10.09.06 Steve Dreaming of Adventfest
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Adventfest
1-3rd December 2006
endorsed by The Vestry - decision taken to repeat and improve. ie Planning Group in advance.
Good
reasons
1.
hospitality.. Opening
the doors to friends/family/wider community. Wat we do here / what we
are - should never be a private matter. Theoretically, all of our
worship is public worship - the doors are open. But there are
considerable limitations (anybody here for the first time?). We're
quite hard to find. You have to be quite brave to show up and make
yourself at home. SEC official policy for years now has been MYCMI.
Our common life together is a gift to be shared. We work hard at
making our worship accessible (it's all relative), and many of us
invite friends and family to accompany us - that's good - but I think
we should always be on the lookout for ways in which the gift of our
common life can be shared. One concrete way we do this is in our
giving as a community - last week we sent out cheques to agencies and
charities that the Vestry decided to support -
CORE
GIVING
Christian Aid,
David and Helen Allen,
Fischy Music,
Jubilee Scotland,
Larche Community,
Lent Appeal,
Lydia
Project, Rock
Trust, Scottish
Episcopal Church QUOTA
-Support for the central church ,
Scripture
Union, Soul
Marks Trust..... Total
£7,449
That's
a policy commitment
- 20% of our income - that's a big commitment for a wee church that
has to pay for it's own full time clergy - there are plenty of wee
churches that can't manage to do that alone.
Adventfest is one
other way of sharing the gifts of our common life - gift of our
property, our place, our creativity, our celebration of life, our
commitment to children, our welcoming worship - which is our small
expression of our Lord's sharing of himself, and of his hospitality,
his open table. We love because he loved us first. An act of
hospitality - as a way of thanking God for the hospitality and the
welcome we have received in this place, and at this table.
recovering Advent as the religious festival of the incarnation in a culture where Xmas has become predominantly a commercial time. We all know that in our culture now, we, the Christian church have all but lost the festival of the incarnation - it has become so very important to a huge part of the economy, that the advent of Christ has been pretty much surgically removed without the patient really noticing it has gone. The season of Advent has a romance and pure religion about it - bristling with anticipation - the prelude, the overture to that excitement which has yet to come. A special festival weekend that draws the heart and the eye to the great Christian Advent themes of darkness to light, of deserts that will sing and rejoice, of preparing the way of the lord, of Mary pondering, of the Magnificat, of angels, of waiting for a birth, of cloth for the cradle, of a universe waiting in hope - If we draw our hearts to these themes in the middle of dark winter it can be a festival indeed.
3. affirming our belief in creativity as a powerful expression of the ongoing divine creativity - a spark that is in us all - which gives us ways of exploring that which is 'beyond' us. We have been gifted hugely here in our life together from gifts of creativity shared - in our music as we sing together, in the words of the writers and poets - in the prayers that are offered - in the colours and shapes and symbols (great and small) that so many of us, young and old have been able to contribute - in the storytelling and craft work with the children - in the mentoring and accopanying of the teenagers - in the ideas generated at planning meetings - ..... all of this creativity an outworking of the creative spirit of God our maker, making all things new. And when we share and celebrate creativity, there is a added advantage for those of us who believe that ours is an incarnational faith - the faith of Emmanuel - God with us.
To
the lost Christ shows his face,
To the unloved he gives his
embrace.
To those who cry in pain or disgrace,
Christ makes for
himself a touching place.
This
popular contemporary hymn “The Touching Place” celebrates the
incarnational theology described above. The presence and purpose of
God is understood as a reaching into the physical world, both in the
historic events of Christ's earthly ministry and in his ongoing
presence 'in all things' and 'through all things', the continuing
work of creation's redemption. It is in the glorious and harsh
realities of the physical world that God is present, and into which
God calls his people.
The worshipping community has, in this
sense, been 'touched into being' as it has responded to the glorious
and harsh realities of the Word made flesh. It is only in touching
the world that we are present to it, as God is present to it in
Christ. When the worshipping community gathers, therefore, its quest
for connectedness with God, with the world and with one other will be
satisfied in so far as the experience is related
to the created, material world.
Philip Newell identifies the
two main features of Celtic spirituality as “the belief that what
is deepest in every human being is the image of God, and the belief
that creation is essentially a disclosure or self-giving of God.”
Elsewhere, describing MacLeod's christology he says:
Shining through the material world is the spiritual world that upholds it and enlivens it. Christ reveals to us what is at the heart of matter. Hidden in the mystery of our own bodies and the body of all creation is the unseeable One, glory of the everlasting world.
The prologue to John's Gospel - one of the key Advent texts - may be said to declare the dignity of Christ's embodiment, which is the ultimate realisation of human vocation. Incarnational theology emphasises that the most decisive experience of God is not in the credal or propositional realm, but in the Word made flesh and in the Word still becoming flesh. We are, says the theologian Timothy Gorringe, endowed with senses by God so that God can explore creation: “God chooses embodiment, and not just in Christ. God chooses materiality in the first place, according to Genesis. That is God's option."
Celebrating
creativity in the arts is good at this stuff - blurring the
distinction for us between the material and the spiritual - what is
sacred and what is profane - where God is and God is not - those
distinctions, that dualism that people so instinctively have been
tempted to make.
3
Good reasons -
hospitality.. sharing
the gifts of our common life
recovering Advent... as the
religious festival of the incarnation
affirming our belief in
creativity as a powerful expression of the ongoing divine
creativity