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This script cannot exactly reflect the transmission, as it was prepared before the
service was broadcast. It may include editorial notes prepared by the producer,
and minor spelling and other errors that were corrected before the radio
broadcast.
It may contain gaps to be filled in at the time so that prayers may reflect the
needs of the world, and changes may also be made at the last minute for timing
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BBC Radio 4
Sunday Worship
5th September 2010
Greenbelt Festival
Led by Andrew Graystone
Andrew Graystone
Good morning.
Of all the many summer festivals, this one is unique; 20,000 people gathered
here at Cheltenham Racecourse, the home of National Hunt racing. We’re
here for Greenbelt, an annual festival of arts and music, discussion and
dissent, all inspired by the Christian faith.
The Greenbelt festival’s been held annually for over thirty years, so it’s almost
as old as its cousin down the M5, Glastonbury. I’ve been coming here for
many years, and for me Greenbelt has become – if not a spiritual home –
certainly an important part of the landscape of my faith. We’re going to draw
on some of the words and music at this year’s Greenbelt to energise our
worship this Sunday morning.
Music: Amazing Grace (Big Top Jazz Mass – King/Cave)
Maggi Dawn
Let us pray.
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Our vision of God is sometimes twisted and distorted; often unclear, never
complete.
Lord, forgive us.
Our view of ourselves is unfair or untrue; often corrupt, never divine.
Lord, forgive us
Our attitude to others can be selfish and unloving; often dishonest.
Lord, forgive us.
Our image of the world is narrow and limited.
Lord, forgive us.
In the name of God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – be forgiven.
Andrew Graystone
Those prayers of confession were led by The Revd Dr Maggi Dawn at the
Sunday morning service here at Greenbelt. Maggi will be leading our
intercessions later in this act of worship.
Before that we heard Amazing Grace from the King / Cave Project , who led a
jazz mass in the Big Top.
Of the thousands who come here to Greenbelt every year, many are
Christians. But this is a place where dreamers and doubters are just as
welcome as more conventional believers.
John Bell is here with other members of the Iona Community. He told me
what draws them to Greenbelt.
John Bell
I’ve been invited back with my colleagues for about 25 or 26 years. But what
keeps me coming is that I believe that the Church advances and the Christian
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faith advances when there are people and places on the periphery which
allow for aspects of faith to be spoken about, types of worship to be
experienced, which the centre mainline churches or cathedrals or spire
churches probably couldn’t cope with, and you have these kind of laboratories
on the outside, of which Greenbelt is one, which enable new things to happen,
which may, in the end of the day, affect the rest of the Church.
Andrew Graystone
So is it okay for some Christians to use Greenbelt as the sort of antidote to
their weekly church experience?
John Bell
I wouldn’t say ‘antidote’. I mean, if you look in the Old Testament, the Jews,
up until the time of Jesus, had local synagogue experiences – there may have
been some quite boring, some were may be interesting, particularly if He was
preaching - but they also had the temple experience when they went to
Jerusalem in a procession and there’d be all the fun of the fair as well as the
solemnity of the big occasion and I think that faith needs that which is
personal, that which is communal to may be 100/200 people, and that which
is a big celebratory event.
Andrew Graystone
What’s the best thing for you personally about your Greenbelt experience?
John Bell
It’s hard to say, but one of the things which I love doing with my colleagues is
getting about a 1,000/1,200 people to sing African songs in 4-part harmony
and to see the delight in people’s faces that they actually can do it.
Music: African Song (Wild Goose/Iona Community)
Andrew Graystone
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As I wander through the middle of the racecourse I’m surrounded by all the
things you’d expect from a Summer festival: miles and miles of colourful tents;
long queues for the portaloos; scores of vans selling exotic foods in cardboard
cartons – here’s a stall selling Goan Fish curry, and over here’s a place where
you can buy a pair of sandals made in the Kibera slum in Kenya. And all of
this bustle and excitement is framed by the glorious Cotswold Hills.
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Voice
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth.
Andrew Graystone
Creator God, we celebrate your creativity. Thank you that you have set us in
a world of wonders. Help us to care for your creation.
Voice
He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber.
Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.
Andrew Graystone
Creator God, thank you that you allow us to be co-creators with you…through
music and art, words and worship. Inspire us to make only what is beautiful in
your eyes.
Voice
The LORD is thy keeper: the LORD is thy shade upon thy right hand.
The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night.
Andrew Graystone
Creator God, thank you that you bring us together in families and
communities, nations. Purge in us every kind of enmity and take down all the
barriers that divide us.
Voice
The LORD shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul.
The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth,
and even for evermore.
[Psalm 121]
Andrew Graystone
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I love the diversity of Greenbelt. There’s a huge range of art, music, comedy
and debate including many voices familiar to Radio 4 listeners. Jeremy Hardy
is here, and Mark Kermode, and Roger McGough will be reading a poem for
us later.
In a basement room over here there’s a heavy metal band playing to an
enthusiastic crowd of – well, mostly teenage boys. On the other hand, last
night there was comedy from Milton Jones and a concert of movements from
Handel’s Messiah. And later I’m hoping to see a play by Carol-Ann Duffy.
I passed some Franciscan monks leading morning prayers on the campsite
using words that haven’t changed much in a thousand years. But there’s also
experimental worship using ambient music and imagery. The diversity is
reflected in the people who come here too, and the questions they come with.
A bishop in a purple shirt can easily end up queuing for falafel or a pizza next
to a goth in black clothes and eye-liner! But they may both be on a spiritual
journey, and at its best Greenbelt can challenge and encourage them both.
Jude Simpson is a stand-up poet whose sideways look at life and faith has
appeared on Radio 4’s Saturday Live. Jude appeared in front of a packed
crowd in the Big Top on Friday night. Her poem “Not Cut Out For Religion” is
a tongue-in-cheek request for God to make faith…a little more user-friendly.
Poem: Not Cut Out for Religion (Jude Simpson)
Andrew Graystone
I don’t want to give the impression that Greenbelt is trying to update the
gospel. I think there’s something much more complex going on here. One of
the speakers at this year’s Greenbelt , the former MP and International
Development Secretary Clare Short, reads from chapter 9 of Mark’s Gospel.
Clare Short
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A man came to Jesus and said "Teacher, I brought you my son, who is
possessed by a spirit that has robbed him of speech. Whenever it seizes him,
it throws him to the ground. He foams at the mouth, gnashes his teeth and
becomes rigid. I asked your disciples to drive out the spirit, but they could
not."
O unbelieving generation," Jesus replied, "how long shall I stay with you?
How long shall I put up with you? Bring the boy to me."
Andrew Graystone
Here’s a man who’s caught in the tension between the transcendent and the
thoroughly down-to-earth. His day-to-day life is dominated by caring for his
very sick son. But the fact that he’s brought the child to the disciples says that
he’s at least hopeful that there’s something more - some grace to be found.
Clare Short
They brought the boy to Jesus. And when the spirit saw Jesus, it immediately
threw the boy into a convulsion. He fell to the ground and rolled around,
foaming at the mouth.
Jesus asked the boy's father, "How long has he been like this?"
"From childhood," he answered. "It has often thrown him into fire or water to
kill him.
Andrew Graystone
Even in the presence of Jesus there are no easy answers. There’s the
possibility of God’s reality, sustained by hints of heaven that the staunchest
unbeliever would struggle to deny. But there’s also the complexity and the
sheer pain of living in a broken world. It’s where those two axes meet that
people of faith have to stand - trying to hold the two together.
So Greenbelt’s a melting pot of social and political activism, issues of health
and well-being, and artists expressing the pain and beauty that they feel, but
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it’s also about exploring the many ways of connecting with God, drawing on
contemporary and very ancient traditions.
Clare Short
“If you can do anything”, the man said, “take pity on us and help us."
" 'If you can'?" said Jesus. "Everything is possible for him who believes."
Immediately the boy's father exclaimed, "I do believe; help me overcome my
unbelief!"
When Jesus saw that a crowd was running to the scene, he rebuked the evil
spirit. "You deaf and mute spirit," he said, "I command you, come out of him
and never enter him again."
[Matthew 9:17-25]
Andrew Graystone
I love the honest ambiguity of this man’s faith: “I do believe; help me
overcome my unbelief”. It takes courage to hold together a life of faith and a
thorough engagement with the world. It’s always tempting either to give up on
God as many have done, or to give up on the world and resort to oversimplified views of religion. Greenbelt is a place where people come to
encourage one another to hang on in there, and to do, well, the only sensible
thing to do in the meantime…to dance.
Music: Lord of the Dance (Beer and Hymns)
Andrew Graystone
The hymn ‘Lord of the Dance’, sung as I’ve never heard it before at “Beer and
Hymns”, part of the great variety of sounds and perspectives here at the
Greenbelt Festival.
Crowds of people queued for up to an hour to hear the radical theologian
Stanley Hauerwas speak at this year’s Greenbelt. These are his reflections
on Jacob’s wrestling with God.
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Stanley Hauerwas
The realism of scripture can and does shock many Christians. We presume
that out forerunners, in order to be our forerunners, should be morally heroic.
Some of our fathers and mothers are quite impressive, but not Jacob.
Jacob’s a schemer, someone taught by his mother to outfox the foxes that
surrounded him. In contrast to Jacob, his loving brother Esau is surely a more
attractive human being. Jacob’s only virtue is tenacity. Just as he used
trickery to steel his brother’s birthright, so he refuses to let go of the one with
whom he struggles until he’s blessed.
As Christians, we have seen God in Jesus Christ. Wounded on our behalf on
the cross, Jesus has now made it possible for us to be a people of truth in a
fallen world. Like Jacob we are witnesses with a limp. Therefore, like Jacob
let us be a people who refuse to let go.
Music: Palestrina (Accord)
Vox Pops
“I’ve just really sort of come back to Christianity so, for me, it was really good
to come somewhere that I could get more information about a relationship
with God.”
“The thing about Greenbelt is it’s one of those places on the sort of Christian
calendar you have to come to. There’s lots to see, lots to do, lots to think
about, lots of people to talk to.”
“I think it represents a particular strand of open, receptive, inquisitive people
that are willing to hear different points of view, willing to think about things
very seriously, and I find that very nice and welcoming.”
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“I love the sort of atmosphere and the whole sort of festival and carnival-ness
of it but – yeh – it’s not very good for suede shoes!”
Andrew Graystone
The character of Elijah in the book of 1 Kings is very contemporary. Like a lot
of us, he knows he believes in God…but he’s still full of questions. There’s
nothing simple about Elijah’s experience of faith. And when God does appear
to him, it’s in the most unexpected places. This passage from 1 Kings 19 is
read for us by the poet and Greenbelt regular Stewart Henderson.
Stewart Henderson
The LORD said to Elijah, "Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence
of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by."
Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the
rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind
there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the
earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire
came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face
and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.
Then a voice said to him, "What are you doing here, Elijah?"
[1 Kings 19:11-13]
Andrew Graystone
A crowd of over 10,000 attended the Sunday morning communion service
here at Greenbelt. They heard these reflections on the story of Elijah from
The Revd Dr Kate Coleman, Associate Pastor of The Regeneration Centre in
Birmingham, and a former President of the Baptist Union.
Kate Colman
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You know, it’s inevitable that we have a view of God that fits very neatly with
our culture, our age, our history, our ethnicity and even the people we hang
around with.
Our reading today is centred on an experience of the prophet Elijah. Perhaps
surprisingly for some of us James, chapter 5, verse 17 informs us that Elijah
was a human being even as we are. This means that contrary to popular
opinion, Elijah was not a super saint in the way that we often imagine. In fact
as we scrutinise his story we discover someone who got depressed, someone
who ran away, someone who feared, someone who even wished to die,
someone who became tired and afraid. In fact the account in 1 Kings 19:
reminds us that even the most extraordinary ordinary people can benefit from
what I’m going to describe as ‘side sight’. In other words, like Elijah, we’re all
capable of finding God in unexpected places and experiencing God in
unexpected ways.
How many of you drive? When you’re moving out, you turn around to the side
and you look over your shoulder into your blind spot, because in the blind spot
there are things you do not see. If you like, it’s the art of looking sideways.
The reality is we all have blind spots. There are things that we do not know
and that we don’t even understand about ourselves, about the world that we
live in and the God that we serve. Like foresight, insight and hindsight, side
sight is a perspective we don’t yet have. Side sight is the ability to think in new
ways, even about old challenges. It’s the ability to see things we’ve never
seen before and to consider a perspective that may be totally new to us.
Elijah was a man familiar with a God who expressed himself through displays
of spectacular power and the extraordinary. But if Elijah was going to fulfil his
calling he needed a fresh revelation of God. And God was about to reveal
himself to Elijah through a small voice a whisper or as some translations put it
‘a still small voice,’ something that Elijah had not met before, had not
experienced before.
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There are very few things that prepare us for encountering God in such
unexpected ways. The reality is that it was the challenges and the difficulties
and the pain of Elijah’s immediate experiences including his feelings of
depression, including his fear, including the isolation, including the sense of
abandonment, that left him receptive to meeting God in an unexpected way.
And it’s often the internal struggles, the difficulties of our lives, the challenge
of meeting diverse people who are different to us, a collision with new ideas
and new experiences, that leave us receptive to possibilities we may never
have considered.
Elijah learned that God is more than simply a God of the spectacular and the
extraordinary. God isn’t bound by the so called laws of physical science or
history or politics or economics. God inevitably breaks loose from our
theological dogmas and challenges us to meet him in a very different world
view, in a different culture, in a different family history, in a different theology.
Sometimes it’s a book, a conversation or an experience with the unfamiliar
that prepares us for the encounter that informs us that God is bigger, greater.
The Bible is littered with such perspectives of God. In fact, I’d go as far as
saying that side sight is the order of the day in Biblical thought. When we
celebrate Communion, we’re reminded that in Jesus’ day, the crowds wanted
a mighty deliverer prepared to shed blood in order to set them free. They
never dreamed that deliverance might come as a result of the Deliverer’s
blood being shed.
Who would have thought God would display power through the weakness of a
helpless, dependent, needy human baby?
Who really understood that the sovereign ruler of the universe - the creator of
all things - would enter his own creation in order to save it?
Who would have thought death could be accompanied by life?
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Today we all have the benefit of hindsight but Lord, give us side sight, the
ability to look over our shoulder straight into our blind spot so that we can
engage, as you did, with someone else’s reality experience and perspective
so that we may find you in unexpected places and in unexpected ways. Help
us to see the things we don’t see.
Music: The Lord’s my Shepherd (Stuart Townend)
Andrew Graystone
In the middle of the noise of the festival I’ve come to the only really tranquil
spot. It’s known as “Soul Space.” It’s high up in the grandstand and it has a
panoramic view over the racecourse, the festival and Cleve Hill beyond.
Festival-goers come here to look for spiritual guidance or to meditate and
pray. Our prayers are going to be led by another of the speakers at this
year’s Greenbelt, the author and chaplain of Robinson College Cambridge,
The Revd Dr Maggi Dawn.
Maggi Dawn
Let us pray for ourselves and for our world:
God, we’re told that you are everywhere,
yet we struggle to locate you, or to know what you are like.
We are told that we are made in your image, yet we struggle to know who we
are, or what we are meant to be.
We pray that we will not lose our sense of wonder.
We pray for the wisdom to know ourselves,
For the clarity of mind to perceive what is beyond our understanding,
For the imagination to re-shape our thoughts,
And for the grace not to become cynical
You are the God of love: please hear this prayer
God, we struggle with a world that is out of order;
With natural disasters,
human accidents,
and the tragedies of war, violence and unrest.
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We pray for those whose suffering we see on our screens and in the ‘papers
and hear on the radio; and especially today for peace and justice in the Middle
East and for the people of Pakistan.
We pray for people we know who are in need.
And we pray for those who suffer alone and have no-one to pray for them.
In the face of a constant stream of news stories, may we never grow numb to
the pain of others, or deaf to their cries for help.
Help us never to place blame where it does not belong
But instead to respond with grace, imagination, and action.
Fill us with compassion and show us how to be the answer to the prayers of
those in need.
You are the God of love: please hear this prayer
God, the world is full of so many different beliefs,
And so much knowledge we can’t master all of it.
Sometimes we struggle to know how to think about faith.
Help us to listen and learn,
To be confident in what we believe but not arrogant towards others,
And not to hold on so tightly to the security of being certain
that our own beliefs become rigid.
We worship you as a living God.
Help us to keep the faith in a way that is alive, and life-giving.
You are the God of love: please hear this prayer
Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy.
May your kingdom come and your will be done on earth,
as it is in heaven.
Give us what we need today
Forgive us for the wrong things we have done,
As we forgive those who have wronged us.
Do not test us but help us, so that we will not stumble and fall,
And protect us from all evil.
For the kingdom, and power and praise belong to you for ever. Amen!
Andrew Graystone
Roger McGough, who presents Poetry Please on Radio 4, has been here
reading his own poems. This one – his personal message to religion – is
about the Lowest Common Denominator of faith…listening for a small voice
amidst the noise, and hopefully holding on.
Poem: To Religion (Roger McGough)
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Andrew Graystone
“Somewhere within, a small voice sings.”
Over the years of my own faith journey this festival has been a reminder and
an encouragement for me to listen for that small voice and nurture it. Not to
duck the difficult questions but to look for God in unexpected places…to hold
together my experience of Christ in prayer and my experience of Christ in
action… and when I do hear that small voice, to sing with it.
Music: Now thank we all our God (Big Top Jazz Mass – King/Cave)
The Grace
The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the
Holy Spirit, be with us all, evermore. Amen.
Music: Blessing (Maggi Dawn)
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