No one can remember it ever happening in a church service at Yorkminster Park, but on Sunday morning the great organ had a pipe that wouldn\u2019t stop sounding its note.\u00a0 It is called a cipher and is often caused by a significant shift in temperature.\u00a0 Never having heard it before some wondered if it was a humm from one of the microphones.\u00a0 Someone else thought there was a vacuum cleaner on the go, or a truck outside backing up, but one look at William Maddox and I knew what it was, because I have seen and heard the same thing happen when he has been practicing during the week.<\/p>\n
Like the Good Shepherd off went William in search of the droning pipe.\u00a0 Knowing that there are 5,731 pipes in our organ loft I might well have cynically said, \u201cGood luck,\u201d but I have seen him silence pipes in the past and he may well hold the Guinness record.\u00a0 The cipher started during the announcements and when I invited Alison to come and read the scripture it was still going and continued well into the pastoral prayer.\u00a0 It turns out that when he found the offending pipe, William stuck a pocketful of Kleenex into its mouth to shut it up and it worked.<\/p>\n
I wonder if the one lost sheep that Jesus went out into the night to find hadn\u2019t also been droning and bleating on about conditions in the sheepfold.\u00a0 Maybe the lost sheep was a chronic complainer and constantly out of tune.\u00a0 If so, it may have been silenced by the fear of the dark and the sudden change of temperatures, but the silent night would not stop the Good Shepherd from finding it and bringing it home.\u00a0 William\u2019s determination and success couldn\u2019t help but remind me of our Good Shepherd, but it also gave me pause to pray that a sudden change in temperature, physical and otherwise, wouldn\u2019t cause me to bleat on like a droning cipher.\u00a0 I am sure the Bethlehem shepherds who witnessed the birth of Christ would challenge us to make Advent a time for silent tuning in preparation of lifting our voices with the angel chorus to celebrate the advent of the Good Shepherd.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
No one can remember it ever happening in a church service at Yorkminster Park, but on Sunday morning the great organ had a pipe that wouldn\u2019t stop sounding its note.\u00a0 It is called a cipher and is often caused by a significant shift in temperature.\u00a0 Never having heard it before some wondered if it was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yorkminsterpark.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yorkminsterpark.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yorkminsterpark.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yorkminsterpark.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yorkminsterpark.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.yorkminsterpark.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":549,"href":"https:\/\/www.yorkminsterpark.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545\/revisions\/549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yorkminsterpark.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yorkminsterpark.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yorkminsterpark.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}