is God’s. 

Now I know there’s a lot of proud, patriotic people here, and I must admit I’ve been cheering on the England Rugby team in the world cup and enjoying our wins, but patriotism can be toxic, in sport fandom it has, at times, lead to violence and at it’s worst we’ve seen many unjust wars fought throughout the world and centuries. Jesus reminds us today that at the our very core we belong to God, not state, or government, or nation. We may love our country but do we believe God feels the same? 

So many have taken lives or lost lives for believing God was on their side more than that of another nation, but at God’s table, God’s alter, there are no nations. 

Every member of the human race is created in God’s likeness, no matter nationality, ethnicity, culture or religion.

I swore to myself that the one thing I wouldn’t do this week was talk about the Isarel/Palestine conflict. Even those with a deep knowledge about the history of the situation, and great gifts of writing and speaking, can fail to strike the right balance or tone when explaining how we got to where we are now.

My knowledge is very limited but as I read around this week’s gospel I was drawn further and further towards thoughts of the awful events we’ve seen unfold. I think one thing which really struck me is the knowledge that ourselves, the Jewish people of Israel and Palestinian Muslims all have a culture rooted in the creation story in the book of Genesis. We all hold the belief that we’re made in God’s image.

If a day every comes where there are no kingdoms or empires, governments or currencies, God will still be God, and we will still be God’s children.

And yet, despite our commonality the narrative around the atrocities committed on both sides are painfully divisive and many people feel they can’t comment without appearing to be antisemitic, supporting terrorism or defending acts of ethnic cleansing. 

I’m ashamed to admit I knew very little about Gaza and indigenous Palestinians until I started to attend Greenbelt festival a few years ago. 

They partner with an organisation called the Amos Trust and other charities who work in Palestine. Having grown up in the 80s all I knew were the stories of the PLO, Hamas and acts of extreme violence. 

I know there will most likely be very strong feelings in this room about what’s happened and what’s continuing to happen, but the situation isn’t black and white, it’s incredibly messed up but I feel there’s some facts of the situation it may be helpful to understand. 

Recently I came across historian John Bradley-Lestrange, who has a popular social media presence. His area of expertise is Genocide Studies and his channel is called the History Wizard. I’m going to share his attempt to explain the facts of the situation, but before I do if we have disagreements on what I’m about to share, remember that we are brothers and sisters in Christ and I feel we can discern how to disagree well.

He says the following, some of which is paraphrased for clarity:

The average person simply isn’t capable of discussing it without being either wildly antisemitic or supporting the ethnic cleansing that the Israeli government is committing against the Palestinian people. There are some basic facts:

Judaism is an ethno-religion, both a religion and an ethnicity and ethnically Jewish people are indigenous to the lands of Israel. Ethnically Arabic populations are also indigenous to the lands that are currently Israel and Palestine.

There’s a historic and moral necessity for a Jewish homeland because throughout history pretty much every single nation they’ve lived in has tried to eliminate them and because the governments of those nations fail or refuse to take any substrative measure to prevent antisemitism and antisemitic violence there needs to be a place where Jewish people can feel safe without being the victims of genocide. 

The government of Israel has been committing an ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people basically since the nation of Israel reemerged under British mandate in the 1940s.

You can accept the historic necessity for a Jewish homeland whilst also condemning the actions of the Israeli government, you can condemn the actions of the Israeli government without being antisemitic.

Israel has tried to take more land, beyond what was granted in the original mandate, displacing innocent Palestinian people, many of whom have been living on the land for 100s and 100s of years.

Violence in this situation begets more violence, such as Hamas’ massacre of innocent people at a music festival. And kidnapping innocent Jewish people. They are a terrorist organisation. 

There’s fault on both sides, victims on both sides. The lion’s share of the fault is with the Israeli government due to the massive power imbalances involved.

People are angry and scared and rightfully so, but there is no simple solution to such a complicated problem.

 

It breaks my heart to know we are all one people and yet so divided, that the Israeli people and the Palestinian people are brother and sister and yet this situation seems unsolvable.

My encouragement for you, for us all, in the light of todays gospel and the knowledge that each and every person involved in this conflict is a beloved child of God, is to resist the dualistic thinking that saturates our news cycles and print media. To look at the situation with nuance, love and hope. I want to leave the last word today to Palestinian Christians. Even though this statement was issued in 2014 it remains painfully relevant:

“We at Bethlehem Bible College consistently called for a just peace for both Israelis and Palestinians. We always sought a nonviolent resolution to the conflict. As Christians committed to nonviolence, we do not and cannot endorse Hamas’ ideology. However, we believe that the people of Gaza have the right to live in freedom and dignity. This means that the siege over Gaza should be lifted and the borders should be open. The people of Gaza need a chance to live. We oppose Hamas launching rockets at Israeli towns and cities. At the same time, we are shocked by the disproportional and inhuman response by the Israeli military and the disregard of civilian life and especially innocent women and children.

We are grieved by the mounting hate, bigotry and racism in our communities today, and the consequent violence. We are especially grieved when Christians are contributing to the culture of hatred and division, rather than allowing Christ to use them as instruments of peace and reconciliation.

In the face of this, we affirm that we are against killing children and innocent people. We support love not hatred, justice not oppression, equality not bigotry, peaceful solutions not military solutions. Violence will only beget wars, it will bring more pain and destruction for all the nations of the region. Peace-making rooted in justice is the best path forward. Therefore, we commit ourselves to spread a culture of love, peace, and justice in the face of violence, hatred, and oppression.”

Amen.

Where's the good news?!

I had the absolute honour of not only preaching at St Michael’s this morning but also at the South Manchester Open Table service at St Luke's Wythenshawe this evening. Sermon based on Romans 6:1b-11 and Matthew 10:24-39

That made for cheerful listening didn’t it? Did you hear the Good News in today’s gospel? Were you comforted by what Jesus had to say? There is part of the liturgy we can use at a communion service called “The comfortable words” but what we heard just now is absolutely not part of it.

This is a more difficult gospel passage, like almost everything contained within the bible it can’t be taken at face value. I was once told that scripture is like a multi-faceted diamond which we must examine from every angle to truly appreciate it’s depth and beauty.

I think it’s really important to acknowledge the more difficult parts of scripture, and to acknowledge there are many facets to Jesus and his teaching, which reveals to us the complex and intricate nature of God.

To put things into the context of where we find ourselves in Matthew Chapter 10, Jesus has called and assembled his disciples and is now preparing them for life on the road with him. At the start of the chapter he gives them the authority to heal, preach, teach and reconcile in his name; he tells them to tell everyone they meet about the Good News we’re seeking in this account today, because he then goes on to prepare them for how hard that’s going to be.

One of the most difficult things I have to deal with as a chaplain is journeying alongside someone who feels God has abandoned them because they’re suffering through something undeniably awful- God must be letting the bad stuff like illness, pain, sepsis and depression happen as they have prayed and they have been faithful but no amount of prayer or faithfulness is alleviating their suffering.

It's hard because seeing someone in physical and psychological distress never gets easier and also how do you explain to someone in spiritual anguish that we haven’t been promised a life free of difficulty, in fact what Jesus is saying here is quite the opposite, we might suffer more for our beliefs, even to the point where our families and communities become divided.

Illness is not, of course, a choice, it’s something which for most people at some point is an inevitability. The most remarkable spiritual encounters I’ve had are with those very few, quite remarkable people who look at their illness and ask themselves “what can I learn about myself or God from this today”.

Faith isn’t a magic bullet to cure all ills or heal all divisions, rather it’s what connects us to the divine thread flowing through all creation, to help us know that when we suffer we aren’t alone and which helps us to recognise the injustice around us and gives us a framework for how we deal with that injustice. 

Because what Jesus is preparing the disciples for here is not how to keep faith through the things we experience that we can’t change, but the choices we have to make, the things we must say and do, to remain true to God and to ourselves, which may have consequences for the peace and happiness of our lives

Some of us here today may have suffered separation within their families through sticking by their beliefs, or may have left communities we once belonged to because we had to be true to ourselves. 

Jesus knew when sending his disciples out into the world that they would be at odds with the world around them, and even with their own people. 

Jesus reminds us here what we’ve seen so many times through the centuries- sometimes what is right, what is of God, needs to be fought for; woman’s liberation, civil rights, the rights of LGBTQ+ people, worker’s rights, voting rights, the list goes on. 

Believing in the rightness or even righteousness of these causes has set many families and communities against each other and continues to do so as we see the arguments used 40 years ago to vilify gay men and women now used against trans people and drag queens. We’ve seen this on our patch this week with the vitriol thrown at Rachel Mann’s appointment as the first transgender archdeacon in the church of England. 

What has given me hope are the number of people celebrating, affirming and supporting Rachel. 

There are fundamental values which I hold, which I believe to align with God’s values as communicated to us through Jesus that I could never compromise on, no matter the cost.

And I will continue to reject the things which I identify as unequal, exclusive or fear-based if I’m to stay true to the work I believe God has given to me. 

These values will look different for each of us as the work God has given you, using your skills in the places and communities in which you find yourselves, is yours to own and develop and to follow where God is leading you.

But we have this warning from Jesus that to follow where God is leading us may not always be a comfortable, peaceful place. And yet, we also have his consolation – the words repeated again and again; “do not fear”, “do not be afraid”. 

Paul reminds us that our baptism links us forever to Jesus, that we share his death and resurrection, and as such we can never, ever be separated from God’s love. There’s no going back. And in baptism we’re invited into a new family- the church family, a chosen family, who may still disagree and fight but who are bound together by God’s care and tenderness.

Jesus may be informing the disciples of the rough times ahead but here is also the reminder that if we belong to God we belong to the one who loves us so completely they know how many hairs are on our head, who we see explicitly in the care of creation, knowing God’s care for us is even greater.

So there is amazing, life giving, spirit lifting Good News to be found in this passage; the promise of God’s faithfulness. No matter what trials and chances come upon us, if we follow where God is leading, we can never, ever be separated from God’s love and care.