It is a truth universally acknowledged (although not necessarily a biblical one) that whenever two or three clergy are gathered together, they shall tell funny funeral stories. Here is my favourite, and it really did happen.

I was taking a big British legion-type funeral at the crematorium, and as usual I had been briefed by the gang of old soldiers as to what I had to do. Just before the commendation they would line up with their colours, which they would then dip; a bugler would play the Last Post, the colours would be raised again, and I could proceed to the committal. What could possibly go wrong?

Then, just before the service was due to start, we received tragic news: the bugler had gone down with flu and wouldn’t be able to play. However, calamity was averted, as at the eleventh hour they had managed to get hold of a cassette (this was a few years ago) with a recording of the Last Post. This was given to the crem attendant, and the service proceeded smoothly, until we got to the end. The colours were dipped, and we waited in silence for the bugle to begin. We waited … and we waited … and waited … and waited … Finally I decided that enough was enough, indicated that the colours should be raised, and said the words of committal.

After the service the crem attendant came up to me with a very red face. ‘I’m sorry about the music!’ he said, with great and obviously genuine contrition.

‘What went wrong?’ I asked. ‘Did they give you a blank tape or something?’

‘No’ he confessed. ‘The tape was fine: I just piped it through to the wrong chapel.’

A couple of weeks later I was at our clergy chapter meeting, and true to form our Area Dean (the kind of leading priest in the area) began to tell a funny funeral story.

‘You’ll never guess what happened to me at the crem. I was just reading that passage from 1 Corinthians, about the trumpet sounding and the dead being raised, when out of nowhere this great trumpet began to play the Last Post!’

I had to own up.

Coming next week: a new feature on #fridayfun. Steve’s Random Icebreakers.

Run a Homegroup, Youth group or something? Fed up with the usual boring questions to get people going at the start of the evening? Then this selection of random icebreakers from my son’s ministry in Bournemouth might just give you some fresh inspiration. Look out for #stevesrandomicebreakers from next Friday.

Finding myself with a bit of time on my hands I’m happy to receive enquiries about speaking engagements, preaching, church weekends, conferences or whatever. Please get in touch via Twitter @revjohnleach

The current TV ad for Macmillan Nurses tells us that ‘No-one should face cancer alone’. I can see what they mean, but as a strong introvert I find the idea of self-help groups, craft workshops and the like only marginally better than the prospect of cancer itself. However a very extravert friend is exactly the opposite, and struggles daily with the loneliness of illness. I guess it’s horses for courses. But in facing cancer myself I found to my great surprise just how much I needed the love of others. The love of my family, up close and personal, was obviously the greatest source of strength to me, but to receive loads of cards, good wishes and presents was both immensely cheering and mightily humbling too. During the most acute phase of my illness my family sent out regular e-mail and facebook updates, and I was flooded with likes, messages and good wishes. At one stage we tried to tot up the number of people and congregations who had said they were praying for us: we reckon there were literally thousands, from several different countries of the world. The first time I cried during the process wasn’t when I was initially diagnosed: it was when my son told me he’d received good wishes for me from a school friend, whom he hadn’t seen for 15 years, via the gift of facebook. Something about all this love told me that actually, in spite of what some people had been telling me for the last year, that I was loved, valued and wanted.

I would have told you that I’m a pretty self-sufficient kind of person, that 30 years of Christian ministry have given me both a thick skin and broad shoulders, and that whilst some people were basically quite nice I could manage fine without them. But during a period of the chips being severely down I realised the extent to which I’d been kidding myself. John Donne was right all along: I’m not an island. I do need love, and I’ve only recently come to appreciate how much. I might have told you, if it had occurred to me even to think about it, that should it come to it I could face cancer alone quite happily. Now I’m nowhere near as sure, and my heart goes out as never before to those who do have to face all kinds of tragedies without family or friends to love them through it.

This has made me ask in turn about people I know who are going through the mill, and how much of a support I am to them. If tragedy does not soften our hearts it really has failed to do its job. Of course in the early days we are pretty self-obsessed, with good cause, and we need simply to suck in the love that others offer us. But as things resolve, one way or the other, can we find room in our hearts for others who might be relying on our love more than we, or they, realise?

.  .  .  .  .  .  . 

Finding myself with a bit of time on my hands I’m happy to receive enquiries about speaking engagements, preaching, church weekends, conferences or whatever. Please get in touch via Twitter @revjohnleach

OK, I’m back from hols and ready to get blogging again. Where were we? This stuff called ‘liturgy’ which so few of us seem to understand or like is natural, essential, and can be beautiful. So what else? I want to suggest today that it can really help us to keep balanced in our worship. Let me explain.

What are we supposed to do when we come together to worship? Since the earliest times of the church, and before that in the Jewish Temple and Synagogue traditions, there has been some kind of an expectation about the sort of ingredients which ought to be there in order for our worship to be well-constituted. This became formalised in set liturgies of the kind against which C21 Christians have so often reacted, with some justification. But even now that the official Anglican line is to be much more flexible, there is much we can learn about keeping our worship balanced.

I can remember a comment made about an act of worship in the era of charismatic renewal. ‘We didn’t once look outside the four walls of the room’, said my critic, and I had to agree. I began to think about services I attended with this comment in mind, and I realised that for so many of the so-called ‘acts of worship’ we had not once confessed our sins, listened to God’s written word, interceded for the world around us, interacted in any way with each other, or even used the prayer Jesus himself taught us to pray. Instead we had sung songs about me and Jesus, and heard a ‘sermon’ which alluded vaguely to odd bits of scripture. Then we sung some more songs.

I want to suggest that a diet like this long term isn’t healthy for us. If our worship doesn’t remind us of our standing before God, and encourage us to deal with everything which gets in the way; if it doesn’t help us to listen deeply to and engage with Scripture; if it doesn’t help us to look around us to the world out there for which we are called to intercede, then it is failing in its task. And above all, if it doesn’t send us out to engage with society so that we help make the world a better place, why on earth are we doing it at all? Those of us who use SU Bible notes will have read Isaiah 61 this morning. The climax of the chapter is God’s desire to see righteousness and praise spring up together. We’re not bad in the church at doing one or the other, but that simply isn’t good enough.

Of course you don’t have to use words out of a book to do all the above: really creative worship planning can include all these elements using songs and spontaneous prayer (although sadly it rarely does, in my recent experience). But at the very least to think liturgically, to have in mind a checklist of the ingredients we ought to be putting into our worship mix, can be a very helpful thing in keeping our worship balanced. And who knows? The odd prayer for us all to join in together might prove a helpful thing.

Yesterday I went to the Royal Albert Hall for a ‘Grand Organ Gala’, a selection of pieces renowned for their dramatic use of the Hall’s magnificent pipe organ. Later that evening I was surfing on YouTube (as you do), and rediscovered some of the work of the amazing Gospel and Jazz Hammond organist Billy Preston. Jazz, of course, is all about making it up as you go along: you have a basic tune and chord structure, but then you’re on your own. Any jazz musician will tell you that you have both good and bad days. Your improvisation can be sublime, but it can also be pedestrian, or even just bad.

On the other hand, something like Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, or Saint-Saens’ Symphony No. 3 in C minor are a bit more thought out. In awe as I am of JSB, even I can’t believe that he did that all in one go. The mathematical genius of Bach’s composition must have been sweated over for ages before it all came together. The Saint-Saens, too, is obviously a major piece of careful planning. At least that’s what the great man himself thought. “I gave everything to it I was able to give. What I have here accomplished, I will never achieve again” he wrote of the piece. If you know it, you probably know the finale, when the great theme rings out clearly (if you don’t, watch the film Babe.) But what is so clever about the piece is that if you go back and listen you can hear the theme being hinted at in earlier movements: little snatches, sometimes only of a couple of notes, pop in and out, so that when you hear the theme in all its glory you realise that you have already heard it, but only in bits. This is composition par excellence: there is real skill and art involved.

And yet in a very different way Billy Preston and his ilk are equally clever. I like JS Bach, but I also like Keith Emerson. So which is best … Only one way to find out …

It’s like that with prayer and worship. There is real value in fervent, heartfelt, spontaneous prayer. There is real power in hearing someone pouring our their adoration or petition to God. It might be raw, but it’s real. But there can also be exquisite beauty in something which I prepared earlier, something which has been sweated over, polished, probably scrapped and restarted a few times until it says what I want to say in the best possible way. In other words, liturgy.

A girl from the Anglican church where I was vicar left to work in a proudly non-liturgical New Church. I can remember her coming home for Christmas and telling her Mum how much she missed the familiar Anglican liturgy compared to her new diet: ‘Not once in the whole prayer book does it say “just really”, and each prayer only has the word “Lord” in it once’. That’s the great value of liturgy: the words we offer to God in worship have been polished and sweated over until they are the best they can be. Not everyone loves every prayer, of course, any more than everyone loves every piece of classical music. Otherwise Desert Island Discs would go on for ever. But liturgy is about offering to God poetry rather than mere words: a symphony, not just a ditty.

The problem is that we polarise the two. Spontaneous prayer is the only real sort, or liturgical prayer is the only kind God is interested in. One is dead, dry, and out of a book, the other is real and living: you know the sort of rhetoric. But to exist on a sole diet of the spontaneous can rob us of deep beauty, while only ever to pray out of a book can rob us of the real immediacy of God. What we actually need is liturgy and liberty, not merely one or the other.

I have often been heard over the years encouraging Christians to ‘shout back at the telly’, an idea which I first heard from a friend called Dave Roberts. When someone says something stupid, mindless, or just plain wrong, don’t let them get away with it – shout back at them. Tell them what you think, or even what God might think. Although I strongly suspect that the idiots the other side of the screen can’t actually hear you, we have found it an important family activity to encourage critical thinking, rather than just sucking in what the media spits out at us. Come to think of it, I have on a couple of occasions had people shouting back at my preaching, but of course that’s different.

Well, I had a massive rant-back whilst watching the news tonight, national and local, about a couple of young children who had been starved or beaten to death by their parents. Apparently if you’re going to get murdered, the most likely time statistically is in your first year, so most of my readers are probably going to be OK from here on. But one child per week is killed by its own parents, usually its mother, per week in the UK. And for that we can congratulate ourselves, because it isn’t as bad as in some other countries.

Of course the news article was all about the failure of social services, police and other agencies to pick up on the signs and prevent these tragic deaths. There was much beating of breasts, and an overuse of the word ‘unacceptable’. But no-one seemed to see the unquestioned assumption underneath this story, or to grieve at its meaning: we are fully used to living in a society where it is the job of social services to protect us from our own mothers. Of course it is tragic when a baby is murdered, but even more so because social workers didn’t stop it from happening. What have we become?

So my advice is for us all to vote back the Tories, the party of traditional family values, into power next time, as they continue to make a stand for the strengthening of marriage and stable family life, where children are born into families with two married parents who love each other and their kids.

Lord, have mercy.

There was a particular time in the past when things were not going well for me. One day I had one of those experiences where the Bible suddenly came alive, and I knew I had encountered God.

It was one of those times when God was gloriously absent, when every prayer I prayed bounced straight off the ceiling and smacked me back in the eye, and where things were getting daily worse and worse. At such times you (or at least I) begin to ask questions about why we’re bothering to have a so-called relationship with God at all. It wasn’t quite that I had stopped believing in him (that was a different week back in 1986), but I just couldn’t see the point in carrying on living as though he was meant to be on my side. Why continue to hope that he might do something in my situation? Why not just live like the rest of the human race, who hope only in what they might be able to work out for themselves, or merely in ‘good luck’?

It was into this situation that God spoke through the passage in John 6 where Jesus’ disciples were busy abandoning him.

⁶⁶ From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.

⁶⁷ “You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve.

⁶⁸ Simon Peter answered him, [and this is my translation]

“Actually O Lord that is exactly what I want to do. But the problem is, I don’t have anywhere else to go. At the end of the day, difficult though it all is, you do actually have the words of eternal life. So I suppose I’d better stick around. I really don’t have a lot of choice”

I realised that life without God at all was infinitely worse than life with an apparently absent God. However badly I felt he was treating me that was still preferable to trying to make my own way in life. That revelation has seen me through grim times for years since. I have often wanted to throw a hissy fit and tell God where to stick it all: I have often felt like taking my spiritual ball and going home. But the reminder of my own hopelessness has brought me to my senses, and so far I’m still walking with him.

Deeper than this is the sense of expectation, which so many Christians have lurking somewhere deep within their spirits, that God is there primarily to be good for them, in the sense of making things go well and painlessly. When disaster strikes we so often resort to the ‘Why me?’ questions, as though we had a divine right to a comfy life. I can’t remember who is was who said it, but it is undoubtedly true that ‘God is more committed to my sanctification than to my comfort’. I have to come, albeit slowly and painfully, to the recognition that God is my only hope, and that his times of absence are all part of his plan for me to grow to maturity in Christ. Twee to say, easy to believe in good times, but true nevertheless. If it isn’t true, where else do we go? What on earth hope do we have?