Isaiah 1:1, 10-20, Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16, Luke 12:32-40

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Rev. Patrick (Patch) Webb

To be appointed Rector of Compton, Hursley and Otterbourne

Patrick Webb grew up in the New Forest, Hampshire. He initially trained as an A-level Sociology tutor
before becoming the youth leader at his family church in Lyndhurst, where he married Verity-Rose in
2009.
Patrick continued working and training at Moorlands Bible College on the south coast before he and
his wife moved with their new baby to St Luke’s church in Grayshott, Surrey where Patrick was
employed as Senior Youth Worker.
A significant step in his career came in 2017 when he was selected for ordination. This led to a family
move to Oxford for training at Wycliffe Hall, followed by his appointment as Assistant Curate in the
benefice of Bleadon and Bournville in Weston-Super-Mare.
While serving in Bleadon and Bournville, Patrick’s ministry included chaplaincy at Weston Hospital,
Weston College, and even Thatcher’s Cider (albeit informally).
For the last two years Patrick has ministered on the estates of Swindon; establishing a fast-growing
community and bringing many into faith through baptism. This ministry has been passed back to the
community to see it grow further again.
Patrick writes:
‘We are committed to invitational ministry, believing that welcoming people from all walks of
life is fundamental to the growth of God’s kingdom. We look forward to joining the family of
Compton, Hursley and Otterbourne as we work together to build God’s kingdom.

As Psalm 34 states:

³. Trust in the Lord and do good:

Dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture

^4. Take delight in the Lord,

And he will give you the desires of your heart.

We pray that, from the safety of our new parishes, we will see all that the Lord desires to do
for all of us. For these are His pastures and we are just happy to be counted amongst His own.’

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Further information will be posted in the near future.

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Considering the elections, and the choices on offer to us draws me, strangely, to the story of Adam and Eve.

The historically literal reading, or misreading, of this creation story has overwhelmed the subtleties of the original and its careful placing after the account of the first seven days.  It is only within the context of God’s good creation of all things that this story of mankind’s place can be understood.  It is indeed a story with a sad ending, but not a hopeless one, it still speaks of God’s care and love for man and woman.

The story is a triumph of Hebrew prose, carefully balanced and interconnected.  There are, for example, 16 words used to describe the creation of man, and 16 for the creation of woman.  Word-plays abound, man is ‘adam and the ground which formed him is ‘adamah, when he sees the woman he takes for himself a new name – ish and calls her ishshah – now he knows his identity, found in hers.

Such are the subtleties of the original – it is an amazing paradox that just as the words have been given the status of the words of God, their beauty and depth of meaning have been subverted and corrupted. What should we do with this ancient and beautiful story, from another age, another culture, another language?  We now know so much about our created and evolved world, what mysteries are there left that might need such a story?  What can it still say to us?  It was intended to describe the human condition, but is it still true?

Well, do we recognise a world where there are choices, where there is danger as well as safety, good possibilities and bad outcomes? Do we recognise a world where there is vocation, freedom and prohibition?  A vocation to tend and care for the garden – a vocation to work, to share in God’s creation, as independent, self-aware beings, given freedom, ‘you may eat from every tree in the garden’, elemental sustenance, there is freedom to harvest.  But along with freedom was also given…. prohibition, our freedom has boundaries.  The thirst for knowledge is inevitable, but handle it with care.

Such a world is recognisable to me.  And, along with it the consequences of failure to follow the insights the story has to offer – the spoiling of vocation, the failure to fulfil the opportunities of freedom, and the disobedient crossing of the boundaries. Such a world is one where God may still be found walking in the garden in the cool of the evening, but it is also one where we continually hope to hide from him.

If such a world feels familiar we should accept the timeless truth of the noblest of stories…. that God is intimately concerned with our creation and our best happiness, that he expects us to honour our vocation, explore our freedom and respect the boundaries to it.

That is how things are for men and women, no less now in the age of genetic manipulation and global warming, artificial intelligence and weapons of mass destruction, than when Genesis was written, perhaps even more so – the stakes are even higher.  If this garden becomes barred to us, let alone barren, where are we to go?

William

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June 2024

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May 26th is Trinity Sunday, not a festival many will be marking I fear. It lacks the fairy lights of Christmas or the chocolate of Easter. But in its way it is a significant day, marking the contribution of Christianity to mankind’s understanding of the nature of God; not a topic now of general conversation, but it was not always so.

The following was written of Constantinople in 381AD by Bishop Gregory of Nyssa:

“Every part of the city is filled with such talk: the alleys, the crossroads, the squares, the avenues. It comes from those who sell clothes, moneychangers, grocers. If you ask a moneychanger what the exchange rate is, he will reply with a dissertation on the begotten and the unbegotten. If you enquire about the quality and the price of bread, the baker will reply: ‘The Father is greatest and the Son is subject to him. ‘ When you ask at the baths whether the water is ready, the manager will declare that the Son came forth from nothing. I do not know what name to give to this evil, whether frenzy or madness…”

But I am sure that Bishop Gregory would not be so impressed with our generation either when few speak of God, beyond cliché and platitudes, let alone indulge in discussion of doctrine. To those 4th century townspeople of Constantinople it mattered who they thought God was, because the nature of the God you believe in will determine how you see the world around you and the people who inhabit it.  If your God sits on high, a creator who has spoken, who desires sacrifice and penance, whose holiness is akin to aloofness, then your attitude to your life and those who fill it will be of a particular kind.  If, on the other hand, your God is a caring and concerned Father who is intimately bound up with the world, suffering with it, suffering for it, taking it into his being, and who is constantly and eternally encouraging it to grow and develop, then your attitude will be of an altogether different kind.

Even more, if you see in the very nature of how God is a desire to relate to us, that the very being of the author of the universe is one of relationship, then that must, in turn, be the life to which, in the image of its creator, you have been called. A life characterized by the struggle, the challenge, the imperative to relate – even if at the risk of pain and anguish.

Theology matters, because how we see God affects how we see ourselves, our priorities, our opinions – how we speak and how we act.

William

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When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought aromatic spices so that they might go and anoint him. And very early on the first day of the week, at sunrise, they went to the tomb. They had been asking each other, “Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?” But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled back. Then as they went into the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, “Do not be alarmed. You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has been raised! He is not here. Look, there is the place where they laid him. But go, tell his disciples, even Peter, that he is going ahead of you into Galilee. You will see him there, just as he told you.

Then they went out and ran from the tomb, for terror and bewilderment had seized them. And they said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. Mark 16.1-8

So ends the Gospel of Mark, to many a short and unsatisfying end to the Gospel – the Greek even ends on a preposition (very bad Greek!). Several other later endings were added by other hands but Mark’s true account ends here with the women too afraid to speak of what they saw.

A young man appears, in the white robe of a martyr, calling the disciples back to Galilee to continue the work there. Will the disciples follow Jesus there, or will they run in the other direction? What happens next is left for the disciples (and that includes us) to decide. Will they/we be silent like the three women?

Whether or not the disciples see Jesus again depends on whether they renew their commitment to the journey. Jesus goes before us summoning us to the way of the kingdom – the way of compassionate living. And that is the hardest ending of all; not defeat, not victory, but a challenge to follow, a call to respond, to join him in his work.

The “problem” with Mark’s ending is precisely because he refuses to resolve the story for us; he means to leave us to wrestle with whether or not the women at the tomb (and we ourselves) overcame their fear in order to proclaim the new beginning in Galilee. To provide a neat closure to the narrative will allow the reader to finally remain passive; the story would be self-contained and in no need of a response from us. As it stands the story can only truly resume if we take up the way of Jesus, a response only possible because Jesus continues to go before us.

The power of Mark’s Gospel ultimately lies in not what he tells his readers but what he asks of them. Mark offers no proof, no end. Did Jesus reappear to his disciples? We are not told. For Mark the resurrection is not an answer but the final question. To follow as a disciple is the only way that the truth of the resurrection will be preserved and lived out.

A holy and happy Eastertide to you all,

William

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We are a good way into Lent by now, our 40 days of fasting, or what passes for fasting these days, usually the giving up of some self-destructive habit, like sugar in your tea or chocolate biscuits. All very useful but hardly a wilderness experience! I suppose we’ve lost our sense of urgency in the conduct of our spiritual lives, we don’t generally tend to think in terms of ‘doing battle with our lower natures.’ Such language belongs to an age of hand to hand combat.

Ours is a keep fit generation. Frightened of physical collapse through sedentary life-styles we take exercise very seriously (or ought to). The idea of rowing on a machine which doesn’t go anywhere, or lifting weights only to put them down again, would have had our ancestors in stitches. But it’s our time, and it makes sense to us.

So let us look at Lent in a similar way – a time to exercise those parts that our spiritually sedentary life-styles have tended to allow to get rather flabby. The discipline to do without (here’s where the chocolate fast comes in) but also the discipline to do what we are not used to doing, reading a different kind of book, for example, one to make us think; volunteering to help people less fortunate than ourselves; making an effort to spend a little more time in the company of God, and listening to what he might be wanting to say to us. All these would seem to be very useful forms of keep fit, strengthening muscles that we don’t know when we might be called upon to use. Much like our forebears and their training for combat.

But hurry, there’s not much of Lent left – if you manage a bit of spiritual keep fit then Easter will feel all the more special because of it.

William

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“Religion is not, as people often assume, a set of beliefs to be adhered to, or arguments to be made and defended. It is an experience to be immersed in. Praying is meaningless until you start to pray… God makes no sense until you start to talk to him. Then, strangely enough, all sorts of other things start to make sense too. It is hard, if not impossible to explain, and yet it is the simplest thing in the world. We have always done it. We always will.” Paul Kingsnorth, writing for the website ‘UnHerd’.

In our increasingly secular world any kind of ‘organised religion’ is regarded as something strange and peculiar. People instead claim to be ‘spiritual’. Which rather sounds to me like claiming to be able to swim without getting wet! Religion is the embodiment of spirituality, it is what gives it shape and purpose, and allows the experience of generations to be shared and learned from.

There is nothing blind about faith that makes sense, and indeed what is believed should be subjected to sense. There is much that made sense to our forefathers that doesn’t make sense to us now. As it is with any field of human experience and enquiry, as the years go by new knowledge and experience should challenge old ideas and beliefs. We simply know now more about how the world works and this should lead us to question the understanding received from past ages. Question certainly, and lead to an evolution of those beliefs, but not to deny outright common and natural human experience and need – babies and bathwater spring to mind.

I recall that so much of my childhood and teen anxiety was resolved when I discovered talking to God. Not resolved through miraculous answers, but in the act of telling there was great comfort and even helpful revelation. I discovered that it really was ‘the simplest thing in the world’.

The first verse of an old hymn goes:

What a friend we have in Jesus,

all our sins and griefs to bear!

What a privilege to carry

everything to God in prayer!

O what peace we often forfeit,

O what needless pain we bear,

all because we do not carry

everything to God in prayer!

Trite it maybe, but true it certainly is.

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Say in the flattest part of North Dakota,
on a starless moonless night,
no breath of wind,
a man could light a candle
then walk away.
Every now and then
he could turn and see
the candle burning.
Seventeen miles later,
provided conditions remained ideal,
he could still see the flame.
Somewhere between the seventeenth and eighteenth mile
he would lose the light.
If he were walking backwards
he would know the exact moment
when he lost the flame,
he could step forward and find it again,
back and forth,
dark to light, light to dark.
What’s the place where the light disappears?
where the light reappears?
Don’t tell me about photons
and eyeballs,
reflection and refraction.
Don’t tell me about one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second and the theory of relativity.
All I know is that place,
where the light appears and disappears,
that’s the place where we live.

This poem by Al Zolynas seems appropriate when there is so much to cause us concern this new year, from the ever present threat of global warming to the dreadful wars in both Israel and Ukraine, not to mention the endless conflict in Iraq and Yemen. It seems there is much mankind is getting wrong at the moment. But, of course, it is in the nature of the news that we are not given many positive demonstrations of human compassion and kindness – they don’t make good headlines.

It seems to me that we don’t always get the choice to move into the light; for some poor people darkness has been thrust upon them. However, for every act of compassion, for every expression of kindness, we can draw people into that light a little further. We may not be able to address the global and national worries, our power tends to begin and end at the ballot box (though Greta Thunberg proved the power of a placard), but we can bring a little more compassion and a little more kindness and so allow someone else to step into the light.

As I say at the end of a baptism ‘Walk in that light all the days of your life to the glory of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.’ Indeed this is the light we celebrate at Candlemas on 4th February in the churches of our benefice.

Wishing you all a happy, peaceful and healthy New Year.

William

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