News Sheet 28 Mar 2010
March 28, 2010
You can see the Weekly News sheet for 28th March 2010, Palm Sunday here: PDF
Weekly Email 28 Mar 2010
March 28, 2010
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| ‘This is Holy Week’ by Fr Richard Coles, Senior Curate  Russell Harty is perhaps not a figure one readily associates with Holy Week, but every year, when it comes round, I find myself thinking of him. Do you remember that notorious interview with Grace Jones on his ITV chat show? She was somewhat the worse for wear and when Mr Harty unavoidably turned his back on her to speak to another guest she started slapping him quite viciously. An Amazon attacking a poodle, I thought, or did until I got to know Mr Harty better.
Unusually, I only got to know him after his death. I was asked to write and present a documentary about his life for Radio Four, which turned out to be one of the most enjoyable jobs I’ve ever had. We interviewed his friends, from Oxford, where he was a contemporary and pal of Alan Bennett and Ned Sherrin; from Yorkshire, where he lived, including a hilarious interview with Madge Hindle from Coronation Street (or Myra Hindley as he absentmindedly introduced her at the opening of Giggleswick Fête); and his family in Blackburn, who never really understood Uncle Russell and his fancy London ways. They were pretty fancy – confidante of the stars, chat show host, arts journalist for the BBC, and a man of great gusto and occasional mischief, to the delight of his friends. He was irrepressible, incorrigible; Ned Sherrin remembered visiting him as he lay dying in hospital in Leeds. As Ned approached his bedside Russell feebly pulled at his oxygen mask; what is it Russell?,asked Ned, aware that the end was near. Russell whispered,Princess Margaret… asked how I was… twice!
There were other famous stories; of how he was once at a do near Leeds with the Princess of Wales who asked him if he’d like a lift back to London in her helicopter. He gratefully accepted, talked non stop all the way to RAF Northolt, and on arrival promptly hailed a cab to drive him all the way back to Yorkshire where he actually needed to be.
Although I never met him in reality, making the programme made me think I had, that we too were friends. His biography was so vivid, his personality so striking, that when those who really knew him told their stories he came to life for me. I could see him in my mind’s eye as as they did. I suppose I felt part of his story.
Holy Week is here and over the next seven days we share the story of the climactic events of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, another vivid biography of a man who died young, in disgrace, leaving an indelible impression on his friends. But, as the great liturgies of Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter remind us, he was more than a striking personality, and this this is more than mere story-telling. It is nothing less than an invitation to share in his life, in his death, and in the glory of his resurrection.
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THE WEEK AHEAD
Palm Sunday at St Paul’s: At 09:00: Family Mass & Blessing of Palms At 11:00: Blessing of Palms, Procession & Solemn Mass At 18:00: Evening Prayer (said) Monday & Tuesday in Holy Week Wednesday in Holy Week Maundy Thursday: Good Friday: Holy Saturday: Easter Day: |
Order of Service 28 Mar 2010
March 28, 2010
You can see the complete Order of Service for 28th March 2010, Palm Sunday with reading and music notes here: PDF
March 27, 2010Give to Lent Appeal by Eating at Spaghetti House!
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TRANSFORMING LIVES: ALMA’s CHILDREN
Bishop of London’s Lent Appeal 2010 Dear colleagues,Fundraising in YOUR parish this Lent. For the past four years the staff of Spaghetti House in Knightsbridge have supported the Diocese’s Lent Appeal in our parish. Over that time they’ve helped us as a parish to raise over £50,000 for lenten good causes (not all from Spaghetti (!) - but their help has been invaluable). Good ideas have a habit of growing. This year we’ve been talking and have agreed to think bigger and to extend their support to all their restaurants in central London! They’re no longer going to be supporting ‘us’ locally, but rather the Bishop of London’s Lent Appeal across the Diocese. They have 750 tables in 11 central London parishes. The game is simply this. There’s a voucher above. You can print it as many times as you like (or email rosie@spkb.org for a bulk delivery of printed vouchers) - and if each of you hands one over when you pay, they’ll give £1 per customer per meal to the Bishop of London’s Lent Appeal, every time you eat there this Lent.
Maybe you’ll think of arranging a ‘Spaghetti Sunday’ (as we’ve done here in the past) and eat together as a congregation after your service… or, instead of a drafty hall, why not hold one of your meetings over a simple meal? Check their website (www.spaghettihouse.co.uk ) and contact your local manager - he or she will be glad to help.
Is there a catch? No. It helps them, of course: but it helps the Appeal too - and if, in the midst of it all, your congregation gets to know one another better and you get to know the manager and staff of your local restaurant, it might be not a bad idea! The Spaghetti House - in partnership with the Diocese of London: for the good of children in Angola and Mozambique . With best wishes, Alan Gyle |
News Sheet 21 Mar 2010
March 21, 2010
You can see the Weekly News sheet for 21st March 2010, Lent V (Passion) here: PDF
Sermon 21 Mar 2010
March 21, 2010
Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Lent (Passion Sunday), 21st March 2010
Fr Richard Coles
From the prophecy of Isaiah: Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Tell it not in Gath, but we are short-staffed in the Deanery of Westminster St Margaret at the moment, and although short-staffed in central London is nothing like short-staffed in rural Lincolnshire, you may have seen less of the clergy than you’re used to. Enjoy it while you can.
One of the churches we’re helping to look after, as it awaits a new Vicar, is St Mary Le Strand, which despite its distinction as one of London’s finest churches – Gibbs’ masterpiece, according to those who know about such things – is little-visited. If you’ve ever tried, you’ll know why. It stands in the middle of one of London’s busiest streets, the Strand, not on a generously proportioned island accessed by zebra crossings, adorned with statues of the heroes of Bomber Command, like St Clement Danes; but slap bang in the middle of two lanes of unyielding traffic, King’s College London to the south, the BBC World Service to the north.
As an alumnus of both I suppose it is fitting that I should find myself celebrating the Eucharist in the church that stands between them; but it is not that which diverts my attention when I should be concentrating on what I’m there to do. It is the view west.
Most people in churches look east, towards the pulpit and the altar. The priest, however, looks west, at the crowd, and that in itself can be most distracting. But at St Mary le Strand you can look out beyond the congregation into the street, to see the two files of traffic passing by on either side. Thus it ever was: please note this morning’s cover picture, by George Sydney Shepherd, showing St Mary Le Strand thronged, in 1836, with landaus, barouches, phaetons and gigs. Today it is cabs and couriers and trishaws and London buses, Leyland Titans on their way to unfashionable postcodes in south London, Routemasters on the heritage trail, like scarlet dowagers disappearing into the distance.
Standing there, not paying attention to what I was doing, watching the world literally go by, struck me as a potent symbol for Lent, or rather, my Lent, which this year has been notably disappointing. On Ash Wednesday, the cross still smudgy on my forehead, I resolved to give certain things up and to take certain things on. In the former category I’ve done OK, giving up smoking, and apart from a single and in my view forgivable lapse outside the Royal Geographical Society on the centenary of Edward King, bishop of Lincoln, I’ve stuck to it. I’ve been less successful in moderating my diet, and find myself embarrassingly fatter in Passiontide than Epiphanytide, but that’s giving up fags for you.
I have been less successful, however, in taking things on. In the past I’ve been pretty diligent, saying more prayers, earlier, and more earnestly, than in the impenitent weeks of Ordinary Time; reading sermons by the Greek and Latin fathers; re-reading Paradise Lost (even years) The Divine Comedy (odd years); and giving, with grudgingly relaxed parsimony, to charity. This year it hasn’t really happened. Early in the morning, when I should have been in church and on my knees, I’ve been in Hyde Park watching Daisy frolic amid the nodding jonquils and half-eaten KFCs. This year I’ve eschewed the Homilies of St Basil of Caesarea in favour of Nordic crime fiction; and my surplus, paltry as it is, seems to have been diverted from the rattling poor box into Belgravia’s chiming tills.
So all my good intentions, or most of them, cannot rise, they are extinguished, they are quenched like a wick. I don’t really know why. I’m busier, which makes it harder to find the time to make the effort; and busier with extra-curricular activity, which takes me into a world which barely notices, if it all, the Church’s calendar. Perhaps trying to maintain the disciplines of Lent has left me feeling a bit like St Mary le Strand, stuck in the middle of the road, going nowhere, while everyone else passes by.
I’m not being nostalgic for an age when Lent was more widely observed – I don’t really remember such an age. When I was growing up I think my mother gave up Noilly Prat and badminton, but she grew up in Presbyterian Scotland in the forties and was susceptible to Calvinist enthusiasms. My father took Lent in his stride, shall we say, and apart from the shops shutting on Good Friday and Hot Cross buns for tea I don’t think it intruded much into our family life. Even for an older generation than my parents’ the disciplines have faded. I remember in my last parish spotting one of the oldest and crustiest members of the congregation in Costa’s on Good Friday when he should have been out with us on the Churches Together Walk of Witness. As he enjoyed a pain au chocolat and a cappuccino we were processing round the precinct, taking it in turns to carry the cross, while the Salvation Army band played hymns about penal substitutionary atonement. One shopper, I remember, seemed particularly moved, and came over for a word: Can we have Away in a Manger?, she asked, which perhaps tells you how little of Lent survives in our secular world.
In the monastic world, at Mirfield, where I trained for the priesthood, Lent endured. No meat, no fish, no sherry, BCP Holy Communion on Fridays, poverty lunch, and the silent retreat. In Holy Week, the brethren went away to preach missions in parishes (you had one here not so long ago) and the College took over the running of the monastic church and the forty-six services that took place between Palm Sunday and Easter. There was the Watch of Maundy Thursday, which lasted all night, a three a.m. start for the Vigil, and most burdensome of all, an obligatory fancy-dress party on Easter Day, which went on well into the small hours, followed by Silent Prayer and Mattins at six thirty the following morning. How very virtuous we all felt after that.
Maybe that tells you something, congratulating ourselves for our spiritual heroics. Just when I’m most pleased with myself I think of Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector praying in the temple. The former, like the Pharisee Paul, or Saul as he was then, is proper and diligent and righteous, and thanks God for not being like the latter; the latter simply beats his breast and asks God for mercy. The tax-collector, not the Pharisee, goes home justified before God.
So if your Lent, like mine, would be marked could do better, don’t worry about it too much. Perhaps in acknowledging our failures we’re closer to God than when we’re congratulating ourselves for our piety.
Passiontide, which begins today, brings this into sharper focus. The austerities of Lent are more marked, with the veiling of statues and a liturgical paring-down; and as Jesus approaches Jerusalem and the climactic events which are to take place there, our part in his story also begins to take on shape, and body and pattern.
We are not willing participants in this – who wants shame and humiliation and failure and worse? – a human reality the Gospel unflinchingly tells. Jesus, in agony in the garden, is abandoned; Peter, the rock upon which Christ build his church, betrays him; and Judas, quibbling over the cost of perfume, finds a way to generate extra revenue – thirty pieces of silver.
Even Jesus himself, in his humanity, is agonised by the approach of his inescapable destiny. Let this cup pass from me, he pleads, in flesh anticipating the nails, the thorns, the spear, the cross. If you look round the chancel you’ll see carved onto shields in the frieze an odd collection of, well, hardware – a ladder, a hammer, a sponge, a pair of dice – as peculiar and arbitrary a collection of curios as the thimble, the wheelbarrow and the iron in a Monopoly set. But these are the Instruments of the Passion, the ladder which will stand against the Cross, the hammer which will drive in its nails, the sponge, filled with gall, that will be pressed to Jesus’ lips, and the dice his executioners will roll to divide up his clothing.
It’s as if the full horror of what is to happen can’t be confronted, in its totality, not yet, not ever. So we’re offered these bits of kit, tokens of Christ’s Passion, not as aides-memoire, but as nudges, goads, keeping us going along the Way of the Cross, towards the New Thing, in all its terror and wonder, that God in his infinite mercy and fathomless grace has prepared for us.
We’re like those buses and cabs, indifferent traffic, breaking and reforming around St Mary Le Strand in the middle of the road, with places to go, people to see, not even beginning to understand the disruption to our journey.
Weekly Email 21 Mar 2010
March 21, 2010
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| “No gain without pain” by Fr Alan Gyle, Vicar  At precisely five feet tall and with long, bright pink dyed hair (think super-charged, diminutive Zandra Rhodes), Francesca makes an impact. Francesca is a personal trainer… No, (I’ve waited forty four years to say this) Francesca is my personal trainer (a personal trainer is surely the ultimate Belgravia accessory!). In fact she is my Lenten treat to myself: what I have ‘taken on’ in an attempt, before it is all too late, to instil some physical rigour in an all-too-sedentary life, and some fitness and muscle tone to an all-too-corpulent body (did you really believe that clergy wear black for some other reason than that it is a sliming colour?). The legacy of my first sessions (“c’mon, just give me another ten of those, Alan…”) - aches in places I didn’t know I could ache, a stiffness that makes genuflection a real challenge – but also, as the pain recedes, the beginnings of a sense that there might be hope and that change might be possible. “No gain without pain,” as they say! Be warned, dear readers, stay out of Hyde Park on Friday mornings: it is not, as yet, a pretty sight.
“No gain without pain” might almost be shorthand for the theology of Passiontide – a season that begins this Sunday (Lent 5) and extends through Palm Sunday and Holy Week to the dawn of Easter Day. The term ‘Passiontide’ is derived from the Greek verb pasch? – to suffer (the Western Church derived the term from the Latin Vulgate ‘passio’) – andPassiontide is therefore that season in which, annually, the people of God connect again with the events of the last days of our Lord as he enters Jerusalem and prepares for the struggle, persecution and, finally, the death that occurs on a Green Hill outside the city wall on Good Friday. This re-engagement with a story of pain, cruelty and suffering is not some morbid exercise or bleak, masochistic endeavour: there is no virtue in telling a sad story for its own sake, still less in self-absorbed Christian gloominess. Passiontide is about something rather more than these. As the Passion Gospels tell again the story, the preaching and reflections, prayers and meditations make a connection between this story of suffering and our story – and assure us not only that God is not remote from what we experience (but, in Christ, has been everywhere we are expected to go, even to death), but also that in and through struggle and suffering there is a hope of new life that is God’s promise and most astonishing gift. Gain through pain – and the promise of life transformed by God in a way so much more wonderful than anything we can achieve ourselves… even with the encouragement of the wondrous Francesca!
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LINKS & INFORMATION
Moissac Retreat: June 2010 The Lent Appeal 2010 Our Parish Website Music & Preachers Our Sister Parish in Washington DC THE WEEK AHEAD
This Sunday: At 09:00: Family Mass Celebrant & Preacher Fr Richard Coles, with Godly Play for children At 11:00: Solemn Mass The Choir of St Paul’s, directed by Stephen Farr Preacher: Fr Richard Coles At 18:00: Evening Prayer (said) Wednesday at 18:45: The Wednesday Evening Service at the Grosvenor Chapel, 20:00-21:00
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Order of Service 21 Mar 2010
March 21, 2010
You can see the complete Order of Service for 21st March 2010, Lent V (Passion) with reading and music notes here: PDF
Weekly Email 8th March 2010 Lent III
March 6, 2010
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| Am I not a Man and a Brother by Fr Richard Coles, Senior Curate
I was in Bristol last week to ‘deliver a lecture’ (a grand way of saying ‘busk for forty minutes’) on the subject of the Wesleys in that city. Bristol is second only to London in importance to the history of Methodism (some would say first), for it was there in 1739 that John and Charles Wesley took to preaching in the fields outside the city when their eminent, if cross-eyed, predecessor, George Whitefield took off for the New World and the Great Awakening. In Bristol the Wesleys built the New Room, the first Methodist church, today lovingly preserved in all its eighteenth century orderliness, although, rather tellingly, there’s architectural evidence at odds with that aesthetic. The windows are noticably higher than in other eighteenth-century buildings and the double-decker pulpit, accessed by a single staircase, gives onto a bolt hole, a kind of prototype safe-room, wherein John Wesley could take refuge when his sermon so inflamed the congregation that he risked being attacked – hence the high windows, harder to heave a brick through than those at ground level.
Methodism is sometimes thought of as being all about Beetle Drives and fellowship-in-the-jammy-dodgers, an unkind caricature which fails to give due acknowledgement to the movement’s roots in eighteenth-century radicalism. Wesley and his followers offended the Established Church and were barred from its pulpits (although he never left the Church of England, thinking it better to be the leaven in the lump), and offended Bristol’s City Fathers, many of whom had grown immensely rich through the import and export of slaves. Wilberforce is, I suppose, the great hero of the Abolitionist movement, much celebrated during the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade in England in 2007. But fifty years before Wilberforce, John and Charles Wesley were delivering fiery abolition sermons to the slavers themselves; O burst thou all their chains in sunder! Thou Saviour of all, make them free, that they may be free indeed!, preached John to an uncomfortable congregation. We don’t know if he needed to retreat to his safe room after that or not, but it makes our rattling of the poor box seem very small beer. But rattle it we do, especially during the Lent Appeal, in aid of this Diocese’s link projects in Angola and Mozambique. It is not only right that this city, which did so nicely out of Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, should send some of its wealth back to support African hospitals and schools in the twenty-first; it is also right, as the Archbishop of Canterbury often, wearily, reminds us, that Christians in Britain support the Anglican Communion, because we are bound one to another, across distance and culture and custom, by our common confession – Jesus Christ – yoked together not by the chains of slavery but bonds of affection. Am I not a Man and a Brother?, asked the shackled African on Josiah Wedgewood’s abolitionist commemorative plaques. We only have to adjust that slogan for gender inclusiveness to make it as relevant for our times as for his and Wesley’s. |
LINKS & INFORMATION
Moissac Retreat: June 2010 The Lent Appeal 2010 Our Parish Website Our Sister Parish in Washington DCWednesday at 18:45: The Wednesday Evening Service (Fr Richard Coles), followed by The Cross in the Box Lent Course at the Grosvenor Chapel, 20:00-21:00 Next Sunday at St Paul’s: THE WEEK AHEAD |
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Unsubscribe nick.mercer@london.anglican.org from this list. Our mailing address is: St Paul’s Knightsbridge
The Parish Office
32a Wilton Place
London, Greater London SW1X 8SH Copyright (C) 2010 St Paul’s Knightsbridge All rights reserved. Forward this email to a friend St Paul’s Knightsbridge (www.spkb.org) is an Anglican church of Anglo-Catholic tradition in central London, part of the Diocese of London (www.london.anglican.org) and the Church of England (www.cofe.anglican.org). To contact us,please either call +44 (0)207 201 9999 or email us: pa@spkb.org OR you could call in and visit in person. We are open for prayer seven days a week from 9am until after the evening mass. The clergy are happy to visit those unable to come to St Paul’s - or to meet you at the church. Please pray for us - as we will for you. Vicar: Fr Alan Gyle; Senior Curate: Fr Richard Coles; Assistant clergy: Frs Nick Mercer, Graham Palmer and Andrew Norwood.  |
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Holy Week Services
March 1, 2010
HOLY WEEK & EASTER 2010
Palm Sunday, 28th March
09:00 Family Mass & blessing of Palms
11:00 Blessing of Palms, Procession & Solemn Mass
Preacher: Fr Alan Gyle
Music: Weelkes, Byrd, Blow
18:00 Evening Prayer
Monday, 29th March
09:00 Morning Prayer
18:00 Low Mass
Tuesday, 30th March
09:00 Morning Prayer
18:00 Low Mass
Wednesday, 31st March
09:00 Morning Prayer
18:45 Wednesday Evening Service for Holy Week
Preacher: David Oldham, Ordinand
Maundy Thursday, 1st April
09:00 Morning Prayer
10:30 Diocesan Chrism Mass with Renewal of Ordination Vows and Blessing of the Oils in St Paul’s Cathedral. Preacher: The Bishop of London. All Welcome.
19:30 Solemn liturgy & procession
with watch of the passion until midnight
Preacher: Fr Alan Gyle
Music: Berkeley, Tavener, de Severac
Good Friday, 2nd April
09:00 Morning Prayer
10:30 Stations of the Cross for children
followed by hot cross buns
Noon Preaching the Cross – Fr Richard Coles
On Good Friday Fr Richard Coles, Curate, explores some of the Passion Psalms of the Icelandic priest-poet Hallgrimur Petursson. The Passion Psalms, “The history of the pain and death of our Lord, Jesus Christ, with special learning, reminding, and consoling articles, prayers and praises, in psalms and songs with misc. notes, compiled and written in the year 1659″, are a collection of fifty hymns to be sung and said, one each working day, during Lent. The life of Hallgrimur Petursson, son of a bell ringer, nephew of a bishop, runaway, anti-slaver and leper, was as vivid as his master piece, and his Passion Psalms are still read daily in Lent in Iceland, nowadays on the national radio network. Discover more about them, about him, and about how we might focus on the climactic events of Christ’s life and death at the Preaching of the Passion at noon on Good Friday
14:00 The Solemn Liturgy of Good Friday
Easter Eve, 3rd April
09:00 Morning Prayer
20:30 Vigil, Blessing of the New Fire &
First Mass of Easter
followed by champagne reception
Music: Lassus, Phillips, Taverner
Easter Day, 4th April
09:00 Family Mass
11:00 Solemn High Mass
Preacher: Fr Alan Gyle
Music: Langlais, Hadley & Mascagni