You wait ages for one and then two come along at once...

As of buses, so, it seems, of weddings.  In three days I have conducted one wedding and been asked to conduct another two!  The lack of a building it seems is not a total turn off for people and, all things being equal, I will this year, have three weddings in three different buildings.  One will be legally Anglican, which could make for some fun and games with the priest as we negotiate what the law does actually allow - and what it will say on the marriage certificate about the rite used!  The other two are legally 'according to the rites of the Baptists' so only require borrowed rooms and Authorised Persons.

The middle of the three promises to be the most fascinating as it is a Hindu-Christian wedding (church legal bit by Baptist rite, Hindu ceremony to follow), and the dates cannot be fixed without checking the way certain festivals fall this year.  I am privileged and excited about this opportunity and look forward to sharing with the two families in this unique event.  Please pray for both sets of parents as they share in what for them, as devout people of faith, will be a challenging time as they prepare for the event in August/September.

I think that's how I would sum up yesterday's events.  The service went really well, the church we'd borrowed (along with an Authorised Person) was full and atmosphere was happy and warm.

The two-part reception seemed to owe more to the desires of a younger generation than the happy couple, and since almost all the food was garnished with or contained peppers to, which I have a fairly severe food intolerlance (not technically an allergy as I don't go green and foam at the mouth!), it was great for the waistline.

The bride's son did a super, short, 'father of the bride' speech noting that today he hadn't lost a mother but gained a big brother, something he'd always secretly wanted!  The groom, a man who has a terror of public speaking, did well too, keeping to the point and thanking relevant parties for their contributions.  Then his eldest son did the best man's speech, which began well, with an anecdote about the couple's first 'date' in a grave yard - something that must have been 'dead interesting' and 'dead romantic' and other suitably groan inducing puns - but then rapidly degenerated.

Am I old, or old fashioned, in finding it unnecesary, and unhelpful, for the speech to centre on what might - or might not - be happening in the marital bedroom?  The odd innuendo is fair enough, but when various items were produced and people started to comment on the presence of young children (but not too young too ask in loud voices "what's funny about that" questions) it was clear I was not alone.

Ah well.  Nice wedding, hope it's the start of a good marriage.

This afternoon I will be marrying a 75 year-old widower to a 70 year-old widow.  This is a wonderful privilege for any minister-type person, but no less a challenge for all that.  Afterall, they have each built and sustained a marriage that lasted a lifetime, so what can a minister, especially a single one, say?

They have chosen 1 Corinthians 13 as their Bible reading (yawn) and in the KJV (aaaargh!) so that presents an interesting challenge its own right.  Perhaps the way the word 'charity' (from Latin caritas) has changed in meaning is no more of a hurdle than the merry slide to 'love' as 'eros' rather than 'agape' when using contemporary translations?

In the end, I have gone for something loosely based on C S Lewis's concept of 'The Four Loves,' affection, friendship, romantic/sexual and religious/Christian which I am interpretting as 'aspects of love' in a more holistic sense.

Many of those at the service will not be churchgoers; those who are will include several widows/widowers and not a few with difficult or failed marriages.  The need for care seems more self evident than ever.

As part of my attempt to make it accessible and 'not too heavy but still meaningful' I will be using four symbolic gifts to the couple as part of my talk: -

• Affection: a pair of mugs and a packet of Batchelor's (nice irony there) Cuppa Soup (remember the tag 'You only get a hug from a Batchelor's Mug'?).  Affection is warm, everyday, practical and understated. It is also wide-ranging and inclusive.
• Friendship: a small brass statuette of two people walking side by side from SPCK (which my sister and I wickedly still refer to as the Society for the Prevention of Christian Knowledge, based on a childhood misapprehension about organisations called the SPC-anything) which happens to match C S Lewis's image of friendship as open and inclusive of others with shared interests.
• Eros: (not that I will use that word!) a fairly traded candle with a heart design.  Eros as exclusive, private, intimate, tender and vulnerable
• Agape: (another word I won't be using!) a Salvadorean cross.  Agape includes the love of God and the love of neighbour (the "great commandments" as stated by Jesus) which the Salvadorean cross expresses powerfully.  Ironically this most special kind of love is not the narrowest but actually a connecting point back to the affection with which we began - a nice mystery for the theolgoians among us (though I won't say that either)

I hope and pray that this wedding will be the start of a successful marriage.  It is good to see the way in which this relationship has blossomed and how there has been a mutual give-and-take in expectations during the courtship phase.

I hope also that those for whom the occasion is bitter-sweet will find some source of inclusion, embrace and encouragement for their own lives.

Apparently, according to BBC radio, today in the House of Commons one MP, I think Gordon Brown, stood up and as part of what he said told members (and presumably the public) who they should vote to be evicted from the Big Brother House.

In 100 years time, someone will be reading Hansard and, rightly, wonder if we had really and trully lost the plot.

I have not watched the programme this time (never did watch the celebrity versions anyway) but it is a sad endictment on our culture when it seems blatant racism makes prime time TV and the government feels the way to handle it is to tell us who to vote out, thereby boosting someone's profits.  Meanwhile issues of justice, peace and truth don't even make the leader columns in the press.  Ah me. 

Not about arriving before the start of something rather than after it has begun, though anyone who knows me also knows that being late is something I dread, often arriving way too early 'just in case.'  No, really this is 'about' time, or more specifically our concept thereof.

One of the books I've been reading on historical method asserts that the way that time is understood underwent a radical shift with Newton (et al) and that this is something that we in the west are so accustomed to, we cannot imagine it otherwise.  I think there are essentially two strands to this, one being a shift from seeing time as being the period between 'Genesis and Revelation' (or creation and the eschaton), a sort of God-centred-time and the other being the emergence of the concept of time as a 'commodity' - something that became important with increasing industrialisation.

If this is a correct understanding of what was being said, or even if it isn't, it has been whirling around my subconscious for a week or so now, along with other weird and wonderful thoughts on time and history etc.

Time is generally seen as one-dimensional and uni-directional, hence our fascination by the idea of time travel.  I appreciate that clever physicists like Einstein can adjust this view, but it seems a reasonable expression of 'everyday time.'  Historians divide this linear time into chunks based on various assumptions - e.g. periods such as pre-history, dark ages, middle ages, etc; e.g. dynasties and monarch's 'houses'; e.g. uniform chunks called centuries; even BC/AD (or BCE/CE if you prefer). The concept of epochs and eras seem to predate Newton and professionalised history; recording ages and durations goes back to Biblical times so I'm not altogether sure it's really an 'Enlightenment' or 'modern' development to do this.  The shift is more about a 'secularised' view of time, such that the 'kronos' element is all important and 'kairos' idea becomes marginalised, nowadays largley relegated to personal spiritual 'God moments.'

Time as a commodity - that can be bought and sold - is a concept that I find more intriguing to ponder, maybe because it has more relevance to my life and work.  December 25th 2006 one of my brothers was paid £100+ an hour to work on railway signals, whilst my other brother as a police officer was paid his flat rate and I, as a minister of religion would not dare to estimate an hourly rate, because that isn't how it's meant to be viewed.  Somehow or other, an hour of a experienced signalling technican on a bank holiday is very expensive because it is a rare commodity; an hour of a police officer or a minister is cheap, not because there are endless supplies of them, but because it is assumed that they are available.

It is hard to imagine a time before time was a commodity - and this is what the book was trying to say - an era when people took as long as it took to do things, when there were no university deadlines of 4 p.m. on 18th July (or whatever it is) and the concept of an hourly rate (or annual rate if you're a minister) did not exist.  As society became more industrialised we obviously needed order and predictability - train timetables were not always a work of fiction and start/finish times for factories and schools are necessary if they are to achieve their aims.

Time as a commodity is something that is relevant in our postmodern age, and especially for churches, since people have to chose 'how much time to spend' (note the financial language) in different areas of their lives.  Present day 'stewardship campaigns' in churches usually focus on 'time', 'talent' and 'treasure', and I well remember offering a tithing approach to use of time the last time we had such a series.  To consciously assign 16.8 hours a week (of which a third could be sleeping!) to Godward intent would be consistent with giving 10% of income to Godly causes.  Whilst I don't find sacred/secular divides helpful, especially in relation to time, it seemed a way of encouraging people to think how they apportion the commodity they have called 'time.'  I'm not entirely sure I still hold that view, as I can see its flaws all too clearly, but when I struggle to get people to get involved in projects we have committed to because they 'don't have time,' a commodity approach seems to be the only language I have.

I'd love to waffle on for ages - to think about how it sometimes feels that time goes faster or slower, and whether we could actually ever know if it did; to play with the existential (?) question of whether or not yesterday really happened or if it is just something embedded by a creator in the mind of a person who is made NOW - but my commodity of time is limited and I need to do other things this day.

If you have read this far, thank you for bearing with me.  If you have understood a word I've said, I'm impressed.  If you can move my thinking along, I'd love to know.