Evening Reception for the Retirement of Rev R D Drysdale (2004)

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29th February 2004

Belmont Presbyterian Church

Speakers:

Associate Minister Rev David Gray, (Belmont Presbyterian)

The Very Rev Dr John Dunlop, (Rosemary Presbyterian)

The Rev Dr Ron Savage, (Stormont Presbyterian)

The Rev Dr David Irwin, (McCracken Memorial)

The Reverend Dr Katherine Meyer, (Trinity College Dublin)

Deaconess Frances Wright, (Belmont Presbyterian)

Clerk of Session, John Erskine, (Belmont Presbyterian)

Response from Rev R D Drysdale.

Thank you for the Supper, Rev Winston Graham, (Knock Methodist)

Prayer and Benediction,  Rev Hastings McIntyre, (Creagh Presbyterian) on behalf of the East Belfast Presbytery

Rev R D Drysdale Retirement Address

29th February 2004

I think Hilary would like to have said something, but just really couldn't at this point in time. 

So, if I may just, on behalf of both of us, say thank you very much for words that really have left me not just tumbled, but also, I think, in some senses, wondering where I go from here. Can I just say thank you all for coming, and especially those of you who have travelled, as I know, some distances in order to be here.

I greatly appreciate your presence. May I say a special word of thanks to David Lapsley for his, as always, thoughtful words in the service of Thanksgiving earlier this evening, and to Father Paddy DeLargy, and to David Gray for their role in the service, too. It was, for me, important to have our local Roman Catholic community represented in this service, because we in Belmont have enjoyed such good relationships, and such good inter-church relations here in this area.

And I hope that long may they continue. At our annual general meeting just a week ago, I said my personal thanks to various people, in particular in Belmont, and to the congregation in general. And so I will not go over all of that again.

I must, however, thank you all for this gift that you have given to me. I receive it as a token of your affection. And with that in mind, I will try to use it in such a way as will honour your giving it to me.

When you are at a dinner party, and one that you are really enjoying, there always comes the moment when you want to stay longer but know that you have to go. Now is such a moment for Hillary and for me. I look back on my ministry in Belmont, and before that in Dundrod and McQuiston.

And I am so delighted that there are people here this evening from both those congregations. I look back on my ministry with a deep sense of gratitude, especially to God, whose grace in Jesus Christ has sustained me over the years. Of course, there were times when I could have made for the hills.

But overall, these for me have been years of fulfilment and creativity. And I have enjoyed a series of ordained assistants, each so different, but each has made a significant contribution to our ministry together. And currently, we have in Belmont an associate minister.

And I am grateful to David Gray for all his help over the past two years and more. And I will continue to follow his future ministry with the interest of a friend. And Valerie, too, will be in our thoughts.

Francis Wright is the second deaconess to boss me, the first being Jane Orr in McQuiston. And again, I am pleased that Jane is here tonight, as she was indeed at our service this morning. Francis has relieved me of much of the ongoing pastoral visitation of senior members in this congregation.

And she goes about everything in her own inimitable style and is loved dearly for it. I am indebted, too, to Andy Adams, and to Cooper Linus for their help in a similar part-time capacity over the past years, and, of course, to the late John Davey, former missionary to India. Over these final weeks in Belmont, Hilary and I have been overwhelmed by so many expressions of goodwill.

That has not surprised us, of course, because it goes hand-in-hand with the people of Belmont as we have come to know you. We will miss so many of you so much. But I don't, I think, go farther down that road, because private and personal emotions publicly shared are always in danger of getting out of control.

We can only manage them, or at least I can, with a certain constraint. So let me leave, for the most part, all of these feelings unspoken, but understood. I have also been fortunate with my friends, some of whom continue as friends from student days, as you have already heard, and others have been gathered along the way.

Your support and encouragement and laughter has been an important part of me. Good friends keep your feet on the ground, strip away any pretentious notions, and never allow you to think too highly of yourself. It's difficult, anyway, to think well of yourself as you hack your seventh golf shot out of the rough on a par three hole, while your friends and playing partners sympathise with your predicament, and all the time you know fine well that what they're really thinking is, take a few more.

For a moment, let me be very personal. It is, I think, a bit unusual, maybe, to reach almost 65, and on the evening of your retirement, to have your mother present. Tonight, I welcome Nanny, as she's known in our family, and I can only wish that at 30, my mind had been as agile as hers is at 90.

I'm delighted, too, to have our family circle here, with the exception of Alan, who's keeping Sky News on the air in London, and our two grandchildren, who are, or at least ought to be, tucked up in bed. All which brings me to Hilary. Anything that I may have achieved here or elsewhere over the years since our marriage has been only possible in large measure because of Hilary.

Put simply, she has been the wind beneath my wings. Someone asked me last week what I was most looking forward to on this final day in Belmont, and I said, my bed in Donaghadee. And so it is, with that thought in mind, and at the end of what has been a long and emotionally exhausting day, as you can only imagine, let me draw this speech to a conclusion.

I leave with you these words from one of my chief and enduring theological and spiritual mentors, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, well-known now in Belmont. Writing from his prison cell in June 1944, and when he knew that the Gestapo would now see to it that he would never return to the life that he had known, he wrote these words in a letter;

“To take leave of others and to live on past memories, whether they belong to yesterday or last year, is now my recurring duty. But to say goodbye goes very much against the grain.”

Thank you, one and all.

Evening Thanksgiving Service For Rev Drysdale’s Ministry (2004)

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29th February 2004

Belmont Presbyterian Church

Welcome to the congregation and visiting clergy.

Church Notices

Hymn: “From All that Dwells Below The Skies”

Prayer

Hymn “Dear Lord And Father Of Mankind”

New Testament Reading: John Ch 15 v 12-25 & Ch 16 v 33

Rev Fr Patrick Delargy (St. Colmcille’s)

The Anthem “The Lord Is My Shepherd” (Arr. John Mercer)

The Apostles’ Creed

Hymn: “Be Thou My Vision”

Sermon

Rev Dr David Lapsley (Fisherwick Presbyterian)

I counted it a great privilege when Derek asked me to preach the sermon at his farewell service and reception. He has been a friend for a long time, a friend whom I have seen more regularly over these past few years, especially for a time when I helped out in Belmont and decided to stay around. Now that I come to worship here more frequently, I have been much more able to appreciate Derek's pulpit ministry.

I have never gone away from his services without being blessed through his prayers and enriched by his insights and perceptions of the Word of God. There is never a clichéd phrase or an empty gesture, no large and hollow sounds from the pulpit. Rather, there is a sensitive probing of the Scriptures, richly informed by scholarship and reading and wisdom.

And his sermons are always applicable to the lives and to the issues with which we struggle in our day-to-day dialogue with the world around us. I am therefore very glad to join with his friends in Belmont and from further afield in this occasion of thanksgiving to express our gratitude and to wish him and Hilary every blessing in the years to come, and to voice the fervent hope that he will surely find ways in broader fields to continue to exercise his great gifts of ministry. I believe this to be a good opportunity to review where we're at in these early days of the 21st century and to tease out what is our role as the body of Christ in the world of our day.

For that purpose, there can be no words more authoritative on this subject than the words of Jesus spoken to his disciples as he prepared them for their ministry after his death and resurrection. We've shared some of them tonight as Paddy read them from John's Gospel, chapters 15 and 16. Let me summarise some of them by taking key phrases from that teaching which exhorted the embryonic church to cohere around its risen Lord.

And as you listen to these loaded cadences, apply them to yourself and to your own parish or congregation. Listen to them. You are my friends.

You are my friends to do what I command you. You are my friends to do what I command you. You did not choose me.

I chose you. I appointed you to bear fruit. If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own.

But you do not belong to the world. Therefore, the world hates you. In the world, you face hatred because the no longer know me.

But take courage. I have conquered the world. And overarching all of these is the injunction repeated in the passage many times.

This is my commandment that you love one another as I have loved you. In giving thanks for an era in your personal and cultural history now coming to a close and an expectation of another era about to begin, I want to suggest some of the resonances of Jesus' teaching for us in this emerging situation. Let me begin with the place of the past.

The past is a complex network of contributory streams which feed the reservoir of our history. There's ancestry which supplies our genes and gives us our names and affects our status. There's the geopolitical aspect of our past that determines tribe and colour and culture.

There's the accumulation of deeds and accomplishments which gives each of us a personal past, a curriculum vitae that is our own which can either trouble or ennoble us. And there's the past that all humanity shares, the mega-past of creation and world history. And for us Christians, that's the past that crystallises around the greatest of all historical events, when God took human form and dwelt among us, the Christ event, which draws together all the strands of our humanness and launched the world towards its end and its fulfilment.

And it's from that event that springs that part of us which is first Christian and then Presbyterian and now Belmont or Fisherwick or whatever taught us our first Bible stories and brought us to a knowledge of Christ. So as tonight when we remember the last 24 years and give thanks for them, we're prompted to ask how we rate the past in our loyalties and affections and priorities. There can be no doubt that we must value the past, however it has treated us or however we have behaved within it, for it has contributed the elements which make us who and what we are today.

It's the meeting ground where Jesus has been able to say to us, you are my friends. You did not choose me, I chose you. Our past is the vast learning complex in which knowledge of God has been filtered down to us.

It has bequeathed us the wisdom of the church in catechisms and liturgies and traditions and creeds, in theologies and the stories of missionaries and saints and the loving sacrifices of a million sainted nobodies. And in the living past of our own lifetimes, family and friends and teachers have tutored us and corrected us and guided us to make the choices by which we live and pray and worship today. In this age, which has very little respect for anybody or any institution, Christians must value the past.

But it is a past which must never dominate or restrict us. It's given to us to propel us out into the world of today. The past is what's given us the bone and the sinew to grapple with the present, with all its needs and opportunities.

And because of it, we are set free to venture into unknown places, to do new things, and to connect with the Christ who keeps going ahead of us to make all things new. So if we keep yearning for the past and resist moving from it, we have failed to learn its most important lessons. I want to think of some of the things that Jesus teaches us to help us to cope with the present.

For the present is the proving ground of who we have become and what we are made of. It questions how we behave in times of crisis, how we adapt to changes, and most crucially, how we relate to each other and to the world about us. And the great problem with the present is that it moves away so fast, which is what the church seems to have a habit of forgetting.

At its institutional level, it lumbers on as if eternity was given to us for arriving at some very modest conclusion. And locally, hard as we sometimes try, the best we can achieve in the face of the ever-changing moods and fashions of the day is catch up. I have a big interest in alpine plants.

I'm saying this, by the way, partly as a plug for your talent contest, because I've been persuaded to put up for auction a trough containing alpine plants, and I hope somebody is listening who will want them. Alpine plants grow in some of the most inhospitable terrain on earth. They grow in thin soil under snow for much of the year, battered by winds and lanced by fierce light when they do emerge.

Yet they achieve in their short growing season a matchless, delicate beauty. They know the urgency of the present and compress their annual life cycle into half the time taken by plants in more moderate climates. The contemporary climate in which we witness out our Christian life has begun to seem a harsh climate.

Postmodernism is not sympathetic to the church and its message. Individualism works against commitment in a personal sense, and materialism gives priority to the physical. As one commentator on current affairs put it recently, people today seem to know everything about sex and very little about love.

But perhaps even more worrying is the disenchantment and cynicism which pervade public comment and dialogue. Discussion programmes on radio and TV have become annoyingly depressing, and newspaper articles are full of destructive negativity. As a nation, we seem to have become resentful and distrustful of all forms of authority.

The Christian faith for many is an irritant which reeks of hypocrisy. For others, it's the butt of savage and sometimes blasphemous humour. But for most, it seems to be just a non-event.

Now, if we are to grasp the opportunity to witness to this time in which we live, we must keep reminding ourselves that this is a generation who feel betrayed by broken promises. The ethos of the 80s and 90s was one that suggested that humanity was being thrust upwards to a better lifestyle, powered by technology and sophisticated knowhow. Well, that certainly didn't happen.

But they also feel betrayed by the church, rocked by scandal and dulled by ease of passage. The church which has failed to deliver a credible alternative. Jesus did warn us, in the world you will meet hatred, because the world no longer knows me.

If you belong to the world, it would love you as its own. But you don't belong to the world. Now, our problem as those who would want to witness to the world is that we have to live in it.

We're as much part of the world as anybody else. We have to be busy with everyday necessities just to keep afloat. So the fact that we're called by Jesus to bear fruit for him often gets scant attention from us.

But we do have a belonging to sort out. Do we belong to the secular world? Or do we belong to the kingdom of God? In plain terms, which gets our first loyalty? Or is it possible that the two are not as polarised as we might have thought? Jesus prayed for his followers in the later stages of the passage from John, which is occupying us tonight. Then he prayed, Father, I'm not asking you to take them from the world, but I am asking you to protect them from the evil one.

And I take that to imply that Christians are in the world of the same stuff as everyone else, but we are not to allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by its false gods and values. The world has always been, in spite of its hesitations, it's always had an open door to the gospel, however tight those doors seem to be shut. Today, for example, there is a discernible hunger for some form of spirituality among the very people who have become disenchanted by Christianity and the church.

And it's our task to present to them the real Jesus as the heart and head of a body which is alive and contemporary, to be like the infant church presented in the New Testament as often raucous, sweaty, embarrassingly frank, yet tender and caring with a sensitive awareness of the world and its people. We have the privilege of being alive in these exciting and demanding times. We've been commissioned to shape them and to illumine them.

How to go about that will occupy this congregation very deeply over the next few months, because ministry and mission go hand in hand. In the bewildering changes in morals and attitudes which have rocked us and sometimes frightened us, one word from Jesus remains constant. This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

Here, in the security of Christ's kind of loving, the present and the eternal meet and walk together. The past that we honour and from which we learn, the past which equips us to face the challenges of this rapidly vanishing today, and now the future. Hope for the future.

The Bible does not lay stress on an abstract continuity of time. Rather, it tells the stories of God-given moments in history, moments which bring insights and revelations, moments of dramatic conflict and resolution, moments of sadness and learning. Time moves on, as it were, by stepping stones to its end, to God's appointed victory.

Tonight, for Derek and Hilary, and for Belmont, has been a stepping stone, a God-given moment of thanksgiving and reflection on the past. And from this God-given moment, we prepare ourselves for the future. Ernst Bloch, the great German philosopher, who died at an old age in 1977 and had experienced to the full the horrors of twentieth century conflicts, wrote of man that he must be classified not as thinker, not as toolmaker, but as hoper, one who hopes.

We, of all living things alone, are conscious, he said, of the beckoning future, and for that we cannot live without hope. All humanity is gifted with hope, but the hope of the people of Christ is distinctive. It is based on a King already come among us, whose kingdom is already begun, but is yet to be fully developed and established.

Our hope is that the contradictions of the world and its wrongs and sufferings and oppressions and injustices will be overcome. Our hope for the future is tied in with our faith today, as that faith powers Christian witness and caring and righteous lifestyles to present to the world, and fuels a passion for the deliverance of all sufferers from every kind of bondage. Our hope is realised today if we can provide a model in the churches for the world to follow, an alternative, which demonstrates that love is stronger than hate, that peace is more effective than war.

And we cannot hang back, because the future is always pressing in upon the fast-disappearing present. But we do not lose hope. We have the promise of the risen Lord.

In the world, of course, you will have tribulation, but take courage. I have overcome the world, and because of His victory already won, we are grateful for the past. We are encouraged for today.

We have hope for the days to come. The past, the present, and the future are bound together in the mystery of time. Tonight, in a very special way, they have all impinged upon us.

As we have been celebrating the past, and challenged by the present, and full of hope for the future, in every dimension of time, God is Lord. And with thanksgiving, confidence, and hope, we praise His name. To Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, the God whom we adore, be glory as it was of old, is now, and shall be evermore.

Amen.

Offering & Prayer

Closing Hymn: “Lord For The Years”

Advent BBC Radio Ulster Studio Service "Waiting" (1991)

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The Reverend Derek Drysdale presented that Advent studio service on the theme of "Waiting." 

The reader was Michael Bagley. 

Music was provided by the Renaissance singers conducted by Ronnie Lee, and the organist was Stephen Hamill. 

The producer was Bert Tosh.

(C) 1991 BBC Radio Ulster