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8 December 2024 – Dedication of the Pat Fry Memorial Stained-Glass Window
Memory is important.
Many of us today will remember Pat. For church-folk, here at St Edmund’s, it may be simply remembering her presence among us as a fellow worshipper, but likely it will be more than just restricted to that. More specifically, our memory may be through how something she said or did has kept with us, maybe from her time as a Sunday School teacher, singing in the choir, rolling up her sleeves and getting involved in bazaars and socials, her service on the church council, through her friendship and conversations and banter. For her family and close friends, the memories will be more abundant, especially from those special times spent together: times at home, times away, and in the ongoing time of her being there as wife, sister, mum, grandmum, great grandmum, aunt, neighbour, good friend and confidante – in her love, care, reliability, generosity and just being Pat.
But memory is also fragile. The older we get the more they fade, as they seem to recede deeper into the decreasing volume of the grey matter of our brains. Often in trying to reach deep to retrieve them, we find it is the same ones that we manage to bring back, to resurrect, to recount. I do it all the time, and I’m sure people knowingly smile or inwardly groan thinking ‘oh! it’s that story again.’
The need to remember is key to us being human. People and their deeds can often get forgotten very quickly. At funerals, often real personal memories of the loved one who has died are reflected on, not only helping the grief of those present, but creating the story, the spoken memory, of that person; sharing it to all present so it becomes part of their story which they can pass on to others. In our families and among our friends, we continue to remember and speak about those no longer with us, and I know among Pat’s family her name and her story is part of their lives going forward and in their lives shared together.
Churches do this as well. We may have heard the term ‘institutional memory’ or ‘corporate memory,’ where the remembrance of people or events are preserved and transmitted within the church or organisation or group itself. Even when our individual actual memories grow dim, the honouring of those we have loved, those we have known, those we have lost, even if only in a generalised way, are part of how we as a church, how we as a community, understand ourselves. This building here, itself, is part of that corporate memory of what and who has gone before: in books of remembrance, in sacred items in memory of others, in the actions we perform and the words we say which have fed and nourished the spiritual journeys of this community across the years.
Today, we add to that, in the new window being dedication to the glory of God and in memory of Pat Fry.
The theme of the window is ‘Resurrection.’ Back in the day, when I was in the final year of my degree, I chose to write my honours dissertation on ‘A Study of the Interpretations of Resurrection in the Theology of Post-War Europe.’ And so, you might expect that this theme and my preaching today would be a good fit. Think again! Since being authorised as a local preacher I’ve managed to sidestep preaching on this subject. But it was only going to be time before it caught up with me.
When confronted by the death of someone we love or who loved us, the grief we experience can be overwhelming and haunt us as we continue to walk our lives without them by our side. And the Bible grapples with that trying to make sense of death as our final state. The hope of resurrection comes as an answer to this existential angst as we come to end of the Old Testament period. We find it in the Book of Daniel and in the apocryphal books that fall between the Old and New Testaments. This belief crystallises in this period, particularly in the Maccabean revolt against the tyrannical Seleucid empire in the second century BC, where the Jewish people needed to look beyond the death, torture and persecution they were then experiencing to trust in the faithfulness and justice of God. And, of course, this culminates in our New Testament, where following Jesus’s crucifixion, his disciples experience the risen Christ: a resurrection that is not a one-off aberration but rather a hope for all, in what Paul calls the ‘firstfruits of [all] them that sleep.’
So, in the light of this theme, when you stand in front of the window, you may try to espy an empty tomb, the risen Christ, resurrection-heralding angels, or disciples running: whether that be from fear or rejoicingly with the message of resurrection hope. But you won’t. And only by looking closely, all you may spot is that the cockerel depicted stands on two sticks that have fallen to create a cross beneath his standing foot.
As Christians, we often focus our understanding of faith and belief by the preaching of the word, reading of scripture, written theology, trying to stretch the limitations of human language to articulate a divine reality that lies around, within and beyond us. We sometimes seem to have lost an appreciation of visceral experiences of the truths and stories of our faith: how our theology and spirituality can be seen and understood and explored non-verbally – through art and drama and movement and space.
The new window intentionally tackles that head on and creates a picture that speaks of resurrection, using artistic motifs from early church iconography, intentionally allegorical, and often quite cryptic. These motifs are not simply dotted here and there throughout the design – like you would find in mediaeval glass – but they fill the window. In the early church, from the second century, we find peacocks used in Christian funeral rites on frescos and on sarcophagus, as symbols of Christ’s resurrection and eternal life. (Most likely from the common belief at the time that peacock flesh didn’t decay with death but was incorruptible.) We see cockerels also depicted on sarcophagus representing the triumph of life over death and of the resurrection of the dead, and being symbolic of watchfulness and readiness for Christ’s return.
Here, in our window, we see a peacock lifting its head as it rises from sleep; while as dawn breaks and in the early daylight of the rising sun, a cockerel crows, chasing away the darkness of night – a loud voice in proclaiming the new day. Larks rise into the air from their ground-dwelling nighttime sleep and, with melodious and continuous song, welcome and worship God’s gift of new beginnings and the ongoing cycle of life and renewal. But even in the small detail, the whole scene depicted is suffused with resurrection overtones, not least in the Butterfly’s transformative life cycle seen throughout the window.
The window invites us to look and to remember and to hope. To explore within it the resurrection faith we hold which at times cannot simply be explained in words. As we will hear later in this service from Pat’s family, how the details of its design allow them to name and celebrate their relationship with and their love for her. To enhance and build on the collective memory of this church community, pointing us beyond ourselves alone, and focusing us on our relationship both with our past and with the church of the future. To allow us to catch a glimpse of our ourselves reflected in its glass, and (more so) – as the light beyond it, shines through its shapes and colours – to find that we may also experience the sacred reflection of God.
Colin Setchfield
1 December 2024 – First Sunday of Advent
A few weeks back, I was chatting all things Christmasy with Jordan, the musical director of the community choirs where I work. It was quite a rambling conversation about carols and getting ready for the festive season, what was coming, what we were looking forward to, what we weren’t, the carols that gave us that warm nostalgic feeling and the “hardy annuals” that make us groan inwardly. (‘Hark the herald angels’ springs to mind.)
And in that conversation, Jordan came out with, “yeh, I imagine you are more an Advent person than a Christmas person” and grinned: needling me (in a good-natured way) – implying I have a bit of an ‘eeyore’ perspective on life. You will recall that in the Winnie the Pooh stories Eeyore was that an old grey stuffed donkey – pessimistic, depressed and anhedonic. And (if I am honest) perhaps there is some truth in that.
Advent can sometimes seem a bit of an eeyore season. When I was young, as the world was putting up its trees, and tinsel, and garlands, the church preached the decidedly unfestive Advent themes of the four last things – death, judgement, heaven and hell. And today’s gospel reading very much fitted into that focus: we need to be alert, we need to be watchful – there are signs, there is distress, there is confusion, there is fear, be ready, beware. Jesus is coming – best look busy. The Advent hope often felt a lot more like a future Advent dread.
We live much of our lives looking distantly into the future: making plans, worrying about fears, imagining what our destiny might look like. Admittedly, looking into the future can bring exciting possibilities and hopes, but often it is the scary unknowns and anxieties that prey on our minds.
But strangely enough, Advent isn’t particularly about the future. Over the past three weeks, on Wednesday evenings and Thursday lunchtimes, there’s been the opportunity in Bible Study groups for people to look at the readings we will hear at our Christmas carol service later this month. It isn’t just the story of Jesus’s birth we will hear, but stories from the Old Testament which speak of the hopes and promises, the challenges and frustrations, of a tiny people living difficult and challenging lives in the midst of surrounding successful superpowers, as they try to maintain their identity and keep the relationship with their God.
The stories of the readings are used to explore the promise of the future birth of Christ. However, as part of our study, we have found how the stories are grounded, rooted, in the often-harsh realities of the time. Hope springing up from real frustrations and dangers faced in their present time; hopes often frustrated, unrealised, and needing re-evaluation before the future ever comes.
In today’s gospel, Jesus isn’t doom-mongering to give us the heebie-jebbies. But what we find is Jesus challenging us to engage with the present time, the here and now, no matter how difficult and perilous that seems. Perhaps the world reeling in pain, that he paints in this passage, may remind us of the actual world in which we currently live, in the events we read in the news and see on our screens.
But what he says in this passage is rather than cowering and trying to hide from reality as it is, we should stand up, with our heads raised, embracing it, for it is in the ‘here’ in the ‘now’ that we truly experience the nearness of God. The passage doesn’t say that God will scoop us up out of the present in which we live. The passage says that the kingdom of God comes ‘here’ and it is in this messy, sometimes-scary reality in which we really live that Christ the Son of Man stands … and stands with us.
What Advent requires of us is an honesty to say it as it is. Despite all its apocalyptic language, despite all its assumed eeyore-ish tendencies, Advent is about getting real: not posturing, not pretending, but rather to dwell in the truth, to dwell in the here, in the present time. The Advent hope is that, in all the uncertainty in which we live, there is yet a certainty: the certainty that Christ is there.
And for us the challenge of Advent is how do we live in the belief not just that Christ will come but that Christ has come. It is not just about waiting for an expected future, watching for signs to jolt us into action, appeasing a God who may end the world if we simply don’t shape up. It is how do we stand before Christ the Son of Man as we meet him in the now, in the real people who struggle and cry out in our world and communities, in situations where violent conflict and political expediency counts lives as expendable in the pursuit of long-term aims, in the groaning of nature as it suffocates through our mis-stewardship of our environment. Advent is the call to anticipate those future hopes for God’s justice and the realisation of the kingdom of God, to anticipate the message of Christmas, to live truly in the belief that God is incarnate in our world. It is to stand in the realisation that as we look into the eyes of those people and those situations all around us we are standing before Christ the Son of Man, and it is he who looks back at us.
Colin Setchfield24 November 2024 – Patronal Festival (St Edmund) / Christ the King
It is so good to be with you all again today and especially as we celebrate the patronal festival and remember St Edmund. In the church’s calendar today is also the day when we celebrate Christ the King and the final Sunday of the old year, and look forward to Advent beginning next Sunday.
As I thought about this some questions came to mind: ‘what is a king?’ who was King Edmund? What does it mean that Edmund was a king? What does it mean that Jesus is King? As I thought about these things and explored information about Edmund, I realised there were more questions? What did it mean for Edmund to die as he did and want did it mean for Jesus to die as he did? Is there a link? Or are they separate?
Before I prepared this sermon, I knew very little of St Edmund. I expect many of you know a great deal, but in case there are others like me, please bear with me as I share some of the things I have discovered. Edmund was King of the Angles (Norfolk and Suffolk). He became king aged 14 and was loved by his people. He cared for the poor, and my book says he ‘suppressed wrong-doing’. He led his people to fight when the Danes invaded. He was captured and offered his life if he surrendered his kingdom and renounced his faith in Christ. He refused and they killed him in a rather gory way.
As I was starting to think about these things an article appeared on the news – our own King, Charles, was celebrating his 76th birthday and had donated a large storage space for food to be stored for food banks to help the poor. He is, as King also Head of the Church of England, and he has a heart for all his people. He has, fortunately not been martyred and we hope he will have a long life.
Both Edmund and Charles have kingdoms we can draw on a map. We know where they begin and end, and it is possible to work out who is and isn’t a member of each of their kingdoms.
With Jesus it isn’t quite so straightforward. In our Gospel reading Pilate asked him ‘are you the King of the Jews?’ something that might have seemed a logical progression from the events of Palm Sunday, but Jesus’ reply was ‘My kingdom is not from this world.’
We know Jesus spoke a lot about ‘The Kingdom of God’. We are also told that all who believe and follow him will be part of that kingdom. So where is his kingdom? We can’t see it, we can’t draw a line on a map. Maybe we need to first answer the question: ‘What is a kingdom?’ It is a place where a king (or queen) rules. Applying this to King Charles – he doesn’t make the laws in this country, however, he does have to give Royal Assent and they cannot become law without it.
In the days of King Edmund the king was very much the person who oversaw and made the rules; he was also the person that led the army and would lead his troops into battle. Now, King Charles III doesn’t do that, but he has the position of Commander-in-Chief of the United Kingdom’s Armed Forces, which includes the Royal Navy, Royal Air Force, and British Army, and although he would not go into battle in the event of war, he did serve in the navy and the airforce in the 1970s.
So, what about Jesus? As God he is the maker of the rules of life which he communicates through the words of scripture, and through our consciences. But not everyone chooses to follow them. When Jesus lived on earth he showed a new style of Kingship – he came not as a warrior but as a servant and gave himself up to die for his people, not just the citizens of his Kingdom, but all people.
The readings from Daniel and Revelation show us that one day all people will see him and be aware that he is King of all. His kingdom will be established and there will be a time of judgment for those who have not chosen to be part of his kingdom.
But even for those of us who are already part of his kingdom, we experience it only partially. It is as if we are living in a foreign land. Our home is Heaven and a closeness to God. In a sense we have begun to experience that now, but we will only experience its fullness when we die, or when Jesus returns (whichever is sooner).
King (later Saint) Edmund was a king after the pattern of King Jesus. He knew Jesus and had great faith. He worked out his rule in service by caring for the poor and seeking to be just and fair. He led his people in both their daily life, and in battles with the Danes. When he was asked to give up his faith, he refused, and as a result he was martyred.
We may never have to face dying for our faith, although many people around the world do face persecution and death on a regular basis. But we may experience rejection because of our faith, maybe lose friends because of it.
King Jesus defeated his enemies, and ours, by dying on the cross. Sin and death were defeated when Jesus rose from the dead. He offers forgiveness and eternal life as a free gift, but never forces anyone to accept. He is already our heavenly king, but we may think it seems like Jesus is not in control as we see nations being torn apart by war, but he has won a victory that is beyond this world. And one day he will return to claim and reveal the fullness of that kingdom and will call us to join him and experience that fullness.
On Friday the news was reporting the enormous cost of the coronation of King Charles. Pomp and ceremony with the highlight: a jewel-studded crown. Charles had been born into privilege and comfort. He was inheriting his birth-right.
I know little of King Edmund’s circumstances but I have read that he was only 14 when he inherited the throne, and I presume he was part of the privileged class of his day.
When Jesus was named King of the Jews his crown was a crown of thorns, he had been born into poverty, in adulthood he had nowhere to lay his head. But one day he will return and we will see him crowned in glory, a glory that will far outshine the coronation of King Charles, or any other earthly king. In the meantime, those of us already living in his kingdom – are we, like Edmund, ready to live following Jesus’ example? We may not be called to physically die for our faith, but there may be other things that we need to die to: Bad attitudes, bad habits, and so on. It may seem hard at the time but one day when we meet King Jesus face to face all will pale into insignificance as we rejoice not only with him, but with all those who are part of his kingdom and who we have not seen for many years – and who knows, on that wonderful day, maybe we will also get to meet St Edmund!
Maria Holmden
10 November 2024 – Remembrance Sunday
What keeps our followers following? Is it belief in what they are doing and why they are doing it? The disciples are caught up in what Jesus proclaims at the start of the reading: the Kingdom of God has come near. In some way, shape or form, as they follow they encounter the Kingdom of God. And what is the Kingdom of God? The Kingdom of God is the place – using that word in its broadest and most stretched sense – where God rules supreme and in which the prophet Isaiah declares there will be ‘no more wars’ and the apocalyptic writer John declares there will be no more death, grief, crying or pain. No more war, no more death, no more grief, no more crying and no more pain. That is a kingdom worth striving to be part of bringing into reality. In this kingdom Jesus sits as the ‘Prince of Peace’ – who wouldn’t want to follow someone who is out to replace war with peace. Who wants to replace oain with prace? Who wants to replace grief with peace?
When we take a look at our world today, when we watch the news or scroll through whichever app keeps us informed of the state of the world … yes, there is a lot of good: but is there also not a scary amount of crying, grief, pain, death and war? Is our world not calling out for peace?
So, as we reflect on our world’s need for peace on this day when we remember those who have given of themselves in order to bring about peace, our response might need us to be like those who have gone before and to be brave, if not a little nervous. For the thing is, Jesus is still recruiting people to bring about peace in our world, still looking for people to help replace crying with peace and pain with peace and war with peace and well I wonder if we would consider ourselves up for that adventure however scary it may be.
That may sound like too big of a job, a scary job perhaps. Surely, we aren’t qualified. But look again at those disciples … similarly ordinary people with a willingness to follow. We are left with the question: are we willing to follow Jesus? Are we willing to act to make our little parish here in South Chingford look more like the Kingdom of God?
Ruth Holmes
20 October 2024 – Bible Sunday (transferred)
This week we are celebrating Bible Sunday, and I set myself the challenge of keeping this sermon short in order to give time and headspace to the meeting we are having after the service. The problem is, talking about the Bible is one of my favourite subjects so I am acutey aware that there will be much missing this morning.
I am also aware that I will be taking some things for granted. I am assuming we know that this is in fact a collection of over sixty books of different genres, from differing periods in history, written by many different people, in different language, compiled and translated, and which have been used in worship ad spiritual teaching since at least one thousand years before Christ, and probably much more. So, we share these texts,. Not least with our Jewish siblings, but with some streams of Islam, and many others who ave picked up these texts and found wisdom in them.
I am also going to take for granted that the Bible has authority. These are the books which the church discerned many centuries ago were inspired by God in a particular kind of way – we might refer to scripture as “God-inspired” – and since then they have been given authority as the church works out doctrine in each new generation. Here at St Edmund’s we spend much of our worship hearing from the Bible – whether in the readings or in the way the Bible has inspired our liturgy. And if you follow a pattern of morning or evening prayer, it is likely that they too are full of readings from scripture. I am assuming we might want to let the Bible have some say in how we live in response to our faith.
So, what else is the Bible? I want to suggest today that the Bible is at its heart the record of God being revealed to humankind. Amid the different genres and people groups the Bible introduces us to, it is full of reports of encounters with the Almighty, with God, who is not distant but who reveals himself to all sorts of people in all sorts of ways in all sorts of places. The Bible teaches us through those encounters about the character of God. At the same time, the Bible holds a mirror up to humanity. Much of the Bible describes to us the state of humanity, in contrast with the chatacter of a God who is full of love and justice, sometimes leading to wrath, also grace, mercy, and wisdom. The bible is not a textbook or recipe book for a good life, but one way into a relationship, a doorway of sorts. The Bible is about a God who reveals themselves to human beings in order that we might know God’s love and live lives touched with eternity.
That is, I think, what Jesus is pointing to in the passage we read just now from John’s gospel. This group of pharisees want to kill Jesus because he has broken the rules, he has both performed a miracle on the Sabbath and has referred to himself as equal with God. This break all the rules as far as the Pharisees are concerned. Surprisngly, Jesus commends these pharisees for their diligent study of their scriptures, those books we now call the “Old Testament.” However, they have reduced their Bible to a set of rules to follow in order to be “good.” They think that by knowing their Bible and following the rules they have made, they will inherit eternal life. They are trying to earn their way to God and then impose rules on others. Along the way, they have missed out relationship.
Jesus corrects them. The Bible is not primarily about rules, but according to Jesus here the Bible points to him. He is the Messiah, Immanuel, the God of the scriptures in human flesh. Earlier in John’s gospel, Jesus is referred to as the very Word of God. In Jesus we find everything the Old Testament has been trying to tell us about God summed uo in human flesh. The Pharisees could have found the signposts which would have helped them receive this next, incredible, history-changing revelation of God, and yet they miss it. There is a good reminder to us. When we pick up our Bibles, might we first look for what these books say about who God is, might we wrestle with that question, be drawn into relationship, and then ask how we might live in response. Let our Bibles be a guidebook, helping us look for the things in the world which areof Christ, rather than a box we live within. As the Psalm puts it, let’s allow the Bible to be “light for our eyes” rather than using it to grind ourselves or in fact others down.
So, the Bible records the revelation of God to humanity and humanity’s response. The Bible points to Jesus Christ who is the living Word of God. And, finally, the Bible helps form us – the body of Christ – by the Holy Spirit into people who continue to live in response to those revelations of God found in scripture and which in small ways continue. We see this most clearly in the letters written by the early church, in which we are given a window into what it looked like for a community to work out how to live in response to the death and resurrection of Jesus.
This final point is really important to me. The Bible was always meant to be read by communities rther than by individuals. The Psalms were and are corporate songs of worship, or of lament, or of intercession – ways to pray together. The stories of Genesis and Job and Ruth among others were to be told aloud to children, recited often, as the people of God learnt from their rich historry. The Gospels were to be circulted and read to the new house churches spreading from the near middle east to Africa, and Europe, India, and further East as the earliest Christians made sure the stories of Jesus were not lost. The letters were written to be read and discussed, a bit like a sermon. Even the laws of the Torah were about forming an identifiable community. These books wer not just for priests and pastors and vicars to study, but for the whole people of God to make use of in lots of different ways.
We’ve seen how the Bible tells us about God, how the Bible points to Jesus, and this is where the Holy Spirit comes in. We believe that these books were first written by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and we believe that the Holy Spirit is at work in and through the church, in and between us, the body of Christ. So, the Bible can become alive for us, as we bring ourselves to it, helping one another to be formed again by these words which we have inherited for a new generation. This means that we can all play a part in working out what the Bible means for us today. Part of the authority of scripture is in the interpretative community, in us as we seek the Holy Spirit’s help. Some of us have particular roles in that. Part of being a priest, or in fact a licensed lay minister or occasional preacher, is to have had some particular time to study and to learn. One of the ways I play my part in the body of Christ is through preaching and teaching, but I hope you will find I do so in a way that invites all of us to engage with the Bible. To help us breathe it in and breathe it out, that helps us take it and use it in our daily lives, that frees us to ask how God is speaking to us now.
So, we have to trust that God not only speaks through these written word but that the living Word of God who is Christ Jesus is also working by the Holy Spirit in us, as a community, to make good use of the words of the Bible for today.
Ruth Holmes
6 October 2024 – The Last Sunday in Creation Season
And I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the former heaven and the former earth … perished.
We often hear this reading at funerals, and – there – it offers hope with its message that, when things end, new things begin, and such newness opens up the opportunity of something better: God – no longer distant … but here and near; close enough to rub away the expected tears for sin, which are now unrequired, for reconciliation is achieved and real. The consequent reality of death is destroyed, and its doleful soundtrack of mourning and clamour of grief – silenced.
A message of hope, but maybe one with a sting in its tail.
For what has perished is the earth. And we are creatures of this earth. In our scriptural storytelling, we are physically torn from the ground of this former earth, its red clay is moulded in the hands of our creator-God to form us as an adam. Into our earthy bodies, the divine breath is breathed and we become living souls. From the life of this former earth, we have life; on its landscape we live, from its hidden wealth we prosper, and ultimately into its dark embrace we commit our dead in hope of future resurrection. This former earth is our home, imbued with the memories of countless generations and lives, in the dust that lies buried, and which blows and settles all around. This is that perished former earth. This is what perishes, and with it the dreams of our former heaven.
When confronted with life’s harsh realities often we shield our sensitivities by hiding behind language, finding comfort within euphemisms to mitigate the starkness of what is happening or what we face. And so, we don’t speak much of death, but rather of losing someone. We don’t speak of dying but rather falling asleep. We refer not to our dead grandmother but rather of our gran who has passed away.
And in our passage today, we hear that term in the phrase (as used in the translation) “the first earth passed away”. The Greek word is used metaphorically to mean that something perished; though literally, it translates – not necessarily as ‘passed away’ but rather – ‘passed by:’ left behind as others or as events move forward, passing out of view: disregarded, voided, dispensed with. Everything we know, everything we are, everything we cherished, our world, our presence, our being … becomes expendable.
Our message of hope has become a message of apocalyptic warning.
During this year’s season of Creation, Christians were invited “to hope and act with creation” – it was a call to worship and to advocate together, to recognise that “our well-being is interwoven with the well-being of the earth.” Now, in the bible, hope is seen as confidence in what God has promised and confidence in his faithfulness. There is that saying of Julian of Norwich that “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” A joyful optimism that no matter how bad, how adverse the situation or our circumstances, in the end everything will be ok, ultimately Christ will make everything right, God will kiss it all better.
But hope is not excessive or blind optimism, hope is not wishing, hope is not passive, hope is not donning a plastic smile and pretending that everything will be ok. Rather, hope is an active intention, the motivation we find to persevere towards the goal that we seek, no matter how sceptical we feel about the likelihood of success; hope is taking action forward.
And that can work its way out in various ways. We’ve heard about how any small step we make can create a difference. And that is true at one level. But the motivation for our actions is critical, as success hinges on that. Unscrewing a light bulb simply to screw in a different type of light bulb may make us feel good about ourselves, but by itself it is simply fiddling. Reducing our car journeys or swapping to a greener car does reduce our emissions, but we are simply mitigating our impact without challenging our wants, our desire to have a car, ignoring the issues of the manufacture and shipping of materials and rare metals still required for their production.
We count our small actions – but overlook our large negative impacts. There is our wanderlust to appreciate the wonders and beauty of the world, while failing to consider the airmiles we clock up in doing so and the negative impact that has on what we seek to see. We sit and watch documentaries on how families cope and live with 15 … 22 … 24 kids and counting, blind to the fact that the Earth’s carrying capacity was reached way back in 1970; there are a lot of us humans, and many of us humans in the rich nations of the world consume beyond our possibilities. Our activities tramped over our planet’s ‘self-repair’ threshold decades ago, as we increasingly overly-consume resources way beyond the environment’s capacity to replace them.
The American environmental advocate – Gus Speth – said awhile back, “I used to think that top global environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse, and climate change. I thought that with thirty years of good science, we could address these problems, but I was wrong.” He continued, “The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a spiritual and cultural transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.”
And that poses a real challenge to us as Christians and to people of all faiths. How does what we believe influence not only the way we act but how we live and how we see our place within creation? How do we move from adapting what we do to changing how we live? To move beyond simply tinkering to mitigate our impact; to understand that how we live and what we have come to expect needs to be impacted. Silence – and the failure to speak about this – isn’t an option, we need to be spurred into action, we need to be invested with hope, we need to find a language that articulates a different way. For us, that bigger thinking has to be God-shaped.
Creation provides us with a metanarrative that scoops up the smaller storytelling of our lives and through this big story we can begin to see what it means to live out the work of God. But often we take that big story of creation and we make it small. We speak and talk of creation simply as God making things, of which we are the pièce de resistance, the final showpiece.
But creation is more than that – it is the bigger story of the relationship between the God who creates and the creation of God, the relationship between the Creator and the Created. Right at the start of the Bible, we are told that the whole of creation is good. It is not good simply because it is new and not broken. It is not good simply because it is a damn fine piece of work. It is good because it is of God and because of that it reflects the goodness of God. To pick up the biblical phrase used in the creation of humankind, creation is in the likeness of God.
That way of looking at creation is heard in the words of Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Sun. These days we will usually hear it sung paraphrased as the hymn “All creatures of our God and King.” For me, it is not a particularly helpful translation, for it takes Francis’s original poetic song, and seemingly makes it all about a grateful creation joining in a hearty Songs of Praise service with a lot of Alleluia-ing: “All creatures of our God and King, lift up your voice and with us sing ‘Alleluia’.”
But what we sang before the Gospel today is a different renditioning of Francis’s thoughts, and perhaps closer to his intention. The praise and worship of God is not by God’s creation but rather in and through his creation. Creation is of God, and creation itself is the praise and worship of God. “Be praised…” not by but “in all your creatures.” The whole of life itself being “a song of worship” of the creator-God.
And perhaps if we could hold on to that, and really believe that seriously – that relationship between God the creator and the creation through which God is honoured and worshipped and praised, that could jolt us out of the arrogance that seeks to place us outside of it. The arrogance that seeks to dominant and domesticate and destroy God’s creation. What we need is a metanoia – a transformative change of heart. If we can move to that new thinking, that new way of living, away from business as usual – to pull down our idols of profit and consumption and banish our culture of waste – then that turning of our lives and the world of our own creation upside down may provide the hope we need and require.
Tomorrow, a new show “Solar System” begins on BBC2. It will (among other things) explore space travel and exploration, arguing that there is an imperative for this because of the damage being done to our planet through “civilisation’s thirst and requirement for more resources” – acknowledging that what is likely to destroy us is ourselves. What is being explored is an exodus from this first earth to another planet that, presumably, we can in turn rape and pillage: leaving behind this former earth that has perished by our hands, leaving behind the victims of our greed, the non-human creatures, the non-viable lesser-valuable human creatures, and springboarding to a new earth.
This of course is far from the vision of the new heaven and new earth we heard of in our reading today. For this is simply finding a bolthole away from our ecological crimes here, travelling vast distances but still remaining firmly within the cosmos of this former heaven and earth. The hope for us, the hope for creation, lies not in escape, lies not in finding heaven somewhere out there, elsewhere. The hope for creation is here – that vision of heaven come down to earth, that newness created by an everlasting embrace of heaven and earth, allowing heaven to get into us, and creating change in us. But the questions remain. How receptive are we to change? How respecting are we to the praise and worship of God vested in the whole of God’s creation?
Colin Setchfield
25 August 2024 – The Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity
So, what have we learned about Ephesians over these past weeks? We’ve considered what the book is and engaged with questions on whether it is what we thought it was. “The Epistle of St Paul to the Ephesians:” except it probably isn’t by Paul and it might not be to the Ephesians. But that doesn’t detract from what it is. It still is a key scriptural book of the early church written by the followers or disciples of the original Paul drawing on his teaching and passed around the new churches in the late first century. At one point, maybe as the Epistle to the Christians in Ephesus, maybe at another time as the Epistle to the Christian in – perhaps – Laodicea, and today (well!) passed on and readdressed to the Christians here in South Chingford.
We’ve heard how it addresses the identity of the church, both the individual members as adopted, loved and blessed children of God but also the community which the individual members incorporate. Where everyone has a full place; where even in the reality of continuing disagreements and differences, the dividing walls of hostility that these might construct are broken down by Christ. And it is in Christ that the whole structure comes together, it is around Christ that unity forms, and the differences become re-purposed: the diversity that exists is celebrated and the difference that is there actually makes us stronger. I don’t have to stop being me. You don’t have to stop being you. We are members together incorporate in the body of Christ.
And as the epistle continues, it draws out what this living in community looks like: in terms of the community’s common living, and the rules for this new interconnected common life together. But right at the end, we are then confronted with the reading we heard today, which might at first glance seem a bit irrelevant to what has preceded it: “put on the full armour of God, and you will be enabled to stand against the wiles of the devil.”
The letter has been previously speaking about real living in the known world. But here we are presented with a metaphor, which – though at the time will have been familiar to the original hearers – to us it may seem violently unattractive. Particularly in our modern world, we know that connecting religion to war is profoundly dangerous. Violent rhetoric often leads to violent action. Emboldened by this reading, across the ages Christians have seen themselves as “soldiers of the cross” “marching as to war” willing to lay down their lives in violence (sanctified with the veneer of martyrdom) or – more often the case – laying down the lives of others in holy wars, crusades, pogroms, and inquisitions.
So, what can we – the twenty-first century church in South Chingford – take from this final extract from a letter written nineteen and a half centuries ago. Our context is very different. Back in the first century when the churches were new, the first hearers of this letter were very much a minority, particularly as they spread across geographic and cultural boundaries. They were seen as outsiders; they encountered harassment, attacks, and imprisonment, just as Paul had himself. Propaganda and rumour often scapegoated them – leading to official pronouncements limiting their movement in civil and religious society, banning their writings and with the potential of pushing them into an “out-group” within the society and communities where they lived: dehumanising them, subjecting them to oppression and with the ever-present risk of persecution. It may be the case that back then, armour was something they might have actually craved for their protection.
However, we need to read this in the context of the rest of the epistle. Across these past weeks, we have heard encouragement and instruction that we can take on, in our daily living, as individual members of the church but the focus has very much been on the church as a cohesive, mutual and Christ-centred community. But by itself, that risks us being simply a reassuring caucus: a closed group of like-minded people, finding comfort and identity in our internal relationships and beliefs and spirituality. Today’s reading shakes us out of any complacency and naiveté which that may bring. There is a consequence, a challenge, a compulsion that requires us to look beyond our close-knit group and to purposefully act on – to pursue, to fight for – God’s justice, to call out behaviours and speech which are contrary to the gospel of peace, to call out all that rebuilds barriers and maintains walls between people that Christ came to break down. And that is not just within our own church community, it is breaking down the barriers wherever they exist and are built.
So this feels like it is addressed not to me, nor to you, nor to you, nor to you, nor to you, but instead to us: a challenge to the community as a whole, to the whole church assembled together as a single body listening to this letter being read to them. This passage is not a charter for Christians to act as spiritual loan rangers. It is the whole body of the church which is being urged to “put on [this] armour of God.”
And similarly, the armour is not for a fight with other individuals who are not like us, who are not part of our “in group,” those who act, think and behave differently to us. For that leads too easily into the demonisation of opponents and worse to the justification of war crimes, against individuals and peoples, committed in the name of God. Up front, the passage tells us, “We do not wrestle with blood and flesh” instead it focuses on ideas and ideologies that influence behaviour and corrupts. Our translation speaks of the “wiles of the devil” or (as the Greek can be translated) it is “the adversary’s strategems” which we are called to opposed. To understand those “strategems” it may help if we expand on the simple translations we have been provided, for the four Greek terms in the original text.
- Against the archē – the original principles, the things have been from day one till now, that hold sovereignty over any alternative perspective.
- Against the exousias – the imposition of legal and moral acceptability, that judges and condemns people who fall outside its constraints.
- Against the kosmokratōs – the systems and the might at play in the world, imposing power exclusively.
- Against the pneumatikos – the spiritual-powerplay that lays claim to heaven by leaving others god-less and denying them as worthy recipients of God’s love and attention.
It is these ‘stratagems’ that the church is called to wrestle with and to fight against: forces that are destructive and divisive within the world; to acknowledge that, though it is always easy to focus on people and to blame individuals, the problems we face are mostly systemic. The church is called to undo the tactics of power; to stand up and challenge; to rise and object.
And the armour that is listed is what enables us to rise to that task. The first piece is truth. We may define that as what is real, or what is factual, but the word used here drills deeper into how ‘truth’ is served. The word used has the meaning of not being closed: it is a revealing, an unconcealedness, a full disclosure – there is a vulnerability or nakedness to truth, which does not worry about appropriateness or consequence. And I love it that in this chapter, this exposure of truth’s nakedness girdles the “loins” (the bodily parts that polite society would seek to conceal, the procreative area of our body … though – of course! – suitably sanitised in our version as ‘fastened around the “waist”’). And the next piece is righteousness (not us being moral or virtuous) but justice, standing up for what is right. A justice that needs to be worn on our chest, covering our lungs and our heart, in all we breathe in and in the love we extend out. And the next … a manifesto of peace bound to our feet, taken wherever we move and present wherever we stand. And then … trustworthiness to shield and protect, before surrounding our head in our thoughts and in our vision with a motivation to deliver and save from harm and loss.
In the past weeks, the epistle has invited us to consider who we are, but today it pushes us forward to consider what do we do in the light of who we are. The battle, which this chapter gears us up for, requires the church to be prophetic, to be subversive: to call ourselves, to call each other, to call the church itself, and to call the world, to justice, and to the proclamation of peace and liberation. “Righteousness is not righteousness unless exercised; and for truth to be true its statement must be made.”
In concluding our consideration of Ephesians, I wish to quote John Wilson, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Southwark, who – rather than being mimsy and safe – loudly and without holding back called out the racism seen in the riots earlier this month. His standing up and speaking out publicly models for us much of what we have heard over these past weeks.
“We must speak prophetically the truth that there is no place for racism. We must speak prophetically the truth that every person irrespective of their place of origin or their language or the colour of their skin; every person, no matter what, has an innate dignity that must be respected. This divine truth is self-evident through human reason. It is enshrined at the heart of our faith. ‘Love one another,’ said the Lord Jesus ‘as I have loved you.’ Love one another: there are no exceptions to this, there are no get-out clauses. Love one another. And so we want to make it absolutely clear that in our Church and in our society, in our nation and in our world, there is no place for racism – never, ever, no matter what. We are, and we must be prophets of justice who refuse to remain static or silent in the face of racism and discrimination. We are, and we must be prophets of hope who dream of and work to achieve the celebration of our beautiful, shared identity as one family of humankind united in love.”
Colin Setchfield
7 July 2024 – Dedication Festival
Today we celebrate the dedication of this church as a place of prayer and worship. So, take a moment as we begin to think about this question: What is a church?
There are lots of different answers to that question. Perhaps we have described buildings. The places we come to bring our worship to God, to be built up in faith and encouraged by others. Those buildings have often been made beautiful so that God might be glorified by the building itself as well as the people within. Perhaps we have, in fact, described those people. We are the body of Christ, people make up the church. Or perhaps we have described the kinds of things a church does, just as we sometimes describe a person by their profession.
We could spend many weeks, a whole Lent course or similar, answering the question “what is church?” For today, we will look to our readings for today and also to the words of our final blessing as we continue to ponder.
Firstly, we turn to this vignette in the Old Testament. You might glance at it and say, well, this is not a church! We are early in the history of the Israelites here, Jacob would never have even heard of a church, they weren’t even gathering formally for festivals at this point, buildings in which to worship would not develop for many generations. Does this have anything to do with dedicating our church as a house of prayer and worship?
However, when we look more closely, we see that what Jacob does tells us something about what church is. First and foremost, this is a place where Jacob encounters God. He hears the word of God, the promises of God, receives comfort and inspiration, has his imagination widened for the future as he has this incredible dream. The dream features the familiar image of a ladder between heaven and earth, a sense of time and place collapsing as Jacob has this encounter with the divine.
In response, Jacob constructs a simple pile of stones. We human beings have been doing this as a way to mark special places throughout our history and we still do. It is particularly common in Scotland for families to have a “cairn” – a pile of stones – which they return to as a place to remember those who have died and celebrate new beginnings. Jacob builds something very similar. He wants to be able to return to this place and in fact later a town called Bethel springs up around it.
A church is in some ways just the same. A pile of bricks built in places where God has been encountered. Built as places to return to and to share with others. Over time, those piles of bricks have become more and more intricate as people have continued to respond to God. Churches become places which display awe and wonder, which help lift our hearts and minds to the encounter with God which others have enjoyed. They become places into which we pour resources as part of our worship, honouring God by the way we look after our church and continue to create space for others to encounter God. But, however intricate and beautiful the building itself becomes, God’s action, God’s meeting with us, comes first.
What about our gospel reading? Here we have another community celebrating their place of worship. It is the dedication festival of the temple. And yet, we find Jesus outside, sheltering under the portico – or, porch – being asked questions. This brings us to think about the way in which our places of worship, for us our church, provoke questioning and exploring together. It is presumably after the dedication celebration that Jesus takes shelter and others come to question him. They will have just heard readings from scripture, said prayers and remembered the promise of the messiah. Naturally, then, they want to talk more about it. Being in the place of worship leads them to ask questions about who Jesus is.
Jesus answers those gathered around him by turning their focus to seeking out God’s voice. Jesus’ works have pointed them to the Father, and he tells them “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me”, he reassures us that when we hear God’s voice we are promised access to life eternal and he all but tells them – albeit still indirectly – that yes, Jesus is the messiah. Church is a place where we too might come to hear God’s voice. I wonder if this is as much about seeking, as putting ourselves in places and around people where we find it easiest to hear, as it is about simply hearing. Church is a place we come to listen out, to seek, to hear the voice of God.
Finally, another piece of scripture which this morning we will hear as part of the final blessing. This is taken from 1 Peter chapter 2. This letter leads us to think of church as people. The image is of each one of us being one of those stones or bricks which makes up the church building. Peter writes “you, like living stones, are being built up into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood”. Each one of us makes up the church, we are each one of those bricks. I wonder, as you look around this building, which part of it might represent your role here. What kind of a brick are you in this spiritual house which God is building us into?
On this day of celebration, we might remember too that we are not the only “living stones” who are part of this particular church. As we look around the building, we are reminded of all those who have gone before us. Those who have poured their skills, their financial resources, their prayers, their imagination into this building that it might be a place of prayer and worship. Those people who took this pile of bricks and made it something which helps us to encounter God. And we might look forward expectantly to the ways in which God will build us up and will bring others to be part of this place in the future.
So, three ways to think about church. Simply a pile of stones or bricks, set down to mark a place where God is encountered. A place of questioning, exploring, and seeking God’s voice together. A people, strengthened and empowered by God to be living stones who bring their worship.
Eighty-five years ago, this building was dedicated for worship. This was not the start of St Edmund’s as a worshipping community. A bit like Jacob, those living here in South Chingford were responding to what God was doing amongst them. They had been worshipping somewhere temporary, the parish centre just over the car park, they had travelled through difficult years of war together, and finally they were able to move into a permanent building. It continues to be a place where we are led into encounter with God, where we are helped to ponder and to remember, a place of exploration of faith through diversity and questioning.
As I have said, the building itself leads us to think of the people. This has been a theme this week. If you were here on Monday evening, you will have heard Bishop Guli encouraging all of us to think about our gifts and how we might play our part. As we celebrate today, I am so pleased that we can focus on the fact church is not about me as priest and vicar, or about anyone else in particular, but it is about us. We are built together by God as living stones to bring praise and worship. Today we consider that this us spans across different generations and geographies and reaches into the future. I hope we can be a place that draws that us as wide as we can, helping all in our parish find their place as a living stone.
So, back to our first question but with a tweak this time. What is this church? I have only been here a few days so far. So, I would love to hear your answers to that question. What are your stories of this place and its people?
Ruth Holmes
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30 June 2024 – The Fifth Sunday after Trinity
Storytelling is a wonderful way to communicate information, and stories are even more interesting when they are about real people. In today’s gospel reading we have two interwoven stories, and although the two people concerned are poles apart socially and would never normally have been linked together, faith in Jesus enables their paths to cross.
I have been fascinated as I have read through and thought about this passage. The more I look at it the more I have been struck by the differences between these two people, and yet Jesus dealt with each according to their needs. He did not differentiate between social class, gender or any other aspect. He met them both as human beings in need of, and asking for, his help.
What I am going to do is to take Jairus and the woman with the haemorrhage and compare them to see how Jesus respects them as individuals and treats them each in a way that is best suited to them.
Firstly, what do we know about the woman? Very little! We don’t even know her name. All we are told is that she had been through a lot of suffering and had used up all her money paying for treatments that had not worked.
She would already have been a second-class citizen just because she was a woman. As a woman, with what was effectively a permanent period, she would have been regarded as ritually unclean, and this would have meant she was excluded, not just from the religious life of the community, but also the social life. She would not have had close friends because anyone who touched her would have also been regarded as ritually unclean. So, she must have been a very lonely person. We also know that she had faith – perhaps it seems to us more of a superstitious kind of faith – but nevertheless it was very real. She was desperate, and her desperation led her into a situation which must have caused her fear and anxiety.
As a woman she would not have had any right to be in the company of prominent men in the community. Jesus was a well-known religious teacher, and Jairus was the head of the local synagogue. Had anyone found out what she was suffering from she would have been in really big trouble.
She longed to be healed; she was desperate to come to Jesus for that healing; but there was no way that she could ask him publicly. Yet, her faith was strong enough for her to dare to try and touch the cloak he was wearing. As soon as she did – she felt it! Something happened! She was healed! What wonder and ecstasy must have flowed through her. Now she could slide away and resume her life.
But no! Jesus had other ideas. How terrified she must have been when Jesus demanded that she make herself known; how ashamed she must have felt when he demanded she tell him everything. And yet, that was the turning point. It was only when she was willing to share everything, to open up and tell him all, that her healing was complete. Jesus confirmed it in words ‘Your faith has made you well.’ But more than that he also brings her spiritual healing. He calls her ‘Daughter’ and blesses her with peace. She has been accepted as one of God’s children.
At that point she was able to leave the crowd with her head held high; relieved and confident that all would be OK.
What do we know about Jairus? Jairus was one of the leaders of the local synagogue. A man of high social standing and respectability, with many friends. Yet all his money and friends and influence cannot bring healing to his precious daughter. Was she his only child? We are not told.
As we know from other parts of the gospels, Jesus did not get on well with the religious leaders of the day: he had many enemies among the Scribes and Pharisees. As leader of the synagogue it must have cost Jairus a lot to come to Jesus, let alone to humiliate himself by falling at Jesus’ feet and pleading publicly for his help. Such an action might have cost him his friends. Yet he was desperate and he must have had faith that Jesus could help.
And he got an immediate response – Jesus started to head towards his house. He must have begun to feel some relief. It wasn’t an easy journey because everyone wanted to see and hear Jesus. Pushing through the crowds was hard going, but they were getting there. Until there was an interruption. I can just imagine Jairus muttering under his breath, please hurry, please don’t stop.
I wonder what he thought when he found that the cause of the delay was this woman. Did her healing bring him hope? We are not told. But when his friends arrive and bring the bad news, it must have seemed like the end of the world. Did Jairus lose his faith in Jesus at that point? Jesus knows exactly how hard Jairus is finding all this, and encourages him: “Do not fear, only believe’. Fear is the opposite of faith. Jairus and Jesus continue to the house. Then Jesus removes the crowds, he goes privately into the house with only Jairus, his wife and three disciples, Peter, James and John. He performs the miracle privately and then commands those present not to tell anyone.
The comparisons
As we compare these two miracles, we see a woman who is at the bottom end of the social spectrum, who comes to Jesus in secret, for her own need, is healed and her healing is then made public. On the other hand, we see a man at the top end of the social spectrum who comes to Jesus very publicly on behalf of his daughter. The daughter is healed in private and the news of it is kept secret.
God’s ways are not our ways. We can never dictate to God how he does things. The woman wanted the matter to be kept private, but Jesus made it public. Jairus came in public but Jesus insisted the healing be kept secret.
The woman came with no friends, but her healing opened the way for her to make friends. Jairus came with many friends, but his encounter with Jesus may well have led to him losing those friends.
Both situations involved losing something they had each had for 12 years. For the woman 12 years of suffering came to an end. For Jairus, it seemed as if 12 years of joy was about to end until Jesus performed his miracle.
The woman had strong faith which she had held onto in spite of not being included in the religious life of the community. Jairus lived a religious life but that alone was not enough to heal his daughter – he needed to have personal faith. A faith that was challenged by the delay in Jesus’ response. But even in the time of doubt and fear Jesus had a message of encouragement ‘Do not fear..’
One of the ways we show our faith is by not fearing. Many years ago, when I was a teenager, I went ice skating with my friends for the first time. I was very apprehensive and when I put on the skates and walked onto the ice, my knees wobbled and I fell over. One of the other girls, called Gill (who like me had never skated before), had been saying for days ‘When I get there I’m just going to go out on the ice and skate.’ She went out onto the ice with confidence and before long she was skating around as if she had been doing it for years. She had faith in her own ability.
When we have faith in Jesus we will not fear – things may not go as we would wish them to, but if we have faith we will know that God is in control.
Every person is different: we are all unique. We all have our own problems, difficulties and crises. Sometimes they affect us personally, sometimes they affect the ones we love. But we can all come to Jesus, just as we are. Sometimes we may come in secret, sometimes we may share our needs publicly. Sometimes Jesus will respond immediately and we will feel his power working in our lives. Sometimes he may delay – we may see others helped but not see any help for ourselves.
Our faith may be tested, but we can remember the reassurance of those words that Jesus gave to Jairus, ‘Do not fear, only believe.’ There is no one formula that Jesus uses when we come to him. We cannot pigeonhole Jesus or dictate that ‘This is the way things must happen.’
In our Bible reading two people were healed, but there were many other people there. Amongst that number there must have been others who needed a touch from Jesus, yet we are not told of any others who were helped, although perhaps there may have been some. In the crowd who were encouraged by the woman’s healing.
In the end it is God who decides who will be healed, and how. When we, or someone close to us, is ill we can come to Jesus. Sometimes he brings healing, sometimes he doesn’t, that is not for us to say. But what we can know for sure is that he has taken away the fear of death.
Jesus raised Jairus’ daughter but there would have come another time when she did die – maybe not until she got old, but die she did. All of us will one day face death. What Jesus has done is to overcome death and promise to all who come to him that there will be a resurrection to eternal life.
In his words to Jairus Jesus was saying, ‘death is not such a terrible thing as you think.’ Now, post-resurrection we can truly know that death is not as terrible as we think. Jesus experienced death and he overcame it. He has returned to show us that what he promises is true.
Let me end with the story of a nun who knew the truth of this. During the Second World War, Maria, a Russian nun voluntarily walked in to the gas chamber of Ravensbrück concentration camp with a terrified Jewish girl saying, ‘Because Christ is risen, there is nothing to fear.’
Maria Holmden
23 June 2024 – The Fourth Sunday after Trinity
The story of David and Goliath was a staple of Biblical stories told in Sunday School when I was young. Many of us will know the story – and if not … well! we had it read today. A young lad volunteers against all expectation to fight a giant, with little likelihood of winning. Armed only with stones and a sling, the boy confronts the giant stood there in full military armour. But with one small stone between the eyes, the giant is hit and falls, and David wins.
The story follows a theme we find repeated throughout the Old Testament, how God – or how history as told by scripture – seems to favour not the strong but the weak, not the powerful but the enslaved, not the conqueror but the vanquished, not the entitled heir but the also-ran younger son. The Old Testament gives the firstborn male child prominence: he is the leader of his siblings, he inherits special privileges, he belongs to God, he is sanctified, he is consecrated. All firstborn things – whether human or animal or even crops – are dedicated to God. Except again and again, the stories of the Old Testament seem to imply that God hasn’t been fully briefed on this fact. God continually subverts the expectation of scripture and instead doles out his blessings – and showers responsibilities – on the less-likely younger and weaker members of the family and on weaker peoples among the nations.
Abel is younger than Cain; Canaan is younger than Egypt; Isaac is younger than Ishmael; Jacob is younger than Esau; Joseph and Benjamin are the youngest of their brothers; Moses is younger than Aaron and younger than their sister Miriam; and David – well David has six or seven older brothers (depending on which passage you read). And there are loads of others: Ephraim, Perez, Gideon, King Solomon, and – even in the New Testament with Jesus’s storytelling – we have the younger prodigal son.
And this story of David and Goliath fits this trope. Goliath is tall, impossibly tall – six cubits and a span. That’s not exactly an exact measurement … but that’s 9¾ feet give or take a few inches, that’s almost a foot taller than the tallest man ever (as recorded in the Guinness Book of Records). However, that may be a slight “magnification”, other texts including one found among the Dead Sea Scrolls, make him a more reasonable four cubits and a span – 6 foot 9 – still imposing but maybe not so immense. (Stories often get enhanced or exaggerated over time, it can help to improve the story or to enhance the spin we wish to place on it.) This fearful warrior would stand head and shoulders over everyone else on the battlefield – well, definitely a “head” above, even if not the “shoulders”. But he would be intimidating, and it would still be understandable that no one was in any particular rush to confront him and to rise to his challenge.
David in this story is very much the underdog, the story is told in terms of bravery and taking responsibility. David gets caught up in this fight by accident. His older brothers – all warriors – were on the battlefield, when he enters the tale: sent there by his dad who had told him to leave the sheep he was tending and to take some food to the real men on the front line doing real men’s work (that is, if fighting, killing, and taking other people’s land qualifies as proper work). And this young lad hears Goliath repeating his challenge, and whereas others had dodged it, this boy throws his hat into the ring.
You can imagine his brothers and the Israelite army viewed the boy’s bravery as being a particularly idiotic thing. But they go along with it, and the story descends into comedic bathos as the boy is dressed up in armour, too big for him that he stumbles and is unable to walk let alone fight a champion warrior. But it heightens the resolution of the story, as the boy David discarding the weaponry and armour goes out past the great warriors who didn’t dare to accept the challenge, and he confronts the aggressor simply as he was – a young boy smelling of sheep with nothing more than some stones to throw. (Even stone-throwing is little more than many can do when face with aggression and threat.)
And that makes good storytelling, it reminds us that we are called to stand up and confront powerful people and organisations or brutal regimes, which mock and revile, bully and threaten, intimidate and oppress. It reminds us that whatever our weakness, or the situations shortcomings, boldness and courage to do the right thing is always “the right thing to do.” And that no matter what the ridicule or uncertainty or danger this places us in, God is there with us in that jeopardy.
That’s all well and good then, story done, everything is nice, straightforward and hunk-dory: clear baddies, obvious goodies, God is definitely on the side of the winners. Good, good, good. We know who David is – he’s the brave young boy. We know who Goliath is – he is the angry proud warmonger. David is David. Goliath is Goliath. The bad guy has been dispatched by the good guy on whom God’s favour rests.
But of course, the Bible is rarely that straightforward. Things change. In the following book of the Bible (2 Samuel), David is now King, and is shoring up his position to make his reign secure. This of course is good for him, but perhaps not so good for those whose ongoing presence is a tad awkward for him. So, it isn’t quite a reign of peace and there is still a quite bit of bloodletting. Goodbye King Ishbosheth of Israel whose presence made David’s claim on the throne insecure. Goodbye Uriah the Hittite who inconveniently happened to be the husband of a (potentially non-consenting) woman recently impregnated by David. And of course, the Philistines are still around and so a lot of xenophobic fighting still goes on, from both sides. And even what we thought we knew becomes unsure; as in the annals of the ongoing war, key triumphs are listed, such as – to take one sentence at random (well, perhaps not so randomly) – ‘In another war with the Philistines in Gob, Elhanan the son of Jair of Bethlehem killed Goliath of Gath.’ And the sureties we took for granted come crashing down, as identities and claims become shaky and suspicious.
We live in uncertain times, with ongoing international crises. And we face a General Election (and where Europe has experienced other elections) where rhetoric has fanned hatred and suspicion, and extreme opinions, misinformation and conspiracy theories, radicalisation and polarisation. Which in turn has expressed itself in the vilification, contempt and demonisation of individuals and groups of those who are seen as outsiders or who hold contrary opinions or outlooks or ambitions.
And the question has to be: where is the voice of the church? Not just the church as an organisation but also the church as in its individual members. We are called to confront Goliaths wherever they stand, and to be conscious that roles change, as power dynamics change: that Davids can become Goliaths and Goliaths become Davids. Our God is a moving God though remains constantly the same: forever shifting himself to be found, present and incarnate, among the poor, the weak, the ostracised, the outsider, the scapegoat, the refugee, the victim, and the weakling. The people of God are not that by virtual of succession, inheritance, history or privilege, but rather God’s people are those among whom he stands, no matter how rejected by us and how unlikely in our view. And the only way that we too can become people of God is if we dare risk moving into that same unsure and uncertain space. We are not called to be quiet. We are not called to be safe. We are called to the awkwardness of being godly.
Colin Setchfield
16 June 2024 – The Third Sunday after Trinity
Today is Father’s Day, a day when children say thank you to those who are their father, or who are like a father to them. One of the things fathers do is to teach their children. Small children are always asking questions and a good father is always trying to find answers and explain them in a way that his children will understand. As we grow up, we still have lots of questions but often become more reserved in terms of asking them.
God is our heavenly Father and he found a way of answering many of our questions about himself and about the kingdom of heaven by sending Jesus into the world. When we look at Jesus we see God in a way we can relate to and understand. He knows and loves each one of us, his children, no matter how old or young we are. He knows we need to ask questions. Through Jesus God has provided pictures and stories that illustrate the truths he wants us to know.
We see his love in the beauty of the world around us, we see his love mirrored in the love of parents and children, and in the teachings of Jesus we find him using everyday situations and objects to help to describe spiritual truths. Today some of his illustrations are not so clear to us because the society we live in is rather different – but the truths behind them are still valid and important. In our Gospel reading today Jesus uses two illustrations to help us understand more about the kingdom of God.
We all understand what an earthly kingdom is. It is an area of land surrounded by legal boundaries inside which there is an identifiable kingdom or country over which a king or queen rules. The kingdom of God is more nebulous. We cannot draw boundary lines or confine it to a particular area. In simple terms, the kingdom of God is where God rules, so in human terms it is more or less invisible.
This invisibility can sometimes lead us to believe that nothing is happening, but Jesus shows through his illustration of the farmer sowing his seed, that even when we cannot see growth, it is happening. Many people today live in towns and cities; often in flats without a garden and so this illustration may not be as obvious as it was to Jesus’ audience. However, there is something which may be a similar illustration.
And that is pregnancy. Initially a woman may not know that she is pregnant, but new life is growing inside her following the act of love. She does not have to do anything, other than get on with her daily life and a few visits to the doctor or hospital for checks – but the new life continues to grow and develop inside her and in nine months’ time hopefully she will give birth to a child.
When the farmer plants his seed, he too has simply to get on with his daily life. Maybe a bit of watering if there is no rain. The seed is hidden in the ground and for a while it may seem like nothing is happening, but after a while, small shoots will appear poking through the earth, which will grow and eventually become fruitful ears of wheat. These will ripen in the sun until it is time for harvest.
When we sow seeds of the gospel, the good news about Jesus, we do not always see anything happening. We may have a passing conversation with someone, or we give them a book for Christmas, or maybe bring them along to church or another special event. The friend shows no real interest and it feels as if we have made no difference. But Jesus tells us that when a seed is sown, it has the power to grow.
We will not see the growth, that is happening inside the other person. They themselves may not even be aware of it. But growth is there. And one day there will be a shoot – maybe they will show a desire to know more, perhaps they will start to ask questions, or begin to come along to church, or start to read their Bible. Slowly and gradually growth will happen. It may take many years, even decades, and the bottom line is that God has given everyone that ability to accept or decline what he offers.
It is not our responsibility to make sure someone accepts Jesus Christ into their life. It is only our responsibility to plant the seed, or to be around to water it if there is no rain, or to gather the harvest when the time is right. Sometimes we can feel as if we have to keep on and on trying to convince someone that they should become a Christian. But the kingdom is not like that. We plant, and God brings the growth. We need to pray; but our work is not to make the growth – in fact we cannot.
In the same way as if we were to keep digging up a seed to check if it was growing and replanting it, eventually it would give up and die. So, if we keep trying to plant and re-plant God’s word in someone else’s heart the end product may be that we stop that word from growing.
What this story does tell us is that if we plant the seed, God will bring growth. We may not see it. But it will happen, and one day there will be a harvest.
But there is also a second story or parable which again involves a seed, but gives a different perspective on the kingdom: the story of the mustard seed which grows into a large tree so that all the birds of the air can settle in it.
In Jesus’ day the mustard seed was proverbially the smallest thing (even though there were smaller seeds). We see this in another saying of Jesus when he spoke of ‘faith as small as a mustard seed’ meaning the smallest amount of faith you could imagine. But even such a small seed has the power within it to grow into a very tall bush. There is an account from the early centuries of a traveller to Palestine reporting seeing a mustard bush that was taller than a rider on a horse.
Mustard trees/bushes attract birds because of the small seeds and so Jesus’ hearers would have been easily able to picture a mustard tree with its branches full of birds. It was something they often saw. It is also an image that is present in the Old Testament. In our first reading Israel is pictured as a mustard tree giving shelter to the birds and animals – representing the surrounding nations. It did not fulfil this vison (nor does it today) and Daniel speaks of the tree being chopped down until only a stump and roots are left.
Jesus speaks of himself as coming from that stump and bringing God’s kingdom into the lives of all who will accept him, not just the Jewish people.
The kingdom, as I have already said, is often invisible, but we can see it when we see the people of God, Christians, in action in the world. It is made visible when the church reveals the kingdom by what it does. The birds who shelter are people of all kinds. Anyone is welcome to come into the church building and join with us when we worship on a Sunday, and at other times. They may stay for a short time and then move on. But some people come and, if you like, build their nests and raise their family within the shelter of the church and as we know, the church is not the building it is the people, and so they become part of the church.
But even if the people who live around us don’t settle in the church, the tree of the kingdom may be there for them in some other way. Maybe through the Food Bank and the pet food bank. These offer help to anyone in the name of Jesus, allowing people to find help and shelter in the branches of the tree that is the Kingdom. And just as in the first parable, seeds are sown. We don’t know what conversations had with church members might have touched something in a persons’ life. The growth is left in God’s hands. We may, or may not see the final plant coming to fruition.
(In absentia)
Maria Holmden
9 June 2024 – The Second Sunday after Trinity
It’s good to be with you again this morning, my second appearance here, and very likely my last up front, at St Edmund’s. I assume that you are delighted and perhaps relieved that you will soon have a new incumbent in post, someone to take the lead in all the doings and sometimes the worrying’s of parish life, and helping you to discern ways ahead.
Nonetheless, I hope that the interregnum too has been of some benefit to you and your community. Interregnum can be a testing time, but it can also an instructive one, as members of the parish step up to keep its life going, and also experience that life without continuous clergy leadership. It is also of course a time to reflect on the life, needs and wishes of your community.
We have a good and attractive set of readings this morning, of which I’m going to concentrate on the middle two, that is the psalm, number 130, and the epistle, a passage from St Paul’s second letter to the church at Corinth.
It is one of my sadnesses about parish worship today that the psalms do not always receive the attention which they deserve. Not only are they or should they be a regular part of our worship, but they are very rewarding, whether in public worship, in private prayer or in group or individual study.
The Psalms also provide us with a live connection to the worshipping community of pre-Christian times. They are, after all, part of the Old Testament. Interestingly though they are sometimes detached from it, so that there are volumes comprising ‘New Testament and Psalms’, suggesting that the psalms are something other than just a book of the Old Testament.
Unfortunately, though, the sixty minute rule, the informal cap on the length of our principal Sunday morning service, applied in many churches, can get in the way. That’s what has happened in my parish, where the psalm was dropped from our principal Sunday morning worship some years ago, to keep the running time down to 60 minutes. The intention is understandable, but it comes at a price, in terms of lost experience of and engagement with such an important part of our scripture and our liturgy.
We do still have the psalm at Evensong, but Evensong is a minority sport in local churches these days. Here too I have little grumble, which is that, as is often the case, the psalm when there is one is sung by the choir. Lovely though that may be, if it is well done, it seems to me that it takes away words which should properly be said or sung by the people, and not by others on their behalf.
Psalm 130 is a lovely psalm of modest length, which can also readily be used as a private prayer. The psalms are often named and known by their first word or words in Latin, a practice dating back to the time when Latin was the language of the church. The first words of Psalm 130 ‘Out of the depths’ translate the Latin ‘de profundis’. You don’t need to be a Latin scholar to get the resonance of those words, a cry for help.
From then on, though, ‘hope’ and hopeful waiting become the theme of the psalm, along with patience, and the assurance of forgiveness. Hope is appropriate in all times and circumstances, both personal and corporate, as one of the great Christian virtues. It is certainly appropriate when, as here at St Edmund’s, a time of new ministry approaches: ‘O Israel, hope in the Lord’; ‘O Chingford, hope in the Lord.’
And so, to the epistle, today the passage we have heard from St Paul’s second letter to the church at Corinth. Here too, we find words of encouragement: ‘so we do not lose heart’. This passage is appropriate for reading at funerals, although certainly not only at funerals. We used it in our parish last Thursday, at the funeral of Mary, a dear parishioner, who had died just short of her 93rd birthday.
Mary was fortunate, as were her family and friends, that she remained lucid right to the end of her long life. She was indeed a bright spirit and she certainly did not lose heart.
One notable thing about Mary was that she had lived since 1947, as it happens the year of my birth, in the same semi basement flat in Hermon Hill, just down the road from Wanstead High Street. That itself intrigues me, at a time when many people make a number of home moves the course of their lives, some but not all of which may be necessary. You may need to move because of work, or to have more space, but it may just be change for the sake of change.
Some of you may know that one of the principles rules of the Benedictine order of monks and nuns, is the rule of stability. What that means is that when Benedictines first enter the order they are sent to a particular monastery or convent, and that is where they are expected to stay.
There is, I think, great wisdom in the rule of St Benedict. I very much doubt if Mary was aware of the rule of St. Benedict, or his principle of stability, but I’d say that she lived out the wisdom of his teaching. I would further say that this principle of stability may be of particular value to people trying to navigate their lives in fast changing times.
Back, though to the words of encouragement that we find in this second letter of Paul to the Corinthians: ‘so we do not lose heart’. Whilst they also have general application, they seem to me to apply particularly, or at least to be of particular interest, to those of us who are in the later stages of our lives.
This is a time at which some may feel or fear that, as St Paul puts it, our outer nature is wasting away, whether that be our physical state or our state of mind. What Paul tells us, however, is that we are not to lose heart due to his perception of decline and decay, which he describes as ‘temporary’ and as a ‘slight momentary affliction’.
Richard Wyber
2 June 2024 – The First Sunday after Trinity
What’s the naughtiest thing you ever did?
Oh, goodness me. Well, I suppose… gosh. Do you know, I’m not quite sure. Nobody is ever perfectly behaved, are they? I mean, you know, I have to confess, when me and my friend, sort of, used to run through the fields of wheat, the farmers weren’t too pleased about that.
This week’s ITV documentary ‘Theresa May: The Accidental Prime Minister’ reminded us of that strange confession in 2017 by the former Vicar’s daughter. It hardly seems the naughtiest of behaviours, unless perhaps you were a farmer concerned about damage to crops.
Today’s gospel reading presents us with an antecedent to Theresa May’s “wickedness.” What is nicer than at the weekend getting out into the countryside and enjoying the fresh air, meeting up with friends, and that sense of wellbeing through walking and chatting. And that is how the story begins – Jesus and his disciples are rambling through the sown fields. As they walk, the disciples idly pull at the crop plucking some of the ears of grain.
And then, all of a sudden, from nowhere the Pharisees appear. ‘This is not allowed.’ To me, it is a little Pythonesque: almost as if the Pharisees are there waiting, concealed, hiding in the corn, ready to pop up to confront any unwary person, to highlight how any seemingly innocent behaviour is on-the-whole heresy and a violation of God’s commands. Jesus and his disciples’ weekend walk is interrupted, unexpectedly by these champions of moral behaviour. “Dun dun duuun!” I imagine amid diabolical laugher and threats, the menacing shout of ‘No-one expects the … Pharisees!’ is heard.
The story doesn’t actually tell us what exactly the Pharisees are claiming to be the concern here. We have to surmise whether it is that – by walking through the field – they are forging a path through it, or that – by plucking the grains – they are harvesting, or – if they did have a munch – they were eating food not prepared in advance of the Sabbath. Any of these could be seen by the purist Pharisees as tantamount to work, and as such a disrespecting of the Sabbath.
And our first reading today (from Deuteronomy’s version of the Ten Commandments) handily gave us the supporting text: ‘Keep the Sabbath day holy as the Lord your God commanded you. You have six days to labour and to do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God; that day you shall not do any work.’
It may be difficult for us to understand the Pharisees’ consternation with Jesus’s Saturday stroll. But that may be (in part) due to us not really understanding the Jewish concept of Sabbath. And that isn’t so surprising, seeing that the church moved away from keeping the Saturday Sabbath quite early on in its history. So much so, these days if we use the term, we simply view it in terms of our Sunday: a day of leisure, of roast dinners, and football matches, of trips to garden centres, spending time with the family, getting ready for work on Monday.
But Sabbath was less about ‘doing’ and more about ‘stopping.’ It was an intentional making the busyness of our lives to cease. It was a limit, a full stop, at the end of a week of work and activity. What lay at the heart of the Sabbath wasn’t its seven-day cycle, nor the cessation of work; but rather that the Sabbath was holy: it was about our relationship to and with God.
The concept of Sabbath is read back into the Genesis creation story. Sabbath comes about once God has completed his work of creation. Once it is completed, then he is able to rest, and – in that rest – he can then enter into relationship with his creation, to make a covenant with all things he has made. And similarly, Sabbath forced creation to stop its frenetic work, to quieten its drive to prosper and achieve, and instead to stop the ”difference-making” – to stop the actions and work that demarked our roles, our positions, our ambitions, our worth, and to focus us back into our common relationship with God our creator. To lose the right of control and influence over others and even over ourselves.
‘You shall not do any work, neither you, your son or your daughter, you slave or your slave-girl, your ox, your ass, or any of your cattle, nor the alien within your gates, so that your slaves and slave-girls may rest as you do.’ The Sabbath is the great leveller, pausing our creator-ambitions and restoring our creaturely-value.
So hang on then, does that mean that, rather than being the bad guys in this story, the Pharisees actually do have a point. One of the things we don’t pick up in our modern translation, which reads that all this happens ‘one Sabbath,’ is that in the original Greek the word is ‘Sabbaths’ in the plural. It seems to suggest that this conflict was an ongoing conversation to be had. In our gospel, yet another Sabbath confrontation follows straight on after this.
But in the first instance in this story, Jesus does react to the Pharisees’ accusations, by reminding them of an incident in which David bent the Law, in order that he and his men could eat. Except that the scripture passage, which Jesus quotes, is not only a bit irrelevant to the matter in hand (as there is no reference to it as happening on a Sabbath) but his argument is full of errors and flaws. He gets the name of the High Priest in the story wrong; he recounts companions of David who weren’t there; in the story, David does not enter the house of God let alone eat the bread of the presence.
The Pharisees – these great scriptural nitpickers – found the tables turned, as this uneducated woodsmith from Galilee, subverts their craft, laying himself open to mockery, suggesting their ignorance of scripture through instructing them, while seemingly having an “abysmal ignorance of the very scriptural text” which he had selected.
But, is that not the point? Remember Jesus’s parable of the mote and the beam, where he challenges us, ‘Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye, with never a thought for the great plank in your own?’ The disciples idly pulling at the ears of grain as they made a path through the field may have been in contravention of the Sabbath law; but the Pharisees practising their craft of interpretation of scripture, placing themselves as teachers above the uneducated sinners breaching the regulation, were themselves working against the levelling intention of God’s Sabbath.
Intentionally or unintentionally, they had weaponised scripture to subject others to their authority and to the authority of their interpretation and teaching. And this is a salient warning to the church today and to us particularly in this lead-up to July’s General Election.
We live in a world which, particularly through social media, suggests to us the need for acceptance, for popularity, for superiority. We watch, we view, we follow. We are encouraged to compare, to like, to judge. We make judgements about people we know nothing about, we form opinions that polarises people, and we create social, religious and economic hierarchies, fostering intolerances that breed separation, misunderstand and hostility.
This week on television, as well as the Theresa May documentary, there was also Channel 4’s finale of the latest series of Taskmaster. (It sounds almost like I did little more than watch telly over the past few days!) At the start of the show, the introductory Prize task was, on this occasion, for each contestant to supply the thing that gives most hope for the future of the human race. Each comedian presented and explained their item. But when it came to Steve Pemberton, he listed off what he defined as the disasters of this age: artificial intelligence, Brexit, cancel culture, deadly pandemics, greenhouse gases, the hottest temperatures ever, ice caps melting, and (worse still) his competitor John Robins probably winning Taskmaster. And in consideration of these, the thing of hope that Steve offered up was simply bringing in nothing. And they turned to the screen that stood next to them, and on it this nothingness was displayed.
Here was the hope: that everything that divided and destroyed and corrupted, that set people apart, above or dependent on others, that subjected, and robbed people of their humanity and worth was reset, was stopped. And though not using the term Sabbath, it was as if this nothingness, this ‘stopping,’ gave hope for the beginning of a real change.
Take this gospel reading today and use it during this week, to consider whether we make allowance for a Sabbath in our living. Are we open to letting go of all our attempts to improve ourselves, to better ourselves, to raise ourselves above others – in what we do, in what we say, in what we think, in what we believe? Do we allow time to be grounded back into that right relationship with God, and right relationship with the rest of humanity and the whole of creation, equally valued and equally loved. Are we prepared to stop awhile – and to cease “doing” and simply just to “be”? And in that break, in that Sabbath-stop, to rest in the love of God, which is not ours by virtue of what we have done or not done, but is freely given simply because we “are.”
Colin Setchfield
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26 May 2024 – Trinity Sunday
As I was sitting and eating my breakfast earlier in the week I began to reflect on how I would talk about what it means that the one God we worship is made know to us in three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Three distinct persons, and yet they are inseparable and are one God. We call them the Trinity.
It is a mystery that people throughout the centuries have tried to explain, and yet no-one has ever fully succeeded, and I am glad they didn’t! God is above and beyond our understanding, if he wasn’t he wouldn’t be God.
The word Trinity doesn’t appear in the Bible, it was first coined in the 3rd century AD by a man called Tertullian. For the first few centuries Christians had struggled to describe God. Throughout the New Testament God is described as ‘the Father’, but then it is very clear that Jesus is also God (and he says “I and the Father are one’), and the Holy Spirit is described as the Spirit of God. Three recognisable persons and yet we say we worship one God. Most of the time the bible simply talks about each of these three persons as individuals, sometimes in the same passage, sometimes just showing relationship between two of them, sometimes just speaking of each one separately. If we try to explain it we find it difficult. Tertullian coined the word ‘Trinity’ to give us a way of expressing this simply, even if it still didn’t make the meaning crystal clear.
Back to my musings. I reflected on how in the past I have used an illustration which I am sure you are all familiar with. The sun. It is known to us by the fact we can see it as an object, we are illumined by its light, and we are warmed by its heat. Each aspect is separately identifiable, but one cannot exist without the other two. This gives us the possibility of understanding that there can be three interdependent parts of something, but our understanding of God is still partial.
Then I wondered if the idea of teamwork helped in some way – three persons each playing their particular part, but that had its flaws too. People can leave a team, team members can be replaced. With God the three persons cannot leave or be replaced they are part of an eternal whole.
As I ate and my mind continued to wander, my hand raised the spoon to my mouth and another image came into my mind. The body. And of course, we know that was the image Paul used to describe the church. But the image for me that morning was of the relationship between my hands and feet and brain. God the Father being the brain, God the Son (Jesus) the hands and the holy Spirit the feet.
Each part can be seen to act independently: the hand can move without the feet, the feet can move without the hand, but both need the brain. The brain instructs the hands and feet, and they in turn send messages back to the brain. The feet carry the hands and brain to where they need to be. Again it is not a perfect image, but if we could describe God perfectly, then God would cease to be God.
Just yesterday I had an email from the Mustard Seed Team (that’s the Diocesan Children Families and Youth Team) and they presented yet another illustration to add to my collection: Let me read what they said.
“Another image … is the three- legged stool. Think of God as the seat. He is there, solid, full of love. The legs, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit supporting that Love. Take one leg away and the stool is not complete. We need all three for God to be whole. The three in one.
The message is about Love. God gives us his love unconditionally. The love that binds us all together in faith.
So, it’s simple, three divine legs totally dependent on one another, joined together in perfect love, inviting us to come and sit and rest awhile.”
As I think through all of these images or illustrations, each one gives me a slightly different insight into God as Trinity. It will never become crystal clear until we get to heaven and meet God face to face, and maybe even then we won’t fully understand.
One other amazing truth is that we are made in the image of God. It is obvious from the amazing diversity in human beings that that doesn’t refer to our physical appearance.
We can identify as body, mind and spirit. And see them as three separate parts, but we can only function as all three. One aspect can have an effect on the other two. For example, when we are ill we can find it harder to function mentally and we can feel down in our spirit.
If we are troubled in our mind (with fears or worries) it can affect our bodies: we may have less energy, or feel aches and pains, and it can affect our spirit: we may find it harder to pray, or perhaps we feel distant from God.
We are each one whole, but we can see we are made up of these three aspects. The problem with this image is that we don’t usually experience our body, mind or spirit separately.
In our Gospel reading, Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus, Jesus speaks of how he, the Holy Spirit and God the Father work together in our salvation. In speaking with Nicodemus Jesus sets out the role of the Holy Spirit, and later his own role, and that of the Father:
‘No one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the Spirit’
and how are we invited into that kingdom? ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.’
We could spend a lot more time discussing how Jesus can be God’s Son and also be one with the Father and the Holy Spirit. But suffice it to say that when God communicates with us, he does so using human language. He uses words we can understand like ‘son’ and ‘father’. The trouble is when we hear those words, we immediately put a human interpretation on them – we think of human father/son relationships. At the beginning of John’s gospel Jesus is described as the Word (capital W) made flesh. God’s way of communicating with us is in a language we can understand. When we try and interpret heavenly truths in restricted human language, we limit the amount we can explain.
We have to recognise truths that are expressed in the bible, but we also have to accept that those truths may have deeper meanings that we cannot describe, and accept them by faith.
Tertullian and others spent a long time trying to put the teachings about God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit into language that would make things a bit clearer. It was from these kinds of discussions that the Creeds developed. In your service book on p.? you will see the words of the Nicene Creed which we will say a bit later in this service. If you notice the creed expressly says we believe in ‘One God’ and then goes on to express this in terms of the three persons who make up our one God and the close and inseparable relationship between them.
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I find myself just repeating it without much thought. However, it is one of the most important and central statements of our faith. It is expressing who God is and proclaiming that this is the God we believe in.
So what does it mean for us today that God is three in one? It means that we are able to connect with him in a meaningful way.
In the Old Testament God was seen as unknown and unknowable. Then Jesus came and revealed God in a way that is knowable, a way we can understand and relate to, but only those who were physically with him could really relate to him. After his resurrection when he returned to heaven and was no longer physically present anywhere on earth God sent the holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit brings God into our lives in a way that enables us to access the power of God wherever we are. He comes into our lives to ‘seal the deal’ and make real our relationship with God through Jesus Christ.
We have an amazing God who is not only beyond our comprehension, but who has also provided a way to know him personally, and a way that he can come and live inside us. Even if we don’t understand exactly how he can be three in one, we can give him our thanks and praise that he is, and for all that he means to us!
Maria Holmden
19 May 2024 – Pentecost
Today we are celebrating Pentecost – the day when the Holy Spirit came in power on all the followers of Jesus and they spoke in tongues. Something remarkable and seemingly outside their usual experience, but an inspiring and motivational event. Have any of us ever had such an experience of God’s power? Should we expect it today? What would such an event be like? Would it be dramatic and public as it was for the first disciples? Or would it be quiet and personal? I suspect it is more likely to be the latter, although the Holy Spirit changes lives so others would be sure to notice a change in us.
On May 1st we were all horrified and shocked by the senseless murder of Daniel Anjorin in Hainault, when a man armed with a sword attacked him on his way to school. The shock for his family and friends and for others involved in this situation is unimaginable. For those seeking to bring solace to the family – what can they say? How should they pray? Words are so inadequate in this situation.
About 9 years ago I was asked to visit a young woman in hospital. She was aged 20 and had accidentally drunk some poison which had left her with brain damage, unable to move or speak. She gradually regained some speech but had to re-learn the names of the things she could see. The shock for her family was unimaginable. What could I say to bring comfort? How should I pray?
On another occasion I supported a family where a woman and her two children were murdered by her partner. The pain for her mother and sister as well as the wider family was beyond words. Again, what could I say? How should I pray?
Many people face traumatic episodes in their lives – a friend or family member dying of cancer, losing someone close in an accident, being made redundant when you have a family to support and a mortgage. I am sure you could add your own situations to the list. How do we know what to pray in each of these situations?
At times like these, when we receive devastating news, or try to come alongside someone else who is suffering in this way often we cannot speak. All we can do is groan or cry. There is a deep emotional response within us that cannot be voiced.
As we look at our readings this morning, I would like to look at them through the spectacles of Pentecost, and to focus on the second reading: from Romans chapter 8. This is part of the great letter of Paul to the Christians in Rome. It has a different feel to some of the other letters he wrote. Most of his letters were written to churches that he had founded, many of which he had also spent quite a lot of time with and so knew lots of the people personally.
The church in Rome had not been founded by Paul, nor had he ever visited (although he had a heartfelt desire to do so, and eventually did, but as a prisoner). As a result, his letter is less personal than the others and doesn’t speak about specific personal issues. It is more like a doctrinal thesis which aims to give the church a firm foundation through his teaching.
The passage we read this morning is a small part of a much longer section. In the lead up to this Paul has been setting out the Gospel – explaining that no-one can earn God’s favour because everyone has sinned and fallen short. No-one is righteous and all deserve to be condemned. But in his love for us God has shown another way – he has sent His Son Jesus to die in our place, and in his resurrection and ascension enabled the coming of the Holy Spirit in a new way.
The Apostles and the other disciples in the Upper Room, on that day of Pentecost, just 10 days after the Ascension, were waiting for the coming of the Holy Spirit in obedience to what Jesus had told them to do. I don’t think they knew exactly how it would happen, but as they gathered, they must have been filled with expectation and hope.
In Romans Paul speaks of the situation in which we find ourselves today. We are waiting, waiting for the return of Christ, the resurrection of our bodies, meeting God face to face, and knowing the fulness of our salvation. As Christians we have received the Holy Spirit. Maybe not in such a dramatic way as the disciples and Apostles, but as Christians, the Holy Spirit is placed inside us. He is the way we experience the presence of Jesus in our lives. He is the power of Jesus in our lives as we await his return. And we can call on this power.
But we are not the only ones who are waiting. Paul says the whole of creation is also waiting, but he describes it in terms that indicate Jesus’ return is near. He describes creation as groaning as in the pains of childbirth. When a woman is pregnant there is an expectation and a hope that a child is being formed who will one day come into the world. She has a rough idea of when the child is expected, but when her labour pains begin, she knows that this will end with the birth of the child, usually within a few hours.
The mother-to-be will experience much pain and exertion, there will be many groans and sighs (or shouting or screaming!). She is on a course that cannot be reversed and she knows that at the end she will have a son or a daughter. This wonderful hope helps her to put up with the discomfort of pregnancy and the pain of childbirth.
For the people Paul was writing to in Rome, if they were not being persecuted then, they soon would be. Christians would be thrown to the lions and forced to fight gladiators in the Arena. Today Christians in many parts of the world are suffering for their faith. Paul calls these the birth pangs. This suffering points to the return of Jesus. Even creation itself is suffering – we see this in the pollution that is choking our planet, climate change, rising sea levels, droughts, floods, forest fires, earthquakes, volcanic activity… Creation is groaning.
Here in England, we are fortunate that at the moment we do not suffer persecution in the same way as some of our brothers and sisters in other parts of the world. But we can see how, in many ways, it is getting more difficult to be a Christian or to live out the Christian life. Church no longer meets the needs of the younger generation so they do not come. Technology draws us onto a realm where we are promised that all our needs will be met and we look for material comforts not spiritual wealth.
One of the things we experience is that we do not always know how to pray. There are situations (like those I mentioned earlier) where we cannot put our prayer into words, or we just don’t know what would be the right things to pray for. Alongside that we do not always make the effort to pray (but that is a separate issue!)
I wonder if you have seen the film Bruce Almighty? In the film Jim Carey plays Bruce Nolan, a TV presenter who is frustrated with his job. He wants to be the main newscaster, the person in the studio holding the programme together. Things keep going wrong for him and he ends up crashing his car. He leaps out and shouts at God, ‘Someone here is not doing their job; and its YOU!’
God (played by Morgan Freeman) decides to let Bruce have God’s powers for a week. Straight away Bruce starts to use these powers to benefit himself. Then he starts to hear millions of prayer requests in his head, so he just says ‘Yes’ to every prayer. Chaos ensues. One result is that thousands of people win the Lottery jackpot – but because there are so many winners each person only gets $17. Riots follow as people accuse the Lottery company of malpractice. Bruce confronts God with the chaos and God replies, ‘since when do people know what they really want?’
Then he challenges Bruce to pray. Bruce flippantly says,’ Make everyone love each other and bring peace on earth.’ God responds ‘That’s OK if you want to be Miss America.’ And invites him to try again. This time Bruce struggles and from his heart he prays for his girlfriend who he has treated very badly. ‘Now that is a prayer,’ says God. Although some may feel the film is a bit sacrilegious it does portray some profound truths about the spiritual life.
At the beginning I gave examples of traumatic events that people face and asked, how should I pray? Let’s take the example of the family of the girl left brain damaged. Should I pray for a miracle that she would be restored to full health? Should I pray that God would give her a peaceful death? Should I pray that she would get the best treatment? Should I pray that her family and social services would find the best way to enable her to be looked after for the rest of her life? The truth is, I didn’t know how to pray as I should. Only God knows what is best.
And how do we pray for the situations faced by our country and the world? Let’s take the rise in drug use and many other crimes. Do we pray for more police? More severe prison sentences? Better educational resources? For God to send a disease to kill off all cannabis plants? But then what about the people with medical needs who are helped by this drug? Only God knows what is best and how to achieve it.
And God promises the Holy Spirit will help us. Sometimes that is by giving us the right words to say in a particular situation. Sometimes it is by prompting us to be silent because there is nothing to say – but the deep longings of our hearts are carried to God by the Holy Spirit as we pray silently in our hearts. And thirdly it may be through the gift of praying in tongues. Praying in a language we do not understand. Elsewhere Paul calls this a heavenly language. Not everyone has this gift, but if we do, it is a way in which the Holy Spirit gives us words to pray for someone else in a situation where we are unable to pray in words, and even if we don’t know what we are praying for – God does! He receives the words and understands them.
And so, let’s remember, not just today or on other Pentecost Sundays, but whenever we pray, let’s remember that God’s Holy Spirit is helping us in our prayers. I will close with two verses from Ephesians chapter 3: 20-21
‘Now unto him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever. Amen’
Maria Holmden
12 May 2024 – The Seventh Sunday of Easter
Children focus:
Simon & Sarah are twins, they live with their Mum and Dad and are in the same class at school. They love playing football and they are both players in the Chings. The Chings is a mixed team made up of four girls and 7 boys. Most Saturdays they train in the local park, but more recently they had found a few other mixed teams and had been playing matches. The Chings had been training hard but finding it hard to win their matches.
One Saturday the twins arrived at the park and found the other members of the team were very sad. John, their goalkeeper had moved away and couldn’t be in the team any more. Sue, their coach was on holiday. They had a match on Sunday afternoon. What would they do? They all had a big think and eventually a couple of names were suggested. Junior and Jordan were both very good at football and the team was split on which one to choose. Eventually Sarah had an idea – ‘Let’s toss for it,’ she said. ‘If it’s heads, we’ll have Junior, if it’s tails, we’ll have Jordan.’ The others thought it was a good idea and so Sarah pulled a coin out of her pocket and everyone gathered around.
Sarah flicked the coin and everyone watched it fall – it tumbled to the ground and came to a halt. The children all peered at it – it was heads! Simon went off to find Junior and ask him to join the team and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. They now had a full team again and the match could go ahead.
That night when Simon and Sarah were in bed, Mum came to tuck them up and say a prayer with them and tell them a bible story. She told them about when Jesus had gone back to heaven and his friends who were called Apostles, had to choose a new person to join them. They had two people who seemed suitable Matthias and Justus, but how to choose which one? So they cast lots. Mum explained that meant they threw some stones and depending on how they fell that would show which man to choose. The stones fell in a way that meant that Matthias was chosen, and so he became the twelfth Apostle. Sarah got very excited. ‘That’s just like at football today,’ she said. ‘So it is’ said Mum, but, you know, when Sue is back next week she might have someone even better.’
The twins said a prayer saying thank you to God that they had been able to get a replacement goalkeeper and then they went to sleep. The match the next day went ahead, but they didn’t win.
The following Saturday they got to the park and Sue, their coach was waiting. Beside her was a girl they didn’t know, dressed in the Ching’s kit. Sue said, ‘This is Tesha, she has just moved here. She used to play football for the Walthams. I think she will be very good as our new goalkeeper.’
At first the twins didn’t feel too happy about this, but when they started to play they saw that Tesha was really good. The next week there was a match against the Walthams, and the Chings won! ‘Wow’ said Sarah, Sue knew much better than us who would be the best goalkeeper.’ ‘Yes.’ said Simon, ‘now we have the best team. Come on you Chings!’
Children, now I am going to talk to the adults for a little while. If you want to you can stay and listen, but if you would prefer there are some colouring sheets and other activities at the side that you can go and do.
Adult focus:
Our first Bible reading was about a time just after Jesus had ascended to heaven. This was the first time that Jesus had not physically been with his followers. There were about 120 of them, and part of that number were the disciples. There had been 12 of them, but because of Judas’ betrayal and suicide there were now only 11. They knew that Jesus had appointed 12 disciples for a reason – to represent the twelve tribes of Israel – and now Judas had left them they needed to find a replacement.
As we read, it seems like they made the decision to find someone, they found two men from amongst them who fitted their criteria, and then they prayed that God would help them to choose which one. It seemed to work well and Matthias was chosen. But very interestingly, there is no further mention of Matthias or Justus in the gospels, and apart from the events in our reading, neither are mentioned again in the bible. The disciples became known as Apostles, to distinguish them as leaders of the hundreds, and soon to be thousands, of people who became disciples, or followers of Jesus.
However, sometime later God called a man named Saul, who we know now as Paul, to become a follower of Jesus. He had been a very devout Jewish man who had hated the followers of Jesus and even tried to get them killed, but (and if you want to read the story you can find it in Acts chapter 9), but he had a miraculous conversion. He met Jesus on the road to Damascus in a very real way and it transformed his life. From being an enemy of anyone who followed Jesus, he became one of the most fervent followers of Jesus, and also became known as an Apostle.
While we don’t hear anything more about Matthias and Justus, Paul fills our New Testament. In the book of Acts we can read about many of the things he did, and from his letters to churches, which make up a large part of our New Testament, we learn how to apply the teaching of Jesus in our lives. His ministry didn’t happen overnight, it took many years of prayer and listening to God, but as he waited, God prepared him and through him the church grew and developed in the Gentile (that is, non-Jewish) world.
Now the question in my mind (and maybe in yours too) is, were Peter and the other Apostles right to try and replace Judas when they did? Or should they have waited? I don’t know the answer to that! But what seems evident from our reading is that they made their mind up about what had to happen before they prayed about it. It was only after they had decided that Justus and Matthias met the criteria (which they had also decided) that they prayed and asked God to help them choose between the two.
Jesus knew his Apostles and other disciples would find things hard when he was crucified, and that they would find it hard to cope with the amazing reality of the resurrection and then his leaving them again when he ascended to heaven. And so, before his arrest, in the Garden of Gethsemane he prayed for them. And we had part of his prayer in our gospel reading. And, you know, he didn’t only pray for the Apostles and the disciples that were alive then, he also prayed for those who would become his followers through their teaching – and that means you and me, and this morning it particularly means Saint-West.
How amazing that as we bring Saint-West to be baptised today we can know that Jesus prayed for him two thousand years ago, but what’s even more amazing, is that Jesus is still praying for him (and for us) today.
Baptism is a beginning of journey that lasts a lifetime. Kejuan and Jahneka are bringing Saint-West at the beginning of his life, into a place of prayer, the church. They have chosen five godparents: Nathan, Jenade-Lee, Shanay, Morgan and Jemal, whose main job will be to pray for him regularly, and teach him how to pray, alongside making sure that he receives Christian teaching and by setting him an example as they live out their Christian lives.
As Saint-West grows up, I pray that he will follow the example of his parents and godparents and will pray and ask for God’s guidance throughout his life. But, like all of us he may sometimes choose to do things his own way. Young people in our society today are under huge pressures. They need the care of loving adults to support and guide them in the right direction. To set them an example, and to pick them up when they fall.
Like those first Apostles, sometimes each of us make decisions about what we want and how we are going to get it, and then ask God to bless what we are doing. I believe we have a God who is greater than whatever we do, and who will often allow us to do our own thing. However, I also believe that God has a purpose and a plan for each of us and if we are faithful, he will reveal that plan. We may or may not be aware of his being at work, but when we look back later we will see that he has been guiding us.
The Apostles thought they were helping God out when they chose a new Apostle. God didn’t stop them, and I am assuming that both Matthias and Justus were active in that new embryonic church, but God knew that it needed a different kind of person to really spread the good news and create churches around the world. Someone who was fervent, caring and would be able to keep in touch and encourage these brand-new congregations. Someone who also would have the stamina to face this enormous task and to withstand the attacks that would come.
Jesus stepped in. He met with Saul in a dramatic way, his name was changed to Paul and the rest is history. I don’t know what Jesus is going to do in the life of Saint-West. But I do know that bringing him into church today is a first step.
From today on, there is a responsibility placed on the adults in his life to ensure that as he grows up he is taught to understand who Jesus is, what he has done, and can do for him.
I don’t know whether Kejuan and Jahneka prayed about this before they made the decision to have Saint-West baptised, but what matters is that they are here and praying today. We will all pray today, and I would encourage you, not just the parents and godparents, but everyone here, to pray, and continue to pray for Saint-West. This morning, he will be admitted to membership of the church. In that sense he will become ‘one of us.’ ‘Us’ being not just St Edmunds, but all the whole Christian Church around the world. He won’t understand but as he is taught, understanding will come and when he gets older, he will be able to make the decision for himself to carry on following Jesus or to turn away.
My prayer is that he will want to carry on following Jesus and that Jesus will watch over and protect him. That he will learn how to pray and that Jesus will help him to make the right decisions, but that if he does make mistakes Jesus will draw him back onto the right path. Jesus came to give life. May Saint-West and his parents and godparents know the truth of that life. Amen.
Maria Holmden
5 May 2024 – The Sixth Sunday of Easter
Children focus:
I have two faces with me today – a happy face, and a sad face. I wonder, what kinds of things make you happy? What kinds of things make you sad?
Do you think Jesus wants us to be happy? He tells us he can give us something that is better than just being happy, he gives us joy. Joy is something that helps us to feel good even when we are sad. And he tells us how to have joy. We can find out how if we look at the bible readings we had this morning.
In our gospel reading Jesus said, ‘abide in my love’. In the reading we had second John was saying that we will show that we love God if we obey his commandments.” Then if we go back to our gospel reading, Jesus said, ‘This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.’
At first that sounds like, if you obey me and love everyone, everything will always be OK. But Jesus isn’t saying that bad things will never happen to us, but he is saying that if we stay close to him, if we let his love fill our lives, then even when bad things happen we will know we are safe and will have his joy in our hearts, even if we feel a bit sad, because we will know he loves us and is with us.
Now, loving other people is not always easy. It is easy if they love us, it is easy if they are kind to us. But if people are not kind to us, then it is very hard. But if we can do it, Jesus helps us and we feel his joy and peace even if we are sad. Let me tell you a story about Simon and Sarah.
Simon and Sarah are twins. They live with their Mum and Dad and they all love Jesus and want to live the way he tells us to in the Bible. One day Dad came home from work and he was very sad because he had lost his job. He knew that now there would be must less money for the family as they would only have Mum’s money to live on. They prayed about it and Dad said, we must still continue to obey Jesus and he will help us. It was the twins birthday and they had really wanted the most up to date trainers, but Dad told them he could no longer afford them and they would get new trainers but they would have to be cheap ones from the supermarket.
The birthday came and the twins went to school on their new trainers. There was a boy in their class called Paul whose parents were very rich. He always had the best of everything. When Paul saw the twins new trainers he made fun of them and it made Simon and Sarah feel a bit sad. At breaktime they sat on a seat away from the other children and said a little prayer asking Jesus to help them to love Paul even though he had hurt them. Then they felt better and went back to play with their friends.
That afternoon their Dad came to pick them and they were so pleased to see him. You look a little bit sad, he said, so they told him about Paul and also how Jesus had helped them feel a bit better. They had been talking for a long time and so most of the children and their parents had left, but then they saw Paul, who was all alone and looking very tearful.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Dad, ‘My dad hasn’t come for me and he says he will be a long time because his car has broken down.’ Simon and Sarah said ‘could Paul come home with us until his Dad can get here’. Dad thought this was a good idea and so he rang Paul’s Dad, and asked if Paul could come home with the twins and maybe have dinner with them too. Paul’s dad was very grateful. So, Paul went home with Simon and Sarah. They had a great time together and when Paul’s Dad arrived, Paul said to Simon and Sarah, ‘Thank you for being so kind to me when I wasn’t very kind to you this morning’
The twins explained how Jesus had helped them and they were able to love him because of all they learnt about Jesus from their mum and dad and when they went to church. Paul said, ‘you are so kind, I would like to be more like you. Can I come to church with you one day?’ They agreed and they all went to ask Paul’s dad if that would be possible.
The twin’s Dad was just shaking hands with Paul’s Dad. He agreed that Paul could go to church with the twins next Sunday. When Paul and his dad had left Simon and Sarah’s dad called them and their mum, and he looked really happy. ‘Guess what,’ he said, ‘Paul’s Dad was telling me that they were looking for an engineer at his firm and he has offered me a job interview for next week!’
‘Jesus has really been helping us a lot this week,’ said Mum, ‘not just helping us to love people who haven’t been kind to us, but now it looks like because of that Dad might have a new job.’ Then they all prayed and said thank you to Jesus and went to bed with their hearts full of joy.
Now, children, I am going to say a bit more to the adults. You can stay and listen if you want to or you can go to the side and do some colouring or craft.
Adults focus:
I read the other day of a sermon peached by an American pastor, Revd George Thomas one Easter Sunday. George came into church with a rusty old birdcage and told his congregation that the previous day he had met a young boy swinging the cage around with some very frightened small birds inside.
George asked him what he was going to do with the birds. ‘Take them home and have some fun. I’m gonna pull out their feathers and watch them fight.’ the boy replied. ‘But they don’t belong to you,’ said George. ‘They do now’ said the boy ‘I found them and I can do what I like with them.’
‘What will you do when you have finished with them?’ asked George. ‘Give ‘em to my cat’ said the boy. George thought for a moment. “How much do you want for them?’ he asked. ‘You won’t want them.’ said the boy, ‘they aren’t pretty and they don’t sing.’ ‘How much?’ repeated George. The boy looked at George as if was he crazy and said ‘Ten dollars’. George reached into his pocket and gave the money to the boy, who grabbed it, left the cage, and ran. George put the cage on the floor, opened the door and gently coaxed the birds out, setting them free.
As the congregation listened quietly, George told them another story, ‘One day Jesus and the Devil were having a conversation. The Devil had just come from the Garden of Eden grinning and boasting,” I just caught a set of people down there. I set a trap using bait they couldn’t resist and I got them all.’
‘What will you do with them?’ asked Jesus. ‘I’m gonna have some fun. I’m gonna tell them how to hurt and abuse each other; to lie, to hate, to kill each other. I am really gonna have a good time.’ ‘But those people don’t belong to you,’ said Jesus. ‘They do now and I can do what I want with them.’ Said the Devil. ‘What will you do when you have finished with them?’ asked Jesus. ‘I’ll kill them’ was the reply.
‘How much do you want for them?’ Jesus asked. ‘O you don’t want these people’ said the Devil, ‘They’re no good. You may love them but they’ll just hate you back. They’ll spit on you, curse you and kill you. You really wouldn’t want these people.’ ‘How much?’ Insisted Jesus.
The Devil looked at him as if he was mad, then he said, ‘Your life.’ George ended his sermon by saying, ‘Jesus paid the price. On that first Easter Sunday morning he picked up our cage, opened the door and set us free.’
As I read these words it occurred to me that when wild birds have been caged for a long time, even if the door is opened, they find it hard to leave. They don’t realise there is a big world out there where they can live a better life.
When we hear about Jesus, we don’t always realise straight away that when we come to him, we can indeed have a better quality of life. That doesn’t mean we will necessarily be rich, or that we will never have problems, but it does mean that we can be free from the fear of the eternal consequences of our sin. And that we can know God in the way he intended from the beginning.
John wrote his gospel to show that Jesus died to open the door of our cage. That Jesus rose again to bring us freedom and life. In his letter, John wrote to encourage Christians who were being challenged by the pressures of the society in which they lived, to ‘escape from their cage’. To learn to live in the freedom that Jesus’ resurrection brings.
How do we hold fast to our faith and cope in time of crisis? As our story of Simon and Sarah showed us, it is by allowing God’s love to abide in our hearts and obeying his commandments. As we do this, Jesus makes himself known to us in a very real way by the power of his Holy Spirit, and we can see his work in our lives, changing us and making us more like him. This will be visible to others too, and they will be drawn to want to know and follow him too.
Maria Holmden
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28 April 2024 – The Fifth Sunday of Easter
Our readings today focus on (in the light of the resurrection) what is it like being “church?” What is it like for us?
Are we like the Ethiopian eunuch? He lived a busy life, whose work and commitments and geographic distance, meant that he comes to the Temple when he can: on high days and holidays. (Or perhaps conversely, for us, it might rather be on low days and dull-days when we come to church.) Is it just a personal thing for us, a matter of sitting in our private space, reading our scriptures, speeding through our empty wilderness roads, doing faith in isolation? Perhaps if that is what church feels like for us, we need to listen out for the speedy steps of Philip the Evangelist frantically running alongside our enclosed carriages trying to gain our attention: ‘Excuse me, are you sure you know what you are doing?’
Are we like a vine rooted in Christ with the sap of resurrection life running through us: giving us our lifeblood, our identity, our purpose? Sounds good? But beware the harsh realities of viticulture. Vines are fast growers: climbing, creeping and trailing. And in growing large, it also grows apart. Are we a branch seeking to follow its own path, doing its own thing, seeking to grow its own abundance of grape clusters? Are we focused only on what interests us individually rather than pulling together as a single vine? Perhaps if that is what church feels like for us, we need to listen out for the secateurs of God-the-gardener, who – with a ruthless efficiency (and what may seem to be quite draconian) – prunes back the vine to stop it becoming a dense tangle or unruly expanse: snip! snip! snip! ‘Remain close, remain together.’
What is ‘church’ like? The reading from (what we call) the ‘First letter of John’ (which we’ve heard read each Sunday since the start of Easter) grapples with this. It is written for a community of Christians, facing conflict, danger, schism: a fracturing of the community itself. What church is – is communal. Church is mutual support and maintained fellowship. Our devotion to Jesus involves intimate contact with Christ and that is intimate contact with the Body of Christ – with one another. And the two key themes we find are ‘love’ and ‘fellowship’. Is that what church feels like for you? A community or a family? If so, how does that look or express itself? If the church is the Body of Christ, if Christ is known through the fellowship we share, what is the impulse we feel as a consequence of that? Do we attend when we are free? Do we attend because we are integral to the Body of Christ? How do we generously give of ourselves, to mutually support, to give life to the Body of Christ? Do we give in part? Do we give with reservations or conditions? Or do we give generously and sacrificially of ourselves – of our time, our talents, our treasures – because we are one, we are one body, not for ourselves but for the sake of God’s Kingdom of justice and righteousness.
Colin Setchfield
Following the sermon, the congregation reflected on…
- what matters to them that they prioritise and spend their time and money on, especially when both are tight; be it friends, family, a hobby like sports or music, a weekly coffee with a friend
- what church means to them, and whether their giving reflects that.
Everyone was given a Post-It and pen to either reflect on their own or have a chat with their neighbour. Everyone was invited everyone to take their Post-It home and pray about it.
21 April 2024 – The Fourth Sunday of Easter
In our gospel reading we have one of those passages that can stand alone, but is part of a longer passage and makes even more sense when seen as part of the whole. This passage comes after the time when Jesus had healed a man who had been blind since birth on the Sabbath. The story is in chapter 9. Jesus put mud on his eyes and sent him to wash in the pool. It was in the pool that his eyes were open but by that time Jesus had moved on, so the man had no idea who had healed him.
People were so astonished at the miracle that they took the man to the Pharisees, who didn’t believe that he didn’t know who had healed him, and so kicked him out of the synagogue. News of this reached Jesus and he went to find the man. During a short conversation Jesus invites the man to put his faith in the Son of Man (ie Jesus himself) and the man agrees wholeheartedly. Jesus speaks of spiritual blindness and some the Pharisees overhear. They recognise that he is saying they are the ones who are blind. Spiritually blind.
It is following this miracle of physical and spiritual healing that John records Jesus’ words that have come to us as chapter 10 – the Good Shepherd and his sheep. The first few verses are Jesus describing the work of a good shepherd, compared to a sheep stealer. Shepherds are not in big supply in Chingford, so we might think that this may not have the same immediate impact on us as it did on Jesus’ listeners at the time. But actually, to start with they didn’t understand why he was saying this either, and so Jesus expands and explains.
The first part of the explanation comes in v.8-10 just before our reading, where Jesus calls himself the Gate. He says he is like the shepherd of the time who would make sure his flock were safe in a fold, a walled area or a cave, and would then lie across the entrance (forming a gate) so that he could stop them from running away and could protect them from enemies. He would know his sheep and would only let in the sheep that belonged to him. Thieves would not be able to get in through the gate, they would try and climb over the wall.
Our passage is an extension of this where Jesus calls himself the Good Shepherd. A shepherd who will not only do everything he can to protect his sheep, but will even sacrifice his own life in order to save the sheep. He contrasts a Good Shepherd, the man who owns the sheep, who loves them and knows them each personally, with someone who is just looking after sheep for someone else and has no real commitment to them; someone who, when trouble comes, just runs away and leaves the flock to fend for themselves.
The problem we have is that sheep and shepherds in the Middle East are different from sheep and shepherds in this country. In Israel the shepherd would live with his flock. He would know each sheep and lamb by name, and they would know him. When he called them by name they would come to him. He didn’t herd them with a sheepdog, they followed him. Where he went they went and a good shepherd would lead them to good pasture, and fresh water.
Why was he saying all this and who was he speaking to or about. Jesus was speaking to the crowd. The implication is that some of the Pharisees may have been there listening.
In the Old Testament the leaders of Israel were described as shepherds and the people as their sheep. Many times, the leaders had been criticised and condemned for being bad shepherds – leading their sheep astray. Taking them away from their God and leading them to worship false gods.
Jesus’ comments about ‘hired hands’ and corrupt shepherds could have been referring to the Pharisees and other religious leaders of the time (which is how they seemed to take it at the end of chapter 9). Or could be referring to other (false) messiahs.
We see this kind of thing around us as we move towards a general election. I don’t want to mention any particular comments, and it tends to work across the parties, but veiled comments are being made about the inadequacies of certain people or parties, alongside very clear comments. Jesus’ comments were not for political ends, they were for spiritual truth.
The people did not always understand what he said, and so he used the illustration of the shepherd to ‘set the scene’, but then he explains in closer detail. Like a good shepherd, he is going to sacrifice himself. He is going to voluntarily give up his life for his sheep. Not just the people of Israel, but, as he says in v.16 ‘I have other sheep who are not of this fold. I must bring them in also’.
Our reading ends with a reference to his forthcoming death and resurrection. But let me tell you what happens next. Many of the people listening to him thought he was mad, but some thought about what they had seen him do and began to think more deeply about who he was.
John has arranged his gospel in a way which takes his readers on a journey. A journey that is like the journey the people around Jesus at that time would have gone on. They met Jesus, they saw what he did, they heard what he said, and then they had to make up their mind about who they thought he was. Was he mad? Was he a prophet? Was he the Messiah?
If we were to read on in John 10 we would find Jesus back in the Temple at a later date, and the crowds asking him ‘If you are the Messiah, tell us plainly.’
Jesus replies (v.24) ‘I have already told you but you don’t believe me.’ He continues to use the sheep/shepherd imagery and speaks about God as his Father. Instead of being pleased about what he has said, they respond by picking up stones ready to kill him.
Today, it is important that we know who Jesus is, and we respond to him. That we recognise when he is at work in our lives and the world, and when things that happen are not from him. This is true in our daily lives and also within churches. There are many different styles of church and people have preferences about the way they worship. But it is vital to know whether the people who lead the church are good shepherds, following in the footsteps of Jesus, or if they are hirelings: people running churches for their own benefit, so that they can become rich and powerful at the expense of their sheep.
Sadly we have seen examples in America, but also the UK, which are usually jumped on by the media and condemnation blazed across the internet and certain newspapers.
We need to ensure church leaders are good shepherds of their flock and not hirelings. A good shepherd will be following THE Good Shepherd, and will be ministering to people to lead them to Jesus Christ, they will be serving their flock, not extorting them.
But we don’t only need to look at the leaders. We need to look at ourselves. We are to follow Christ and grow to be like him. He calls us to serve one another. Are we serving him faithfully, are we serving each other faithfully? Do we have a sincere commitment to one another? When we have a job to do, do we do it to get praise and status? Or do we do it because we feel that God wants us to do it? Then do we do it to the best of our ability? Or do we try and put in as little effort as possible?
The person who works for reward only thinks of money. The person who works for love thinks about the people they are serving: Jesus is the Good Shepherd. He loves his sheep so much that for our sake, for our eternal safety, he risked, and then gave up, his life.
Jesus called himself the Good Shepherd. That word ‘good’ contains within it quite a lot. It is the same kind of ‘good’ that people in a village might describe a good doctor, not just his or her skill and efficiency, but also the sympathy, graciousness and kindness which they bring which makes them loved and appreciated by all.
The first followers of Jesus were Jewish. But Jesus came for all people, and over time Gentiles also became part of the church. Jesus is making this clear here. He says in v. 16 that he has other sheep who are not of this sheepfold, i.e. not Jewish. As the church began and grew, the Jewish members had to realise that Gentiles (who they would not have had anything to do with before) had also to be welcomed into the fold.
Jesus says, ‘there will be one flock’. It doesn’t mean we will all be the same, or worship in the same way, but we are all united by a common relationship to our Shepherd, Jesus Christ. We do not need to try and get all churches to become uniform. We simply need to be out there drawing those who have no fold to come and know Jesus and become part of his flock.
There are many ‘under shepherds’, appointed by the Good Shepherd to care for smaller sections of his flock. To care for them and lead them. They may travel an Anglican path, a Methodist path, a Pentecostal path – whichever their journey they need to be led by shepherds who will lead them to the Good Shepherd.
The Pharisees listening to Jesus recognised he was criticising them and their response was to plot his death. But in doing so they brought about what had been God’s plan all along.
When we think of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, we may be tempted to picture him in a very sentimental way, carrying a baby lamb, and being very gentle. The reality of Jesus as the Good Shepherd is that he is about to lay down his life – to die – for his sheep. Yes, he loves us, yes he comes to rescue us and bring us home, but his prime purpose was to die for us. And praise God that he did, and overcame death and rose again. John invites his readers to make up our own minds – was Jesus crazy, or was he indeed who he said he was: our Good Shepherd. Our answer will determine whether we reject him, or follow him.
Maria Holmden
14 April 2024 – The Third Sunday of Easter
Our readings this morning have something in common. They all speak of sin and forgiveness, and teach us the wonderful truth that is at the heart of the Christian faith: when we repent and turn to God, there is forgiveness of sins.
Our first reading in Acts is the story of what happened after Peter and John performed a healing miracle on a 38 year old man who had been severely disabled since he was born. I am sure we are familiar with the story in the first 11 verses of chapter 3, of how Peter and John were heading to the Temple for 3 o clock prayers, just like many of the other inhabitants of Jerusalem. When they got near to the Beautiful Gate a disabled man asks them for money.
Peter tells him he doesn’t have money, but he will give him what he has – and says, ‘In the name of Jesus Christ … get up and walk.’ The man gets up and jumps about praising God as they all go into the temple.
This causes no small stir because the man had been sitting begging outside the temple for years. Everyone knew him. They rush to surround Peter and John and the man who had been healed. Peter is quick to point out that it wasn’t he and John who had made the man walk – it was God. The God they have come to the Temple to worship. The same God their ancestors worshipped, who had, through Jesus Christ healed the man. He points out that they are the same crowd who only a short time before had rejected Jesus. Who had cried ‘Crucify’ when Pilate offered to release him. They are guilty of his death.
I wonder how the people felt when Peter said these things – did they feel guilty? Peter doesn’t want to make them feel bad, just to recognise what they have done. He tells them that God had raised Jesus from the dead – and how did Peter know? Because he had seen it with his own eyes. And it was that same Jesus who had used his power to heal the disabled man.
Then Peter tells them the most amazing thing: even though they have done such a terrible thing, he knows they did it out of ignorance, he tells them that their actions had brought about what God had planned all along – that Jesus must suffer and die. That didn’t mean that what they did was right. They had done a terrible thing. But if they were to repent and turn to God then they would be forgiven.
What an amazing thing. Even the very people who condemned Jesus to death could receive God’s forgiveness if only they repented. We are not told how many people responded to Peter’s message at that time, but in ch.4:4 it tells us that ‘many of the people who heard their message believed it, so the number of believers now totalled about 5000 men not counting women and children. In ch.1 there had been 120, by ch.2:41 they had added another 3,000 and now they numbered more than 5000. The church was growing at an amazing rate.
What changed people? The message of repentance and forgiveness through the love of Jesus Christ. No matter how bad the crime, forgiveness was possible, but it was not automatic. There had to be repentance, a turning away from the sin and turning to God.
As adults, when we act, we are responsible for our actions. Our actions have consequences. The crowd may have acted out of ignorance, following others like sheep. But they were still responsible for their actions. They were still responsible for the death of Jesus. It didn’t matter that it had been part of his mission to die. They had caused it and they were responsible.
Peter shows supreme courage in speaking to the crowd like this – a few thousand people vs Peter John and the man who had just been healed – and he tells them they are murderers! What gave him such courage?
We find part of the answer in our Gospel reading. Peter and John had met the risen Jesus. They had been with him when he had proved his resurrection and heard him say ‘There is forgiveness of sins for all who repent.’ But Peter had another experience which must have given him the confidence to declare this message of forgiveness with such boldness: he himself had been forgiven.
Peter had denied Jesus, not once but 3 times. He had done it close to where Jesus was being held in the court of Caiaphas the High Priest, and it is very possible that Jesus heard every word of those denials. In Luke 22:61 we are told that when the cock crowed Jesus turned and looked at Peter, and Peter left weeping bitterly.
Peter regretted denying Jesus, he felt ashamed, guilty, frightened. I cannot imagine his feelings when Jesus died on the cross, or when he found out Jesus had risen. What was going through his head? How could he look Jesus in the eye again? Would Jesus reject him for ever?
Peter’s repentance was very real. He was truly sorry for what he had done. He hadn’t meant to deny Jesus but he was very frightened. He truly wanted to do the right thing. And Jesus forgave him. And more than that he gave him a position of authority in the early church. He poured out his Holy Spirit to fill and empower Peter. Peter knew, in the most amazing way possible, what it was like to be forgiven, and he wanted others to know that too. He began to live in a new way.
When Jesus died, it was no small thing. It was the most powerful and amazing event in history. Jesus took onto himself all our sins, past present and future, and not only ours, but everybody’s. We cannot treat that lightly. He offers complete forgiveness, but not without something from us. And that something is repentance.
What is repentance? It is more than just being sorry. How often do we see people apologise, not because they are sorry, but simply to avoid retribution. Children will often respond ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry’ when caught doing something they shouldn’t. But often they just want to avoid punishment. Later, they do the same thing again.
The word repentance means turn around; turn away from our sin and turn to God, to turn away from one way of thinking to a new way. This includes being sorry for what we have done, and a desire not to continue to do it.
Have you seen the film Billy Elliot? Billy is a young boy with a desire, and the talent, to become a great ballet dancer. Living in a northern mining town his father and brother regard this as sissy and try to stop him. One day Billy’s dad discovers that Billy has been secretly practicing where he was supposed to be having boxing lessons. His dad marches down the hall to beat the living daylights out of him, but Billy’s response is to dance defiantly and to the best of his ability in front of his dad.
His dad is so moved when he sees Billy’s ability and realizes he is capable of going to the academy that he changes his attitude. He becomes a scab and crosses the picket line in the miner’s strike so that Billy can achieve his dream. This gives us an illustration of someone who completely changes their attitude, who ‘turns around’ and then behaves very differently, in spite of the cost.
One of the things that can happen to us especially when we have been a Christian for a long time is that we can become immune to our sin. We are so confident of forgiveness that a quick ‘sorry’ to God seems to be all that we need. While there is a wonderful truth in the words ‘there is forgiveness’ there is a great danger that we never truly examine our lives and so never fully repent. We sin, we say sorry and then we just do it again.
Peter holds back no punches when he speaks to the Jewish people at the Temple. He confronts them with the sin they have committed, and offers them a way to forgiveness, but there is a requirement to recognize and admit the sin, and to repent – turn away from it and turn to God; to receive his forgiveness and from then on to live in a different way.
Most of us don’t commit what we might call ‘big sins’: murder, adultery, robbery. But that doesn’t mean we don’t fall short of God’s ideals. Jesus himself says ‘he who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.’ What about taking the odd pen or notepad from work? The world says ‘perks of the job’ God says, ‘it’s stealing’. The so-called ‘white lies’ we tell when we think we might be in trouble. The behaviours that happen behind closed doors when others think we are model Christians.
In God’s eyes sin is sin. There are not big sins or little sins. All sin is sin. The so-called ‘little sins’ require as much repentance and forgiveness as what we call the ‘big sins’. Just as the Jewish people in the Temple were guilty of condemning Jesus to die – so are we. It is because of our sins (whatever their perceived size) that he suffered and died. We are as guilty as those people in the Temple that day.
But God doesn’t want us to spend all our time thinking about how bad we have been – he simply wants us to recognize and repent, accept the forgiveness he offers and then move on and live our life in a new way. Asking God to give us the power to live as if we are forgiven – and to be changed people. Not living in a way which adds to Christ’s pain in the cross, but in a way which shows our gratitude and seeks to advance his kingdom.
Maria Holmden
7 April 2024 – The Second Sunday of Easter
Growing up, I remember watching Family Fortunes with Les Dennis… apparently Gino D’Acampo hosts it now. But, imagine… you’re on Family Fortunes… and you hear, “we asked 100 people: name what you need to survive in today’s society?” What would you say?
I guess popular answers would include things like money, friends, influence, and even luck… lots of luck… But, I reckon somewhere on the list there’d be something like: “not easily taken in,” or “not gullible,” or “healthy scepticism.” It might not be the top answer. But the more you think about it, the more important it is not to be gullible.
It’s important socially. Most children are pretty gullible growing up… I certainly was…
- The first time someone said to me, “have you heard… they’ve taken gullible out of the dictionary?” I said “really…?!” Totally taken in.
- And when people say “ooh, what’s that mess on your shirt?” I’d always look.
But as you get older, being gullible becomes more problematic… and sometimes it’s more serious than just being laughed at…
- Spam e-mails and salespeople will say anything to get us to part with our money. Action Fraud data says Brits reported losses of over £78 million pounds in 2020 from buying shares in companies that didn’t exist. They were taken in by liars and lost on average £45 grand each.
- Then there’s all the claims and counter claims about things being “Fake News” that make our decision-making harder… Many claimed Covid was fake news… Many websites and podcasts now contain fake news and warnings…
Not being gullible is surprisingly important for surviving and thriving in Modern Britain.
Yet many people think that Christians are the most gullible people around… Not just because we’re sometimes more trusting than most. Christians are considered gullible for believing in God, and for believing Jesus rose from the dead. We shape our lives around this belief. And others think this means we’re gullible… People often say, “I wish I had your faith?”
Today many people think having faith and following Jesus is about taking a blind leap in the dark without any evidence. Professor Richard Dawkins says, “Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.”
But, that isn’t what the Bible means by faith. Yes, Christians make a step. Yes, we put our lives in God’s hands. But the Bible writers always urge people to follow Jesus based on reliable evidence.
So, here’s 2 really important questions… First, did Jesus really rise from the dead? And second what difference does it make? Did it happen? And, does it matter?
John was one of Jesus’ closest friends… and one of Jesus’ 12 disciples… John’s eyewitness account of Jesus’ life, included Jesus’ miracles, Jesus’ teaching and Jesus’ death on the cross. At the start of chapter 20, John records how Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter and John himself had found Jesus’ tomb empty and how Jesus had appeared to Mary… So, let’s hear the gospel according to John.
It’s not hard to imagine Thomas re-joining the other disciples. We’ve no idea why he was missing, but eventually, when he returned the mood would’ve been very different. Their fear had been replaced by joy… because they’d seen the risen Jesus for themselves.
But Thomas said, “unless I see the nail marks in His hands and put my finger were the nails were (the nails that pinned Jesus to the cross) and put my hand into his side (where the soldier’s spear stabbed Jesus to check He really was dead…) [unless I do those things…] I won’t believe it.”
What do you make of Thomas and his request? Was it justified and reasonable? Or totally outrageous? Many think making sure he’s not being gullible or taken in is good…
If Thomas had been in the Mr Men, he would’ve been Mr Sceptical, or maybe Mr Cynical. And he’d be some people’s hero for that…
But John clearly doesn’t want his readers to copy Thomas… Thomas demanded evidence on his own terms.
But, amazingly, when Jesus comes He gave Thomas every bit of evidence… Everything Thomas asked for in verse 25… Jesus shows Him in verse 27… the nail marks and the wounds.
But Jesus never commends Thomas’ attitude. Instead, Jesus says, v29, “because you’ve seen me you’ve believed. Blessed are those who haven’t seen and yet have believed.”
Jesus isn’t saying blessed are those who believe… despite the evidence. No, Jesus says Thomas should’ve believed his friends’ eyewitness evidence…
Jesus isn’t contrasting evidence-based faith and blind trust. He’s contrasting demanding to see everything physically yourself and trusting reliable people who were there at the time. Thomas was like many people today who say “I’ll believe if God does this for me…” But that’s dangerous because there’s no guarantee God will do what you demand.
Christianity isn’t opposed to evidence. Whatever Richard Dawkins says, Christianity isn’t about closing your eyes and believing what’s clearly nonsense. We’re to keep our brains switched on and in gear.
But Jesus says we shouldn’t be like Thomas and demand a visible appearance of Jesus… Like many in John’s gospel, even if we got one, we might not believe… Instead Jesus says: “trust the reliable eyewitnesses.”
Thomas wasn’t being asked to make a leap in the dark… but to believe His trustworthy friends reliable testimony.
Some people will probably say, “But I need to see to believe.” But with the greatest respect, “No you don’t!”
- The British justice system examines the eye-witness testimony of credible witnesses before reaching a verdict… Only when witnesses are established as credible are they believed…
- School history textbooks record Julius Caesar, the Vikings, William the Conqueror invading Britain and so on… We believe the testimony of reliable witnesses.
Thomas’ demands to see and touch Jesus’ wounds were pretty gruesome, but imagine this…
My old hockey mate John rides a motorbike. Imagine John has a bad motorbike accident and he’s in hospital. Now imagine I visit him and say, “Mate, unless I see the cuts on your arms and put my fingers in the gashes on your legs, I reckon you’re faking it. If I did that John would have me thrown out wouldn’t he? I’d be sicker than he was!
Or imagine my sister texts me saying “she’d just ordered our Mum flowers for Mother’s Day.” How should I respond? Would I ask… where did you buy the flowers from? And then ring the flower shop to confirm the order, and her bank to check that the money really left her account? No way! That’s far too sceptical.
Every day, we trust reliable people to tell us about events we’ve not personally witnessed. And it’s just the same with Jesus. We’re not being asked to have faith without evidence… or faith despite the evidence. We’re asked to examine for ourselves the trustworthy evidence God has provided.
John tells us that’s why he wrote… “Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which aren’t recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”
God gives us all the evidence we need. John’s eyewitness evidence shows us Jesus really was dead… Jesus’ tomb was empty. And Jesus’ body was raised to new life. And Thomas teaches us reliable eyewitness evidence is all we need to believe.
Christians aren’t gullible… there’s good evidence that Jesus really did rise from the dead. It happened. Reliable eyewitnesses saw it and carefully recorded it for us. And BBC research from 2017 found that 43% of people in Great Britain believe Jesus rose from the dead.
Second question: Does Jesus’ resurrection matter? What difference does it make? 2 answers…
First Jesus’ resurrection offers a new relationship with God.
When Jesus greeted His disciples twice He said, “Peace be with you!” That’s the first time John records Jesus saying something like this… Jesus’ point is that His life, death and resurrection grants all who follow Him peace with God.
The Bible says that we’ve all rebelled against God… none of us always love God with all our heart, soul mind and strength… None of us always loves our neighbours as ourselves… None of us meet God’s perfect standards. I’m not perfect… and if you’re honest with yourself… you know you’re not either… None of us can be at peace with God by ourselves…
But, John in His gospel makes it clear that:
- Jesus came to earth as God’s Son in human form.
- Jesus always lived a perfect life.
- Jesus was rejected by the rulers and authorities of His day.
- But Jesus was in total control as He went to His death.
- He died to fulfil God’s plans.
- He died to swap places with all who believe in Him so that we can be at peace with God forever and have eternal life.
- And Jesus calls those who follow Him His friends and even His brothers and sisters
Jesus’ life, death and resurrection matter because they mean whoever believes in Jesus has a whole new brilliant relationship with God… That’s what Jesus meant, when He said: “I have come so that my flock may have life, and have it to the full…” Peace with God now and eternal life in heaven with Jesus guaranteed after we’ve died. (279)
And second, Jesus’ resurrection transformed Thomas…
Thomas gives all naturally sceptical people someone to identify with… But after Jesus let Thomas see and touch His wounds, Jesus commanded Thomas: “Stop doubting and believe…”
How did Thomas respond to the evidence? He didn’t say, “Wow, Jesus, you really are risen… sorry for doubting you… it’s great to have you back!” Thomas’ simply said: “My Lord and My God!”
And Jesus doesn’t correct him… When faced with the evidence, Thomas had to change his mind… Literally he had to stop disbelieving, and start believing.
I wish Thomas was here with us today? What do you think he’d say? I reckon he’d say:
“Friends, I was totally sceptical and cynical. Maybe you are too… any questions you’ve got, I had them… I spent 3 years with Jesus and the other disciples, but I was still cynical when they said they’d seen Jesus, alive! I shouldn’t have been. And you don’t need to be… Jesus really rose from the dead. So, stop doubting and believe.”
Maybe you’re thinking, “I’d like to believe… I really would…” or “I wish my faith was stronger…?” Then please something about it… You can’t just sit around waiting for faith to pop up inside you. Please actively investigate the evidence for Jesus further.
- You could read through John’s gospel.
- You could do a local Christianity Explored course… which goes through Mark’s gospel and helps you think through who Jesus is? why Jesus came? and how we should respond?
- Or, if you want to check the resurrection evidence more, I’ve got copies of a book written by a brilliant lawyer [Your Verdict on the Empty Tomb, by Val Grieve (EP Books, 2017)], who asks you to pretend you’re a juror in a British courtroom… He’ll guide you through the evidence step by step, before asking you to give your verdict on the empty tomb.
But, maybe there’s people here who right now should be obeying Jesus’ command to stop doubting and believe that Jesus is your Lord and God?
If you want to do that, you could pray to God today to do just that. I’d love to chat with you afterwards if you’ve got questions or if that’s something I could help you with.
Friends, finding out you’ve been gullible feels horrible and can be costly. But, Christians aren’t gullible… because our faith isn’t something we’ve made up ourselves. Believing Jesus really rose from the dead makes sense because the evidence stacks up… reliable, trustworthy eyewitnesses including Thomas and John saw it first-hand, and we can trust what they’ve written…
And believing Jesus’ resurrection really happened makes all the difference in the world… because Jesus offers you peace with God and life to the full, with Jesus as our Lord and God now, before spending eternity with Him in His brilliant perfect heaven. Amen.
Kieran Bush
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31 March 2024 – Easter Day
Our reading from John’s Gospel today draws us to three key Easter themes…of resurrection, of doubt and of faith. In the account of that first Easter day and of Jesus rising from the dead, we all sit somewhere on the spectrum between absolute faith and total doubt…and millions of words have been written by various theologians and thinkers, in an attempt to make sense of it.
One brief but powerful reflection is from a commentary by Michael Counsell and it reads as follows…you cannot understand Easter until you have seen that merely human plans will always be defeated. But when you have laid your dead hopes in the hands of Almighty God, for him to breathe new life into them, then all things are possible.
Or Henri Nouwen’s understanding that in the resurrection and the coming of the holy spirit at Pentecost, God moves from being ‘God with us’ to ‘God within us’, as close to us as our own breath and able to move through all we say and think and do.
You may feel drawn to one of those understandings of the Easter hope, or you may have a narrative of your own.
For me, I like the understanding given by the image of a courtroom…at the front on a high platform sits the Judge and in the dock stands someone accused of dangerous driving. Now the person is guilty, they know they’re guilty, the Judge knows they’re guilty, they’ve fallen short of the law and they need to face the consequences of that. Though they are deeply sorry and ashamed, they are now rightly censured and denounced.
The Judge pronounces the verdict – guilty – and imposes an enormous fine which must be paid immediately to avoid imprisonment. And the person in the dock is devastated because there is no way that they can pay the fine and they realise they stand condemned.
But at that moment, the Judge gets up, puts down their wig and gavel, walks over to the dock, draws out his cheque book from his pocket and he writes out his own cheque for the full sum of the person’s fine.
The penalty thus paid, he takes the person by the hand, and together they walk free from the courtroom.
And that’s my understanding of what God has done for us in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. God the Father is perfect and he cannot look upon sin. We have each sinned, each fallen short of God’s laws and expectations of us and so we must be judged and face the consequences. So we are each of us in the dock, standing before God as Judge. And we are each of us guilty.
So God the Father pronounces sentence upon us – as Judge he has no choice. But then as God the Son, he comes and pays the price for our wrong-doing himself. Fully, completely, forever. We are redeemed, cleansed, free as we walk with him into our new restored life.
The resurrection hope, the Easter hope, is that we can be reborn at any age and at any stage of life, through belief in Jesus Christ, who wipes slates clean, who heals fractured lives, who binds up the broken hearted.
Whatever your understanding of Easter, know that in the resurrection God offers to each of us, to you, the hope and opportunity of that new life, the opportunity to walk free from all that entombs us…guilt, shame, bitterness, envy, failed relationships…a new beginning in this life and the hope of an eternal ending in the next.
I pray that we might each sense that hope afresh this Easter and that we might embrace all the fullness of life God intends for us.
May we all be blessed and filled with the joy and peace of believing this Easter season. Amen.
Lynne Cullens, Bishop of Barking
29 March 2024 – Good Friday
“Crosses do not make themselves. Crosses are trees that have been cut down, sized, shaped, and put together with the very specific intention of being devices of public torture and execution.”
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Jarel Robinson-Brown
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The cross on which Jesus hanged was once part of a tree. It was a living, growing organism, that enabled life, through its production of oxygen, improving the quality of air that people breathed. It brought benefits to the world about it by ameliorating the climate, conserving water, preserving the soil, and supporting the wildlife that lived in its vicinity.
Right at the beginning of the biblical story, in Eden’s ‘paradise of pleasure,’ two trees dominated the grassland plain: vast and old and symbolic of the creativeness of God, a tree of life and a tree of knowledge, and humankind lived in their shadow and under their protection. And these in turn were protected, for they were not ours by right, they were given by God, they were placed in the middle of the plain, part of and for the whole of God’s good creation.
But our desire to have, to take, to control, to possess, has resulted in us fashioning instruments of death from trees of life; raising up spectacles to constrain and coerce from trees of knowledge.
To create a cross, that outer living portion of the tree is removed and discarded, till all that remains is the mass dead tissue of the trunk, the deadwood that lies in its dead heart. We turn a thing of beauty and of life into a thing of horror and death.
Crosses do not make themselves. We make crosses. Jesus died on a cross intentionally made for that purpose. And still today, we see people hoisted on crosses of our own making. Christ is crucified still, among those who hunger and die for food in a world of plenty, where people are scarred by war, “where the cry for justice is unheard, oppressed, beaten down … where power comes first, where religion twists faith, where fear kills trust” [Chris Polhill].
But what can we do? All that is required of us, like that stranger who came and asked for Christ’s dead body, is to take those crucified in our world down from their crosses: to stop the affront of crucifixion, to give back dignity, to embrace our common humanity. For it is only by bringing people down from the crosses which we have created and on which we have watched them die, that there can one day be resurrection for all these our modern-day crucifixions.
Colin Setchfield
28 March 2024 – Maundy Thursday
Last Sunday we joined together in a procession of the palms. It was a joyful time where we played percussion instruments and even the dogs joined in the joyful noise. Imagine for a moment if there had been crowds in the streets cheering us on. Think about how it feels when people tell you how well you are doing and they support you? Let’s take a moment …
Now let’s think about ‘How does it feel to be criticised, ostracised, rejected?’
Two extremes, and Jesus experienced both of these kind of feelings within a week. We know this and we remember it each Passiontide and Easter time.
But what we may overlook is that the disciples must also have felt caught up in the adulation and then caught up in the rejection.
From the one extreme to the other, Maundy Thursday comes as a stepping stone between them. As I read the gospel account, from a human point of view I found it quite hard to imagine how Jesus could have been so calm and in control at the Passover meal – especially when we know how desperately he prayed in the Garden just. A few hours later. But then I reminded myself that was actually in control of everything that happened. At any point he could have stepped out and said, ‘No! I won’t do this!’ but he chose this path for our sakes.
At the Last Supper his main concern was for his disciples – to help them prepare for what was coming. He wanted them to have something to remember him by and he wanted them to know how to live with each other without him. John’s gospel doesn’t mention the sharing of bread and wine, but it does give us an insight into another event at the meal that is not recorded in the other gospels, but is very significant. I say it is not mentioned: the actual foot-washing isn’t, but the teaching about servant-hood certainly is.
In the gospel we heard how Peter responded to Jesus’ wanting to wash his feet, but what about the other disciples? It seems as if they didn’t question or hesitate when Jesus washed their feet – but how might they have felt? Was their placid acceptance because they had learned and understood what Jesus had told them about being servants? Or was it that they were so stunned and amazed that they didn’t know what else to do?
I was reading an account this week (purely fictional) of how one of the lesser-known disciples, Thaddeus, might have felt.
Before I read that account let’s just see what we actually know about him. His name only appears twice in the bible: Matthew 10:3 and Mark 3:18. On both occasions it is simply in a list of the 12 disciples. In the list in Luke 6:16 he is called Judas son of James, not Thaddaeus. The explanation may be that because these gospels were written after the events, and the name Judas became associated with Judas Iscariot, that Judas son of James was given another name to avoid misunderstandings. It may indeed have been a name that he already had but didn’t often use. The name Thaddaeus means ‘breast’ and indicates a gentle devotion (like a mother for a child). So perhaps Thaddaeus was a gentle person who knew what it was to be a servant of others.
Let me read to you what someone has imagined he might have felt: (from Common Worship Living Word C2 2007)
“Thaddaeus watches as Jesus kneels before him. Like Peter he wants to back away, saying, ‘Lord, you will never wash my feet.’ But he knows Jesus would reply to him as he did to Peter ‘Unless I wash you, you have no share with me,’ And so he wants to share life with Jesus.
<p.“Before Jesus called him to join his group of friends, Thaddaeus, a young man with no family or wealth of his own, was the servant of a landowner if Galilee. He had been in an inferior position and it fell to him to wash the feet of visitors to the house. How he hated that task and how much he longed for freedom from the humiliation of it.
“Now Jesus smiles up at him and Thaddaeus, embarrassed and afraid, finds the courage to look into the eyes of this man who knows him so well in all his weakness, sadness and insecurity. He sees only love, acceptance and reassurance, as he feels also the cleansing touch of loving hands soothing the rough and painful places on his hot, tiered feet and in his aching heart.”
The disciples are on a steep learning curve! In just a few short hours life for them will change for ever. It will never be the same. They are about to fae something that they will find unbearable – their Lord and master will be taken away from them. They will need each other in a way they have not done before.
Jesus often did the unexpected. He sometimes transformed everyday things into something special. Here he took an ordinary task that was normally done by a servant as a duty, and made it into a gift from a friend, done out of love.
Normally the task of foot washing would be carried out by the lowliest of the servants. It was a sign of hospitality but it was also essential after travelling the hot and dusty roads. The feet would get hot and sweaty and the dirt would cling. Probably as men arrived at a friend’s house they would be chatting with the host or with one another and may not have paid much attention to what was happening with their feet.
Jesus changed all that. Something that had been ordinary and everyday Jesus changed into something extraordinary and very significant. As they watched Jesus washing their feet, they would have to think about the difference this would make to their lives. From that time on, each time anyone washed their feet they would be reminded of Jesus. Maybe they would become foot-washers and do it as an act of love and service to Christ.
In the act of washing his disciples’ feet Jesus exemplified his teaching of servanthood. He set an example to his followers, even though he was about to face the cross, and he called them, and he calls us, to follow his example.
In our story of Thaddaeus, when he experienced having his feet washed by Jesus, he also received healing from the insecurity and bad self-image he had because of how people had treated him in the past. As he was healed, so the love and gratitude he felt would lead him to offer that love to others so that they too might experience healing.
When we come to Christ and allow him to minister to us – to touch those parts of our lives that are the most unattractive and dirty. When we let him ‘wash our feet’ without giving anything to him, but simply receiving, then we find that we can do nothing less than pass on that love and service to others so they too will experience it for themselves.
Although we have not physically had our feet washed by Jesus – I am sure that each one of us has been touched by Jesus – we have each had some experience of being healed or restored by his loving touch, maybe not always physically, but emotionally, spiritually. And so, on this day when we remember how he stooped and washed his disciples feet, let us ask him to help us too to reach out and serve those we meet who are in similar need, so that we can bring his love into their lives too.
Maria Holmden
24 March 2024 – Palm Sunday
No sermon
17 March 2024 – The Fifth Sunday of Lent
Today, the fifth Sunday in Lent, is also called “Passion Sunday”. It marks the beginning of Passiontide, the final two weeks before Easter. The first four weeks in Lent have been a time for personal re-examination and penance whereas the last fourteen days are a time for thinking more exclusively about our Lord’s passion. In the early church it was the custom to drape crucifixes, statues and pictures in churches with a purple cloth to signify that this is a time of intense mourning.
For this reason, our New Testament reading focuses on the suffering of Christ. It is typical of the Christology of the letter to the Hebrews. Christology is the branch of Christian theology relating to the person, nature, and role of Christ. It is in this letter that we find the most thoroughly and systematically developed Christology in the New Testament and the way in which it captures the human dimension of Christ is distinctive. The choice of “high priest” as the principal image is significant because it provided Jewish readers with a ready point of reference and identification. The high priests they knew were obviously human figures and this enabled the unknown author of Hebrews a reference point through which he could develop a systematic understanding of the work of Christ. Consequently, Hebrews particularly emphasises Christ’s humanity and his ability to sympathise with human weakness.
The passage opens by referring to Christ’s refusal to glorify himself and then moves to “the days of his flesh” that is the days of his earthly life. The reference to Jesus’ offering up prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears has echoes of his time in the garden of Gethsemane. Although the gospels do not mention loud cries and tears they do refer to the intense distress Jesus felt there.
For the author of Hebrews, the fact that Jesus was the son of God did not exempt him from suffering. We should note the real significance of v8. It is not simply that Jesus was a son who learned obedience, as after all that is what sons do, or at least should do. Rather it was that the Son of God should have to learn obedience. This can be seen if we render the start of the verse “Even though he was the Son of God” rather than “Although he was a son”. Suffering as the Son of God and learning obedience are distinctly human characteristics. Many Christians while believing in some sense that Jesus was both human and divine still find it difficult to believe he shared our humanity. For them it is difficult to see how Jesus could learn anything, particularly obedience. But this is just what this text is saying and stressing. Submitting to death on the cross was the supreme test of Jesus’ filial obedience to the Father.
The reading talks of this as being a perfecting process. From our own experience we know that suffering, rightly experienced and interpreted, has the ability to refine our character and make us more complete, or make us perfect in ways we were not before. But more is implied here. It is not simply a question of Jesus’ character being refined or perfected, but that it was through his death on the cross that the work of Christ came to completion.
Thus, Jesus became the pioneer for all believers and the “source of eternal salvation for all those who obey him”. Elsewhere in this letter this is directly linked to Jesus’ role as high priest, the point made at the end of our reading. The phrase that Jesus is a high priest “according to the order of Melchizedek is developed further in Chapter 7. Melchizedek is the king of Salem and a high priest who blesses Abram in Genesis 14 and is also referred to in Psalm 110. The use of this Old Testament character provides the author with a way of explaining the uniqueness of Jesus’ high priestly role.
In our gospel reading we are told that “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified”. This is the gospel writer’s way of referring to the death, resurrection, and exaltation to the former glory of the one who became flesh and dwelt among us. This is Jesus telling his disciples that this is the start of a chain of events which will lead to his passion. At other points in this gospel from the wedding in Cana onwards Jesus’ actions were commented with the phrase “his hour had not yet come”. This is therefore a turning point in the emphasis of the narrative in John’s gospel just as Passiontide is a turning point in our Lenten observance.
Jesus’ first comments about his impending death and what it might mean for the world were prompted by the arrival of some Greeks who wanted to see him. This builds on the prophesy in the previous chapter that “Jesus was about to die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but to gather into one the dispersed children of God”. The question is how can Jesus’ ministry which is so tightly defined in time and place bless the nations of the world? Today’s gospel is the answer to the question.
The Greeks seek to approach Jesus indirectly through Philip and Andrew. This could be simply because they were from Galilee which had a large Gentile population and Philip and Andrew had Greek names. It could also be that at the time this Gospel was written they were associated with the mission to the Gentiles. In our reading these Greeks are there to symbolise the world seeking Jesus and once they have made their request they disappear from the text. Jesus’ response “the time has come” means that he must now make himself available to the world. This cannot be in his present ministry in Judea, Samaria and Galilee, but must be as the glorified Christ who abides through his word and the spirit with believers everywhere. This is the dominant theme throughout the final discourses and final prayer. To the Johannine church which, was separated by time and space from the initial events of Jesus ministry, it was important to know that they were not beyond the life-giving and life-saving work of Christ. This message is also important to us. We are not second-class disciples born in the wrong place and time and trying to survive on a meagre diet of the recorded memories of what it was like when Jesus was here. Christ is here. As it says in our gospel “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.”
This then is the point, for Christ to be available to believers everywhere he had to die. He makes three comments regarding his death:
- There is a law in nature which demands death if there is to be new life
- There is a principle of discipleship which demands death to self-interest in order to have life eternal
- Is the agent of nature’s creation to be exempt from this principle of death and life?
Jesus replies to God in one word, “No, it is for this reason that I have come to this hour.” In John’s gospel Christ does not writhe in agony, struggle in Gethsemane or offer up a cry of dereliction. Rather, he embraces God’s will and a voice from heaven confirms his decision. Not everyone heard the voice of course, not all of us ever do.
Whatever troubling of soul Jesus has experienced in approaching his death is now over. It is almost as if, for him, death was a past experience. From here on the passion story in John will be without anguish and tears. As Lent now moves us in quiet preparation for Jesus’ Good Friday and Easter, perhaps it might also move us to prepare for our own.
Mick Scotchmer
10 March 2024 – Mothering Sunday
Today is a special day – what is it? Mother’s Day. Actually, here in England it is actually called Mothering Sunday. A day when we think about mothers. This week there was World Book Day and I am going to tell you some stories about mothers. Two are true and one is a story I made up myself.
Story 1
Our Old Testament reading was a story about a Mother. We were not told her name the reading says ‘a Hebrew woman’. But later on in the book of Exodus we find out that her name is Jochabed.
Jochabed had a baby, again at the beginning we are not told what his name was. Jochabed already had two children, a girl and a boy, later we find out that the girl was called Miriam and her brother was called Aaron. The Hebrew people lived in a part of Egypt. They had moved there when there had been a famine in Israel, and had lived there for over 400 years and did well. The new Pharoah felt very threatened because the Hebrew people were very successful and so he created new laws. First, he made them all slaves to the Egyptian people, then he said that all Hebrew boy babies should be killed.
When Jochabed had her baby she had a boy! She kept him hidden at home for about 3 months, but she knew that soon she wouldn’t be able to hide him at home any more. She made a basket and lined it with tar so it was waterproof, like a little boat and she hid him in the reeds. It must have been so hard for her to say goodbye to him. She prayed hard that God would look after him and sent Miriam to hide and watch what happened.
God answered Jochebed’s prayer in an amazing way. Pharoah’s daughter had come to the river to bathe and she found the basket and the baby. I think Miriam was probably very scared that she would hurt him. But Pharoah’s daughter was not like her father, she wanted to save the baby. Miriam came out of hiding and said, ‘Would you like me to find someone to look after him for you?’ The princess agreed and Miriam rushed home and brought her mother who said she would look after him until he was old enough to go and live at the palace.
So Jochabed was able to look after her son until he was older and then she gave him to the princess who adopted him and called him Moses and he grew up in a royal palace. I don’t know if Jochabed was able to see Moses again as he grew up, but she knew God was watching over him. And she knew God was watching over her, even when she felt sad. She knew God was taking care of him. The bible tells us many stories of what happened to Moses when he was a grown up- but they are for another day.
Story 2
There were two children Kemi and Folu. They lived with their Mum and Dad and were a very happy family. Kemi & Folu loved the way their Mum would tuck them in bed and kiss them goodnight. They loved the way she would make them a bowl of hot porridge for breakfast in the morning. They loved the way she cooked jollof rice and chicken in the evenings. One day when they came home from school their Dad was waiting for them said I have some bad news. Mummy was not well this afternoon and has had to go into hospital. She may be there for a few days. Kemi and Folu were very sad. What would they do without Mum.
That night when it was bedtime the children were very sad. They missed their Mum. ‘Who will tuck us up and kiss us goodnight?’ said Kemi. Dad said ‘I’m going to come home early from work every day that Mummy is in hospital, and I will tuck you up and kiss you goodnight. But first, let’s say a prayer asking God to help Mummy get better soon.’ The children agreed and after they all said a little prayer Dad tucked them up in bed and kissed them goodnight. ‘You’re our Mummy tonight’ said Kemi sleepily.
Next morning when the children got up, they heard people talking downstairs. They quickly got washed and dressed and hurried down to the kitchen. What a surprise! Grandma and grandad were there. Grandma was laying the table and Grandad was cooking porridge! They were so happy to see them and there were big hugs all round. As Folu ate his porridge he said ‘Grandad, you’re our Mummy this morning.’
That evening when the children came home from school there was a wonderful smell of Jollof rice and chicken. Grandma was in the kitchen cooking and this time grandad was laying the table. As they all sat down and ate a wonderful meal. When she had finished her meal Kemi said, ‘Grandma, tonight you are our Mum.’
Later when Dad arrived home from work he saw the children were looking sad, ‘Are you missing Mummy?’ he said ‘. The children nodded. ‘I have a surprise for you,’ said Dad. ‘Tomorrow we are going to visit Mummy in the hospital. She is feeling a lot better and will soon be coming home again.’ That night they went to bed and Dad came and tucked them in. They each said a prayer of thanks that Mummy was getting better, and they also thanked God for the other people who had been a Mum to them while she was in hospital.
Kemi & Foli enjoyed visiting Mum in the hospital the next day and a few days later she was home again.
Story 3
I have one last and very short story – this is true story and it is about me and my Mum. My Mum died some years ago. She was very old, 94. For the last few years of her life, I looked after her. She could still do lots of things, but she couldn’t walk very far and she sometimes got a bit muddled up and confused.
Because I was working, I couldn’t be there all the time, so a carer came in and helped her get washed and dressed in the morning, and someone else would come in a clean the house. I would take her to the doctor’s or the chemist, I would take her shopping and sometimes on outings in my car. In her last few years she would often say, ‘you’re the Mum now…’. Maybe that’s what inspired my story of Kemi & Folu!
There is someone who is like a mother to all of us, can anyone guess who it is? That’s right it’s God. There are lots of ways in which God is a mother to us. In fact, he is a perfect Mother. Sometimes our earthly Mums are not perfect, they make mistakes and so do we, but God gives our Mums the love and strength they need to carry on and to care for us. And so today as we thank our Mums for all they do for us we can also thank God for all he does for us too.
As a reminder of that I have a small bible verse for the children that you can colour in when you get home:
Prayer:
Thank you, God, for being our heavenly Mother as well as our heavenly Father. Thank you for looking after Moses when he was a baby, and for helping Jochabed to have more time with him when she thought she had lost him. Help us to appreciate our Mums and even when they are not perfect, or no longer with us, thank you that you are watching over us and being a mother to us. Thank you that you send other people to be mothers to us when we need it. Amen.
Maria Holmden
3 March 2024 – The Third Sunday of Lent
We normally associate our gospel reading today with the events of Christ’s last week leading up to his death on the cross. He enters Jerusalem and goes up to the Temple and walks in. There in the courtyards, he finds “people selling cattle, sheep, and doves, and money-changers seated at their tables.” And what follows becomes the catalyst of why this Jesus just had to be removed from the picture. There is an assault on the Temple as Jesus disrupts the functioning of the House of God.
People came to the temple to offer their sacrifices to God, which required this selling and buying, and the exchanging of pagan coins for non-idolatrous versions, in keeping with the Second Commandment concerning graven images. And yet chaos descends as Jesus overturns the tables, scattering the coins from their money baskets, and kicking the seats from under the traders and old men; denouncing the place as ‘a den of thieves’ or a ‘robber’s cave.’
Except – that isn’t what we heard today. That more familiar version is as it is recounted by Matthew, Mark and Luke. Today’s gospel however was John’s version. This is different in a number of key respects. John places this event not at the end of Jesus’s life but at the start of his ministry. This isn’t what seals Jesus’s fate but rather this is one of the defining moments that demonstrate what Christ’s mission is and what it will be. Here, though Jesus still disrupts the working of the temple, there is no insinuation that the practice is beset with underhanded stealing or defrauding nor that the temple is contaminated by such deception. John’s Jesus does not criticise the temple as being made a den of thieves but rather (to use the original Greek) his criticism is that it was being made into an emporium: a shop or a factory.
Some 12 years ago, when he was Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams preached on this passage. Picking up on this use of the word emporium, he equated the Jerusalem Temple to the factories and steelworks of his native South Wales, with all their deafening noise and intense activity. He painted a picture of thousands of priests, day after day, working in this temple-factory, slaughtering animals for sacrifice, and making religion: “a product with which God would be suitably impressed.”
Religion can often become, as it were, a business, a merchandiser of God-products and God-services, focused on our needs and our wants. But in his sermon, Rowan cautions us against focusing our faith, our beliefs and our prayer-life simply on a “picture of God that keeps us happy, drawn from our own preferences, our own ideals, [one that] makes us safe and comfortable; … something [that we draw out] from inside us, [projecting] it onto the screen of heaven, and [falling] down and [worshipping] it.” That is a real temptation for the church and for people of faith. The temptation of shaping our faith in ways that make us feel powerful or comfortable.
Two Sundays ago, at the start of Lent, we heard the story of Christ’s temptation before the start of his ministry. The experience of Christ in the wilderness was to stare stark reality in the face: to confront and to struggle with and to move past and to reject the temptations of popularity and spectacle and power. To dismiss the obvious and easy and comfortable routes to achieving his mission, and to accept instead the difficult challenge and discomfort of the cross. This is the challenge that we also heard asked of us in last week’s gospel: to deny the “I,” to take up our crosses and to follow him treading the path that leads to salvation not for me personally but for the salvation of all.
In our Old Testament reading today, we heard the Ten Commandments, among which we hear, “You shall not make for yourself an idol.” An idol is our attempt to capture, to define, to limit God. Limited to the restrictions of the world that we know and inhabit; limited to our experiences, our knowledge, our needs and our desires. And through limiting the scope of God, by claiming to be custodians of God’s true image and the sole interpreter of God’s will, we close down God to people not like us, making God the possession of us and those think and act like us. “You shall not make for yourself an idol.” It is a warning against a temple-factory churning out a personalised God, tailored to us through ‘consumer research,’ making us feel powerful or comfortable or spiritually fulfilled.
But the gospel doesn’t quite present us with that pattern. Instead, it presents us with (what Paul acknowledges as) the folly or the foolishness of the cross. Rather than power and comfort, in Christ we find a God who lives a human life and dies a human death. Just as the temple tables and chairs and baskets are upturned, so this God also “overturns all that we think about success and security.”
Next Sunday, with all its emphasis on mothers and flowers, we may miss that we will have hit Mid-Lent Sunday. So, as we approach the middle of Lent, perhaps we should ask ourselves, ‘How is Lent going for us?’ What temptations have we considered and worked through and confronted? And here, of course, I’m not talking about the minor temptations that we have lined up for ourselves, by setting ourselves random challenges of not doing something, for a season, till normality resumes at Easter. But rather what temptations do we need to keep an eye on, behaviours we need to keep in check, as Christians, as people of faith, as workers in our temple factories?
And as we continue our journey through Lent, we should find again and again that that disruptive Christ challenges the natural temptation for us to seek a comfortable religion. The season will culminate, as it always does and always will, on a cross. That may challenge and unsettle our understanding of God; it may rob us of the idol that we seek God to be. It may leave us feeling less safe, but, as we stand in the dangerous shadow of the cross – the cross of the God who clears the temple to open it up and to make room for all – each time we will feel and understand ourselves (and others touched by its shadow) as being more and more loved and welcomed into new resurrection life, by this disruptive, unsafe and surprising God.
Colin Setchfield
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25 February 2024 – The Second Sunday of Lent
I have something in my bag which is a promise. It was given to me by a woman called Sarah who I have never met. I didn’t realise it was a promise. It is just a thin piece of plastic with the promise typed on it and her signature. The promise was of a financial reward. I just have to trust that she means her promise and that it wasn’t a trick.
Have you guessed what I’m taking about? THIS: (produce a £10 note). It says on it, ‘I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ten pounds.’ It is signed ‘London For the governor and company of the Bank of England, Sarah John, chief cashier.’
The piece of plastic itself is virtually worthless but, because it has Sarah John’s promise on it, I can be sure that I can use it to buy food, clothes, petrol, cat food … etc.
In our Old Testament reading God made a promise to Abram. In v. 2 he said ‘I will make my covenant with you.’ Covenant is not a word we use much these days. It means the same as Testament. When we talk about the Old Testament and New Testament in our Bibles, we could say the Old Covenant and the New Covenant.
A covenant is usually a legal term and means a bargain struck between two people. It involves a promise, a deal, a partnership. He gives Abram a new name Abraham. The covenant is a partnership between God and Abraham, which holds a promise for the future for his descendants as well. I suppose another word we could use would be contract. God makes a contract with Abraham.
If you are familiar with the story, you may be thinking: but this isn’t the first time God has said these kind of things to Abram. In ch.12 he made promises to Abram in Haran before he set out to Canaan. Then in ch.15 God repeated his promises and in v.18 it says, ‘Then and there the Lord made a covenant with Abram’. He gave Abram a sign. Now in those days when two men made an agreement they would cut an animal in half and walk between the two halves. Abram cut up a number of animals and God sent fire to pass between the halves.
So why is the promise being repeated a third time? Because God is actually bringing it into clearer focus, he is sharpening up the details. It is 24 years since Abram first heard God’s call. After the first promise, Abram sinned by passing off his wife as his sister. Some years later the promise was repeated. Then Abram and Sarai sinned again by trying to fulfil the promise in their own way – Abram had a son by Sarai’s maid Hagar – Ishmael. Now, 13 years further on and God repeats the promise for a third time, but this time he is ready to carry out what he has promised. Abram and Sarai will have a son of their own – even though humanly speaking that seems even more impossible than it did at the beginning.
This covenant between Abram and God is actually also a model of the covenant that God has made with us through Jesus, and what I would like to do this morning is to look at how those two covenants relate to each other.
1. The covenant was initiated by God.
The Lord appeared to Abram and spoke to him. Abram did not go looking for God. It was God who outlined the promises, and God who showed the responsibilities it involved.
So many times in this passage God says, ‘I will…’ ‘you shall..’ ‘I will make my covenant between me and you.’ And will make you exceedingly numerous’ ‘you shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations.’ ‘I will establish my covenant between me and you.’ There are lots even in this short passage. Its worth going through and seeing how many you can find. All these promises are given freely by God without any prompting by Abraham.
In the same way, in the new covenant, God offers us the gift of new life through Jesus Christ. We didn’t ask Jesus to die for us – God decided that was what he would do. As 1 John 4:10 says, ‘This is what love is: it is not that we loved God, but that loved us and sent his Son to be the means by which our sins are forgiven.’
2. It is a free gift.
In fact, God’s covenant to Abram contains a series of gifts: nations, descendants, a land, a son, kings, and so on. Abram did nothing to earn or deserve these promised items. He didn’t even ask for them. They are just given freely and unstintingly by God to Abram.
The new covenant is given to us freely and undeservedly. Romans 5:8 says, ‘God has shown us how much he loves us – it was while we were still sinners that Christ died for us.’ God didn’t wait for us to be good. If he had he would still be waiting. He saw our need and he reached out and gave us the means to be forgiven. As it also says in Romans 6:23 ‘For sin pays its wage – death; but God’s free gift is eternal life in union with Christ Jesus our Lord.’
3. It requires obedience.
Although the covenant is initiated by God – God chooses to give it to Abram as a free gift – it is not all one-way. It is not all give by God and take by Abram. Alongside receiving what God is giving comes responsibility. God says to Abram, ‘You also must agree to keep the covenant with me.’ (v.9) He was not saying that obedience is a condition of the covenant. Abram had already shown that obedience was not an easy thing for him. God was not saying ‘be obedient or I will take the covenant away.’ But he was saying ‘This is my part of our agreement, now it’s your turn to respond, and the appropriate response is obedience.’ The obedience flows from the covenant as a loving response.
When we turn to Christ and see what he has done for us. When we see the new life, the forgiveness, the cleansing, the companionship, the power, the love and everything that he gives us as a free gift, then our response should be one of gratitude and love which will show itself in obedience. God doesn’t stand over us with a big stick saying ‘obey or else’. He simply loves us and we respond
.
4. Includes other members of the family.
The God-given gift to Abram (and his new name Abraham) includes other members of his family. The promises he gives to Abram contain promises for: Sarai he says v.16 ‘I will give her a new name,’ ‘I will bless her’, ‘I will give you a son by her’). Later in v.19 and 20 he makes a promise to Isaac (the legitimate son yet to be born) ‘I will keep my covenant with him’, and also Ishmael (the illegitimate son) ‘I will make a great nation of his descendants.’
And not just the promises, but the obedience also applies to the rest of the family. God says to Abraham, (v.9) ‘You also must agree to keep the covenant with me, both you and your descendants.’ And God gave Abraham a sign to pass on through the generations: circumcision. It was a physical sign of an inward truth.
In the same way today, God has given us signs of his new covenant. Baptism and Communion. Both of these things are outward physical signs of what God has done for us spiritually. They are reminders of God’s covenant. Rather like my banknote. They are the visible promise of an invisible value. This is a small piece of plastic but it has value because of the promise on it. Baptism looks like just some water – but it has value because it holds the promise of new life. Communion looks like some bread and some wine – but it has value because of the promise it holds, the promise of life eternal.
As we pass these signs on to our children they too will be reminded of the covenant God has made with us, and they too will know they can share in that covenant.
Both Abraham and Sarah were given a new start and a new name. When we turn to Christ we too are given a new start – 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, ‘If anyone is joined to Christ he or she is a new being; the old is gone, the new has come.’ That new start then leads to obedience. Ephesians 4:23-24 ‘Your hearts and minds must be made completely new, and you must put on the new self, which is created in God’s likeness and reveals itself in the true life that is upright and holy.’
Just as their new names signified a new relationship between Abraham, Sarah and God, so we, although we may not change our names, will show by the way we live that we are in a new relationship with God.
When I go shopping, or when I travel in my car, I always carry a banknote or two in addition to my debit or credit card. That means that if I visit one of the rare places today that only take cash I can always buy what I need. In a similar way, I don’t go anywhere without God! I can’t see him, and sometimes I may have questions about what he seems to be doing. But God has made me a promise that is worth far more than £10. And I can trust him far more than I can trust Sarah John’s ten pound note.
Maria Holmden
18 February 2024 – The First Sunday of Lent
I often get very frustrated with Mark’s gospel – he rushes through events with little explanation when I want more details!! Why? Where? How? Our gospel reading this morning is a good example of this. In just a few short verses we are told that Jesus travelled from Nazareth to the River Jordan, was baptised by John, had an amazing spiritual experience, followed by a very harsh experience: being sent into the wilderness and tempted by Satan. Then John was arrested and Jesus began to speak publicly about the Kingdom of God.
I don’t know about you, but I am left with lots of questions. I want details. There isn’t time this morning to look at all the question I might want to ask, but as this is the first Sunday in Lent I would like to take just one: Why did Jesus go into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan for forty days and forty nights?
Mark says ‘and the Spirit Immediately drove him out into the wilderness.’. Some versions say ‘the Spirit compelled him’. The Holy Spirit doesn’t usually make us do things that ae bad for us, so this must have been a necessary experience. But why was Jesus compelled to go into the wilderness.
Jesus was just beginning his public ministry. Up to this point he had been living what we assume was a fairly ordinary life with his mother and brothers and sisters. Now he has reached the age of about 30 and realises it is the time for him to start to do what he had come to earth to do – to make known the kingdom of God, and eventually to die for the world.
In our Gospel reading we see his first public appearance, when he was baptised by John the Baptist. For many people who are baptised as adults the event is very special and may be accompanied by a very spiritual experience. This was certainly true for Jesus. He did not need to be baptised, but had chosen to do so as a public statement, probably in order to identify with the people he had come to save, but also to set an example of how they (and we) should respond to God’s call.
Almost like someone who has been trained as an actor stepping out on stage for the first time – Jesus is in the spotlight. Mark skips over this, but there are more details in the other gospels if we want to know a bit more. However, Mark does record a very spiritual experience Jesus has as he comes out of the water – he sees a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, who descends on him in the form of a dove. And then he hears the audible voice of God the Father, who says, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’
And so, as Jesus steps out in faith to begin his ministry he is endorsed by God. God is affirming that Jesus has the authority to do the work for which he has been called. He is also, in a sense, being commissioned. Until this point Jesus has, presumably, been living an ordinary life. Quite possibly working as a carpenter to provide for the family – many think that Jospeh had died by this time. There were other brothers and sisters, and maybe it is only now that they too are old enough to take on responsibility, freeing Jesus to leave home and start preaching.
You may be thinking, “but if God says he is doing the right thing, if God essentially has said, ‘go ahead and do what you have come to earth to do’ why does he send Jesus into the wilderness?”
What lay ahead for Jesus as his ministry became public was going to be very difficult. It would involve great suffering and eventually death on the cross. Jesus needed to make sure he was ready spiritually (hence his baptism) and physically and mentally (hence his time in the wilderness.
When God calls us to any kind of ministry, we too need to take time out to prepare ourselves. But even if nothing is changing in our lives, we also need to take time out sometimes to reflect to our lives and take stock of where we are in relation to God.
Lent gives us the opportunity to look at parts of our lives we may not often think about. And not just to look, but to take time to do something about the things we find there that might hinder our relationship with God, or stop us being effective in our Christian lives.
Earlier this week the weather improved and the sun has been shining. The down side of that was that the brighter light revealed parts of my kitchen that that look a bit grubby. And so I began by clearing my surfaces, washing and drying up all the dishes and putting them all away. Then I began to wash down the surfaces and the doors. Soon the place was starting to look much better. I opened the oven to put away the grill pan and then I realised that the inside of the oven needed to be cleaned. I took out the shelves and cleaned the bottom, sides and door. As I went to put away the shelves, I saw they too needed some work. Eventually the inside as well as the outside of the oven was clean. I was about to make a well-deserved cup of tea when I noticed a few crumbs under the microwave. I moved the microwave and discovered that underneath and behind was actually quite dirty, so that got a wash too.
Now I realise that actually, although the kitchen is looking clean and tidy, that is mostly only on the outside. I need to make myself a schedule to go through each cupboard and clean and tidy them too.
Why am I telling you all this? Because Lent gives us the opportunity to do something similar for our lives. We may start by thinking “My life isn’t too bad, I just need a quick look and a quick confession and absolution and I will be OK.’ The trouble with that is we often miss things that are damaging our walk with God. Things that we have covered up. There can be things that we don’t even realise are taking us away from a close walk with God until we remove the obvious, and give ourselves time to reflect in a deeper way.
Just like my surfaces and cupboard doors, there are obvious things. For me it is impatience. I come to God and say I’m sorry, but then I rush into something else and realise I am getting impatient again. One of the things I need to do is to take more time and make a conscious effort to be more patient. But as I spent time and reflected on this, I realised that my impatience is often due to lack of trust. If I allowed myself to trust God and accepted that he will lead and guide me, then if things don’t happen as quickly as I would want them to, I would not get so impatient because I would say, ‘there may be a reason for the delay. I will trust God to work it out.’ Also, I realise that I like to be in control, wanting to do everything myself, not allowing God to be in control.
As I deal with this, I am realising there are other things that are hindering my walk with God, but unless I take time out to reflect, pray and listen to God I will not even be aware of them. This can be a dark and seemingly lonely time as we struggle with these things. We call it a wilderness experience. Jesus seemed to be alone in the wilderness but we are told that angels took care of him. When we go through a wilderness experience we can feel very alone, but we need to remember that God is with us, even if we can’t feel him – we are never actually alone.
When Jesus began his ministry, he knew exactly what lay ahead – the rejection and pain. He knew the path would lead to death and that along the way even his best friends would desert him. It is no wonder the human part of him needed to weigh up these things. To look at them at the beginning and ensure that he was prepared to face them, and that he had the strength to do so. Not just physical strength, but that his walk with his Heavenly Father was strong enough to bear the pressures that lay ahead. Hence the temptations in the wilderness. Mark doesn’t give us details but we read about them in other places. Each of the temptations was fundamental to the challenges he would face in ministry that could divert him from the determined outcome – his death on the Cross for the salvation on you and me.
For us as individuals today, we may be in a position where God is calling us to something new. We may need to take time out to reflect on what lies ahead and the cost involved. Or we may be called to continue as we are and just need to give our lives a spring clean so that on Easter Sunday we will be ready to meaningfully celebrate the wonderful truths of the resurrection and all that it means for us.
Maria Holmden
11 February 2024 – The Sunday next before Lent
I consider myself a pretty ordinary person, but about 15 years ago I had the extraordinary experience of being part of a TV programme. There was a programme called ‘How Clean is Your House’, where two ladies Kim and Aggie used to help a person to clean up their house. I became involved because the film company initially called at the church to ask if they could film a section in our car park. In the end we were not prestigious enough for the bosses at Channel 4 and the filming was moved to Leyton Orient!
Why am I telling you this? Because, for me, that was an extraordinary experience. A few of us from All Saints went along and took some items from the church and were given some on how to clean them; advice which I still use today when removing candle wax from candle holders!
Our three bible readings today involved ordinary people who had extraordinary experiences which affected the rest of their life. Experiences way more far-reaching than my little experience with Kim and Aggie. We heard about Elisha, St Paul, Peter, James and John.
Elisha was an ordinary man who worked on his father’s farm until Elijah alerted him to God’s call as a prophet. St Paul, who wrote the letters to the Corinthians was an ordinary Pharisee who had a remarkable encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus and Peter, James and John were ordinary fishermen who had been called to follow Jesus. Each of these extraordinary experiences altered the course of their lives.
Let’s take each one and take a closer look. In our Old Testament reading we had Elisha who had been shown by Elijah that God was calling him to be a prophet. Elisha had responded immediately. He had put his affairs in order and left everything and became Elijah’s assistant. From today’s reading it looks like Elisha had found this a valuable experience. Elijah knew that the time was coming when he would leave and Elisha would take over.
I don’t know how long Elisha had been alongside Elijah, but I think we have to assume it had been quite a while. All that time he would have been learning from Elijah by his example and instruction, so that when the time came for Elijah to leave Elisha would be able to carry on the work. Our reading this morning was, if you like, Elijah’s farewell tour of the local groups of prophets. Each time he offers Elisha the opportunity to stay behind, but Elisha insists he will not leave Elijah.
Was this a test of his commitment? Was Elijah making sure that Elisha had the strength of mind and body to do the work? In the end, as a final test if you like, Elijah promises that if Elisha sees him go then he will be given extra power for what lies ahead. Elisha did stay, did see Elijah leave and did inherit the power God had given Elijah to continue his ministry.
What does that say to us? I believe firstly, that when we are called to any particular ministry in the church, be it a churchwarden, church cleaner, flower arranger, organist, children or young people’s worker, tea maker, pastoral visitor or whatever, we need to learn from those who are doing the job before of us. It is no good waiting until someone leaves before a new person is appointed. Otherwise, the new person will have to start finding out things from scratch and it may take a long time. To have deputies or assistants who work alongside and learn what to do, as well as providing companionship and support is very important.
Our New Testament reading was written by St Paul. I’m sure you know the story of his conversion; how he was violently opposed to those belonging to the Early Church, and had made it his life’s work to persecute, arrest and threaten to execute anyone who followed Jesus Christ. And how one day Jesus appeared to him on the Damascus Road, spoke to him, and Paul was completely transformed. He then spent many years being prepared by God to become an apostle to the Gentiles before travelling around the Holy Land, Asia Minor (what we know as Turkey today) and into Europe, preaching and setting up new churches.
Paul didn’t have the opportunity that Elisha had of working alongside someone and being trained, although others did work alongside Paul and were trained and supported by him. When Paul had that miraculous encounter with Jesus, and afterwards, Jesus himself spoke directly with Paul and taught him all he needed to know. As a result, Paul shared his knowledge with the new churches he had founded (and some that others had founded) through visits and through letters.
These letters form a basis of training, not just for those people, but also for us. If we are called to some form of ministry – as a churchwarden, Pastoral Visitor, Sunday School teacher, Home Group leader, or such like, we may have the opportunity to work alongside someone else first, but sometimes that opportunity is not there and we need to come to God’s word and seek to learn from it the task we are entrusted with.
Our gospel reading gives us yet another perspective. Jesus took three of his disciples, Peter, James and John, with him up a mountain because he wanted to pray. Jesus shared with these three ordinary men some of the intimate things of his own ministry. He taught them and he showed them how to do things. The trouble was that they were, at that time, on a rather different wavelength and didn’t always understand. They were still thinking that Jesus, as their expected Messiah, was going to be a great king, a leader of an army and that they would be his generals.
Jesus, on the other hand, rather like Elijah, knew that his time on earth was coming to an end. Jesus had already told his disciples that they were all going to go to Jerusalem and while they were there, he, Jesus, would be arrested and killed, but three days later would rise from the dead. This had been completely rejected by the disciples. Jesus, however, knew not only that he himself was going to suffer, but also what lay ahead for the disciples. Jesus had chosen the three who were closest to him and took them up the mountain to share a special experience. The Transfiguration. They saw Jesus in his heavenly glory, and Elijah and Moses (neither of who had natural deaths but were just ’taken’ by God).
To those disciples this was a real ‘mountain top’ experience. Something wonderful and exciting to remember for the rest of their lives. They thought that this was the prelude to Jesus declaring himself King and removing the occupying forces of the Romans. But for Jesus this was the prelude to the Cross; to his death and resurrection; a time when the disciples would fall into despair because they would think he had failed.
There are times when God gives us special experiences. Sometimes a person can have an experience where they feel very close to God. It can happen at a Confirmation, or an adult baptism. It may happen at a big mission meeting. It could happen when we are alone and a particular verse from the Bible suddenly illumines our minds and our hearts. It can be an overwhelming experience and we may think that this is the climax. That this is what God wants for us and we want to stay with that experience for the rest of our lives. It maybe, but it may be that God has given us that experience because we are about to face a difficult time. Perhaps God is seeking to prepare us, to strengthen our faith before we go through a time of suffering or challenge.
When the disciples later looked back on their experience on the mountain and reflected on it they would realise that thus had been a time of encouragement for Jesus, to strengthen him for what he was about to face in Jerusalem. It was a time when any doubts that he was doing to right thing were quelled – God showed his approval! But it didn’t change what was about to happen.
Here at St Edmunds, you are going through an interregnum. A time when there are many challenged and some people find themselves thrown into a new ministry. You may have been fortunate to have been able to work alongside someone else to ‘learn the ropes’. But you may have just been ‘thrown in the deep end’ and need to go back to God’s word for reassurance and encouragement.
You may be on a mountain top: close to God and excited at what is happening, or you may be facing problems and challenged and need encouragement.
Soon, I hope, a new vicar will arrive. He or she will find themselves in a new situation. They will need the support of each of you as they learn how St Edmund’s functions and where everything is. You too will find yourselves in a new situation. Your new vicar may not do things in exactly the same way as Lesley did. As you work together everyone can draw upon their past experience and apply the lessons of scripture. But also, realise that God is already preparing you, just as he will be preparing the new vicar, spiritually as you meet with him in prayer and walk with him day by day.
Maria Holmden
4 February 2024 – The Second Sunday before Lent
Our gospel reading this morning, the passage known informally as the Prologue to St John’s gospel, was presumably read in this church at Christmas. I say that because it is the one gospel passage which is required to be read at one or other of the Christmas services. I’m not entirely sure why it should come round again this Sunday, just a few weeks later, but it is, in my opinion at least, one of the finest and most significant passages in the gospels: it repays any amount of rereading.
As you no doubt know, only two of the gospels, Matthew and Luke, contain an infancy narrative, by which I mean some account of the birth and infancy of Jesus. Mark, the earliest of the gospel writers, perhaps did not have access to such material; or perhaps, like John, seemed not to assign great importance to the events of the Nativity. In any case, Mark introduces a fully grown Jesus, coming to be baptized by John the Baptist.
The beginning of St John’s gospel is quite different in character from the those of the first three gospels, in content and in character. Its first fourteen verses, which is what I’ve just read for you, cover an enormous sweep of time.
They take us back to the very beginning: ‘In the beginning was the Word’: we may hear in them an echo of the very first words of the bible, of the book of Genesis: ‘In the beginning’. I wonder if that connection was in the mind of the gospel writer?
Then they, these opening verses of John, take us on to the radical moment at which, as it says: ‘the Word became flesh and lived among us’. This is John’s very succinct account of the incarnation. It is an event of such significance that it could perhaps be seen as a second Genesis, a second beginning.
These first words of St John’s gospel refer of course to Jesus, and to his coming among us. I hesitate to say ‘his birth’ , but that is the natural implication of ‘became flesh’, and John will soon be referring to Jesus’ Mother and her presence at the wedding feast at Cana.
Beginnings: I’ve referred to the book of Genesis, the first book of the bible, but that is not the only place in the bible where we find reference to ‘beginnings. Another (‘vs 22) is the source of today’s first reading, the book known as Proverbs, presumably because it begins with the words: ‘The proverbs of Solomon son of David, king of Israel’.
In the passage from Proverbs which was read for us, the character of Wisdom is introduced, and then introduces him or herself. She tells us that she was God’s first creation, ‘set up before the beginning of the earth’ and was present throughout the work of creation: ‘when he established the heavens, I was there’.
Wisdom also describes her relationship with God, which is clearly very close: ‘>I was beside him like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.’
There are clearly some similarities between Wisdom, as characterised in the Old Testament, and Jesus, as we know him from the New Testament There is though the fundamental difference that Wisdom was created by God: ‘God’s first creation’ as she tells us, whereas Jesus was not created at all. As it says in the first verse of St John’s gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word’ or, put another way, the Word was prior to all creation.
St Paul makes the same point in the passage we heard from his letter to the Colossians: ‘all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before and in him all things hold together’.
Having honoured, I hope, the readings for the day which we have heard, I thought I would turn to the last member of the set, the psalm, although I know that in your church, as in Wanstead, we do not sing or say it at our Sunday morning Eucharist, in our case for reasons of time management.
This is practical, but it is a pity, not least because the psalms are a rich treasure, and one that links us to pre-Christian worship; and they are also something on which Jesus himself would presumably have been brought up.
The Psalm appointed for today is the last part of psalm 104.verses 26-39. It is a song of wonder at the diversity of creation, and it too connects well with the theme of the day: ‘may the Lord rejoice in his works’.
And so may we!
Richard Wyber
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28 January 2024 – The Presentation of Christ in the Temple (Candlemas)
Today we celebrate the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, which is also known as the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, when Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the Temple at Jerusalem 40 days after his birth for Mary to fulfil the Jewish rites of purification after childbirth and for them to redeem Jesus as their firstborn son in obedience to the laws in the Torah. We are told in the gospel reading that Mary and Joseph took the option of sacrificing two young pigeons, the option taken by those who could not afford a lamb. This story reminds us that Jesus was born into a poor family who were devout Jews, as Jesus himself was throughout his life.
The festival commemorates both the presentation of Jesus at the Temple of Jerusalem and his role as a light to lighten all nations.
This celebration is officially celebrated on 2nd February, 40 days after Christmas, but in most churches, it is moved to an adjacent Sunday. It is also called Candlemas. It is one of the oldest feasts in the church calendar having been celebrated since the 4th century.
Let’s start with Candlemas. Many people today do not realise that Candlemas is an ancient feast, celebrated in both the eastern and western church. But like many Christian feasts it traces its roots back to the pre-Christian era; indeed, if you search for Candlemas on the internet, you will find more information on witches than on Christian groups. This is a time of year which marks a turning point in winter, when we are, despite the weather this week, moving on into brighter and better days.
As Candlemas traditions evolved many people embraced the legend that if the sun shone on the second day of February an animal would see its shadow and there would be at least six more weeks of winter. In many European countries bears or badgers are watched, but 19th Century German immigrants into America found an abundance of groundhogs and, late in the 19th century, a few residents in Punxsultawney, Pennsylvania began using the groundhog as a weather prophet which is why in the US 2nd February is also known as Groundhog Day. This folk tradition has given rise to the weather proverb:
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- If Candlemas day be fair and bright
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- Winter will have another flight
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- If Candlemas day be shower and rain
- Winter is gone and will not come again.
The forecast for Friday is cloudy with little or no sun which promises that winter is over. I suspect however that this tradition is about as reliable as that for St Swithin’s day which my wife and I have watched for over fifty years as it is our wedding anniversary and its weather proverb was mentioned in the sermon at our wedding, as indeed were the facts that the British Grand Prix and Open Golf Championship were happening that day, so I have listened carefully to at least one sermon!
It is also the festival of light. In this country, not surprisingly therefore, it has some traditions associated with candles. In some Roman Catholic churches there is a custom of blessing and distributing candles and carrying them in procession before the mass. This morning we carried candles in the Candlemas procession before the gospel. The light of the candles is symbolic of Christ as the light of the world, to stick to tradition all the candles should be made of beeswax. In the past some churches blessed all the candles which were to be used in the church in the coming year and this was sometimes extended to members of the congregation bringing their candles from home which were to be used in the coming year to church for them to be blessed. This must have caused a post-Christmas boom in sales for Chandlers!
Candlemas also marks the end of the Christmas season so next Sunday we will enter a short period of Ordinary time before we enter Lent, another 40-day season in the Church calendar.
So, this is the reason for the festival we celebrate today and some of the traditions associated with it. But what might today’s gospel be saying to us on this day?
Let’s think about a craftsman going about his task of making a stained-glass window. He carefully sets the lead into the window to be the framework for the beautiful glass he has been staining. Now comes the moment: where before there was only a plain window, now with the glass in place there is a riot of colour and shape, telling a story and making it sparkle at the same time.
Luke has now sketched the outline of a picture. He has placed the lead around the window. What coloured glass is he going to use to fill it in? What story will he tell, and what sparkle will he give it?
The picture is of Jesus as the true world ruler: the Lord, the Messiah, the saviour, the real king of the world instead of Caesar. How easy it would be to fill in this picture in glowing, royal colours, giving us a sense of future glory, world dominion, power and majesty.
Luke does the opposite. He chooses sombre colours; and the more he fills in the picture the more we realise that this is a different sort of kingdom to that of Caesar Augustus. It is indeed what God had promised; but, not for the last time, Luke is warning us that it doesn’t look like what people had expected.
In particular, this is becoming a story about suffering. Simeon is waiting for God to comfort Israel. Anna is in touch with the people who are waiting for the redemption of Israel. They are both living in a world of patient hope, where suffering has become a way of life. It now appears that God’s appointed redeemer will deal with this suffering by sharing it himself. Simeon speaks dark words about opposition, and about a sword that will pierce Mary’s heart as well.
So this, Luke is saying, is what happens when the kingdom of God confronts the kingdom of the world. Luke invites us to watch, throughout the story, as the prophecies come true. Mary will look on in dismay as her son is rejected by the very city to which he offered the way of peace, by the very people he had come to rescue. Finally, the child who is, as Simeon says, ‘ destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel’, himself passes through death and into resurrection, taking with him the hopes and fears of the city, the nation, and the world.
But if Luke is colouring in the picture with the dark notes of suffering, he is also showing that the kingdom brought by this baby is not for Israel only, but for the whole world. Simeon had grasped the truth at the heart of the Old Testament (which, Luke is careful to note, Jesus and his parents fulfilled): when Israel’s history comes to its God-ordained goal, then at last light will dawn for the world. All the nations, not just the Jews, will see what God is unveiling – a plan of salvation for all people without distinction. This will be the true glory of Israel itself, to have been the bearer of promise, the nation in and from whom the true world ruler would arise: ‘a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel.’ This is not the sort of revelation the world was expecting, and not the sort of glory Israel wanted, but true revelation and true glory none the less.
Luke adds yet another human dimension to the story. By the time the first two chapters are finished, almost all his readers will have found someone in the story with whom they can identify. In Elizabeth and Zechariah, we have met the older couple surprised to have a child at last. In Mary we have seen the young girl even more surprised to have a child so soon, and her husband Joseph coming with her to the Temple, offering the specified sacrifice. The next section will feature Jesus himself on the threshold of young adult life. Now, in this passage, we have the old man and woman, waiting their turn to die, worshipping God night and day, and praying for the salvation of his people. Luke wants to draw readers of every age and stage of life into his picture. No matter who or where you are, the story of Jesus, from the feeding-trough in Bethlehem to the empty tomb and beyond, can become your story and for all of us here today I am sure is our story.
In becoming our story, it becomes our vocation. As has been said so many times before, everybody has their own role in God’s plan. For some, it will be active, obvious, working in the public eye, perhaps preaching the gospel or taking the love of God to meet the practical needs of the world. For others, it will be quiet, away from public view, praying faithfully for God to act in fulfilment of his promises. For many, it will be a mixture of the two, sometimes one, sometimes the other. However, we will only play our part in this story if we listen to God and follow his will. The vocation to which we are called may not be what we expected, I certainly never expected to be a priest! It may also take us out of our comfort zone, but it will be the part God wants us to play in continuing the story which started in that feeding-trough in Bethlehem so many years ago.
In our gospel reading, Mary and Joseph needed Simeon and Anna at that moment; the old man and old woman needed them, had been waiting for them, and now thanked God for them. The births of John the Baptist and Jesus were already beginning their work, of drawing people of all sorts into new worship and fellowship. If we do not play the part that God has us destined for there may well be some who will not get what they need at some time and we will have missed an opportunity to be part of God’s great plan.
At the start of 2024 this is surely something we should all reflect and act on.
Mick Scotchmer
21 January 2024 – The Third Sunday of Epiphany
That gospel we heard this morning is incredibly familiar to us: the turning of water into wine. But what we might not have known – unless we had the good fortune to study the whole thing – is what John’s gospel is actually about. John’s gospel is what is called ‘midrash.’ A midrash is a commentary on a part of scripture.
Before the bible was put into chapters in the twelfth century (the verses were from the fourteenth century), the way it was explained what part of scripture they were going to midrash on was to simply use was the first phrase, the first few words, that they were going to comment on.
The first three words in John’s gospel are ‘In the beginning…’ That phrase that we find in Genesis in the creation story. In John’s gospel, there is a new creation story. In Genesis, God creates, not out of nothing, but out of chaos, out of ‘the Deep.’ He sinks his hands into the water, and separates the waters below from the waters above. Then God does this <ACTION: palms of hands together pulled apart> … phwww! He separates the water, and you get the sky, the waters to the sides, the sea, the land.
As long as God keeps his hands apart, he creates the process for the condition for life. (It is mythology not history, a story put together to make it understood.) And if God was really upset with how people were behaving, he basically throws a tantrum and folds his arms. In the next story after the Garden of Eden, the story of the Flood – everything turns to chaos.
The idea of the water was important; not just as a necessity but it is also something highly symbolic. There are the stories of the flood, of Jonah, of the parting of the Red Sea. The idea, behind God controls the water, is that God is involved in the creation process.
Water turns up in John’s gospel in all but three of the chapters. (And the most surprising thing about it is that no one drinks a drop.) This is hugely important. When people were writing scripture, they were writing in a particular way. They wrote it to be read out, so people can listen. A scroll in those days cost more than a slave, which in modern currency would be the price of a new car. So, most families did not have access to reading and writing materials. Hence, they wrote in a way that people would listen to and remember. It can’t be like a biography.
If somebody read out a page on car mechanics, the chances are you would remember very little. But if someone tells you a funny joke or a funny story, it is astonishing how much detail you do. Scripture is like that. It is written in a way that people will remember.
Beyond this passage is the ‘totem’ of water: control of water is the presence of God. Elsewhere, we have the story of Jesus walking on the sea. It is significant, as its meaning is that God is in Jesus and he is in control of the water. Exactly the same is happening in today’s gospel.
The story occurs on the third day. The resurrection also happens on the third day.
Six jars for purification were mentioned. It should be seven: there were seven huge pitchers of water in the Temple. But John only mentions six; the seventh does turn up later in the gospel. At the cross, a jar of vinegar (“unfinished wine”) is placed on to Jesus’s lips, and he says, ‘It is finished’ and then he dies.
Metaphorically, it is saying that the Lord of creation, whose hands are in creation, almost the same as creation, is entered totally into this. The water of the old creation is transformed into the wine of the new. The water is transformed, it is changed.
John’s gospel, written between 110 and 120 of the Common Era (nearly 100 years after Jesus), is a theological reflection of what Jesus was, is, and what Christianity is.
The reason why it was on the third day is that the beginning points to the end. The interesting thing about John’s gospel and the resurrection is, unlike in Matthew and Luke, not very long. The resurrection is not an after-thought but a vindication of what Jesus did and stood for.
There are seven signs in John’s story, and seven days of creation. On the seventh day, God rests, and in John’s gospel God rises. And if Jesus is so immersed in creation, that means everything is touched by divinity – every single, quivering thing has something of God in it.
Much of John and of orthodox thinking is of the idea of theosis: the religious life is to make myself more like Jesus and less like me. And the more we allow Jesus to dwell more consciously in our lives, the better the world around us becomes. Heaven is about how we live in the here and now: to see every other person as brother and sister – all as children of God. Sometimes that’s very difficult, some people hide their God-likeness very well; but it is still there, and it is up to us to find it. It is not to tell people what to believe, but to tell them what they are.
Jude Bullock
14 January 2024 – The Second Sunday of Epiphany
Today’s Old Testament lesson shares the story of a young Samuel. He is awakened several times in the night by a voice calling his name, but because he was not yet familiar with the Lord, did not realize who it was that had been speaking. Eli, who had likewise been awakened because of Samuel’s earnestness to respond on being called, realized that it must have been God who was speaking to Samuel, and encouraged him to respond to the voice the next time with the words “Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.” Ultimately, Samuel again heard the voice calling to him, and did respond as directed, beginning a life-long relationship with his Lord.
Now I like you, I guess, pray regularly and I talk TO God, but I can’t say that I talk WITH God, or have a conversation with God. I’ve never heard God really speak to me – at least not in the way that Samuel did. Like many of you, I suspect, I seek God and I regularly find God, in a gentle breeze on my cheek or in the laughter of a friend. Or, maybe in an answered prayer, I understand that God has spoken to me through action. In those moments I make up an interpretation in my head of the grace or the lesson that God has sent to me.
Today’s reading underscores the importance of listening. Our lives are full of endless chatter; be that from the TV, radio, our phones, you name it – it seems we are either being bombarded with noise or actively seeking it out, some would say like an addiction, which drowns out our own thoughts and opportunities for meaningful reflection. Our reading from Samuel reminds us that we need to not only listen, but then to be open to what we hear, especially from God. As we open ourselves to the word of God be comforted by Him accompanying us through good times and bad. But, remember, it all begins with listening.
I’ve been encouraged by others – much wise than I – that I might try quieting my mind and my heart when looking at a passage from scripture. That in being at peace, with an open heart, I might listen and hear. LISTEN. It’s such a powerful word and a loving act. But we usually want to DO something or SAY something – but this is what I try to tell myself – I have 1 mouth and 2 ears!!!! Maybe that should be the ratio of response! If you need that advice also, I’m happy to share it with you! And I’ll pray for all of us that we can be still, know that God is with us, and to hear God’s voice as young Samuel did.
As we go through our day, upcoming weeks, and year let us take some time to turn off the chatter – there is a lot of bad news out there both nationally and internationally. Tune out the noise and tune in to taking the opportunity for prayer and reflection. Truly listen and allow God’s words to guide us toward making a positive difference in the lives of those around us and even the world in this New Year.
Cindy Kent
7 January 2024 – The Epiphany
Of the four gospels in the Bible, only two recount stories of the birth of Christ: Matthew and Luke. And yet at Christmas, the church favours one over the other, that one being Luke’s story. On Christmas Day, three sets of readings are provided. The gospel in Set 1 is Luke’s story of the shepherds. The gospel in Set 2 is (oh!) Luke’s story of the shepherds. And the gospel in Set 3? Well, it’s not the shepherds, but it is from the first chapter of John – a gospel which doesn’t even bother with a nativity story at all. You can imagine Matthew fuming about the sidelining of his birth story. Even last Sunday, the gospel was still (yes! you’ve probably remembered) Luke’s story of the shepherds. And if we had a Communion on New Year’s Day, well! the gospel story would have been mainly the story of the shepherds … yet again!!
By the time Matthew’s story of Christ’s birth does get its day, we are all ‘shepherded’ out, and – annoyingly for Matthew – he finds that his story has even been pushed out of Christmas itself altogether, beyond the traditional twelve days. Christmas is gone, we are now in Epiphany. In the words of the next carol that we will sing this morning, “the shepherds have left us” (eventually!) “the heavens are dumb, there’s no one to tell us why Jesus has come.” And yet it is, now, only in Epiphany that Matthew can tell his Christmas tale.
The 1662 Prayer Book subtitles this feast of The Epiphany as “The Manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles.” The feast focuses on the revelation of God in Christ. ἐπιφάνεια (epipháneia) – manifestation – the shining of a light upon, a revealing – the unveiling of the appearance, the displaying – an illuminating realisation.
And in this period of Epiphany, when we get time to consider what or who is the God that we see and know in the person of Jesus, Matthew’s birth story is told and it comes into its own.
But there are no angels popping up publicly all over the place to announce the great tidings of what God is bringing about. In Matthew, everything is slightly more surreptitious: the story moves along by promptings in sleep-dreams.
Mary is not hailed as ‘highly favoured’ or ‘blessed among women’. In Matthew, the mother of Christ is unexpectedly pregnant outside of wedlock: it is a scandal. She is saved from a life of shame and destitution only because Joseph was a just man. He forgoes a public inquiry to determine whether his wife’s pregnancy was from consensual or coerced intercourse, but (following a dream) he also relents from his intention of quietly breaking off his marriage by divorcing her for adultery.
There is no mention of a census, no donkey rides cross-country, no booked-out accommodation, no stable, no crib. The shepherds might be in the fields outside of the town but they are certainly not in Matthew’s gospel. In fact, apart from the whiff of scandal, the backdrop of this Messiah’s birth in Matthew is mostly humdrum.
So, what then is Matthew’s Christmas story? What it definitely isn’t is schmaltzy or sentimental. In this story, Christ is born in darkness, and that isn’t particularly the darkness of night. The story is full of darkness and danger. This child is born into an “ambivalent world of political intrigue, deception, and fear-induced violence.” This is the world into which he is born, and his birth does not change that brutality. And it is into this world that the story begins – with outsiders, foreigners stepping into the picture.
These are not “We Three Kings” (of which we sang earlier); these are not even “Three Wise Men” (of modern translation); these are magi, magians, magicians. Of course, these were not Christian, they were not even Jewish, these are ‘pagan’ priests, the interpreters of omens and dreams, fortune tellers, star-gazers, astrologers. To the good God-fearing Jews of the time, these Magi would be viewed as “the epitome of Gentile idolatry and religious hocus-pocus – dabblers in chicken entrails, forever trotting off here or there in search of some key to the future.” (Later in the Bible, in the Book of Acts, we hear of another of the magi named Elymas, whom Paul denounces as a “child of the devil … an enemy of everything that is right … full of all kinds of deceit and trickery … [a perverter] of the right ways of the Lord.”) It is this type of person who stumbles first into Matthew’s Christmas story.
These magi, who one evening seeing a pinprick of light in the sky (and thinking “ooo! that’s new”), decide “well, on the basis that everyone has a star, and this is a new one, it obviously means a new Judaean king must have been born.” And, on the basis of that impelling logic, they hotfoot it to the Judaean capital Jerusalem, only to find, however, that (a little surprisingly) the Great Herod is very much still alive. And (not that they pick this up) he is also a tad annoyed at the suggestion that, somewhere out there, there was a child potentially as a claimant to his throne.
And what happens is that these (actually, un-wise) men make an “immense mistake” (to quote former Archbishop Rowan Williams). With information from the court of Herod, and with the fortuitous re-emergence of the new star in the sky, they eventually find that which they were seeking, and – by extension – that which Herod was fearing.
It is not in a palace where they find their new Judaean king. But then again, neither is it a stable. In Matthew’s story, they come to an ordinary family home in Bethlehem, where they find a mother and her child. (There’s no father mentioned as being present – perhaps he was out working; perhaps he was out doing man-things; perhaps – though a “just man” – maybe he just couldn’t play happy families with his forgiven wife and this child.)
I always read into this story an awkwardness that surely was felt when this lone mother, with the shadow of impropriety hanging over her, unchaperoned, with her husband absent, comes face-to-face with not one but several unrelated strange men in her presence, in the privacy of her own home. Once more, finding herself compromised in the eyes of the prevailing paternalistic culture of the time.
And that awkwardness may have also been felt by the magi as they opened their boxes and presented oblations appropriate to a king in the finery of a palace rather than to a squalling newborn child and this housewife in the mundane domestic setting in which they stood.
In Matthew’s gospel, the Messiah is born but the world around him does not change. In his world, just as today, brutality is still very much in charge, and violence is a normalised aspect of life. The magi’s worship of Christ ends in carnage. Realising their error, they scarper home by a different route. The parents of this child also take the hard decision to leave their home, their security and support, and, becoming refugees, they flee towards the safety of the Egyptian border, before the unescapable violence erupts, which it inevitably does.
This unlikely newborn messianic king survives (for now at least). Yet, he and his family leave in their wake, other unforewarned children born in David’s town: left behind, left to be slaughtered before they too might mature into the messianic hopes of a suppressed and frightened people. Political powers of the day will always seek to annihilate their opposition into order to protect their power … while nevertheless assuring us in Herodian terms that they are acting with “due diligence” and in the name of the public good.
This is Matthew’s Christmas story. And it is this story, which the church holds back for this feast of Epiphany: this feast where our assumptions and perceptions of who God is and how he works are challenged. This story puts centre-stage people who are there who shouldn’t be there. Where heretical adherents of the wrong religion are brought into the presence of this God-child through their false-trust in the nonsense of astrological horoscopes, and they worship him by offering up elements of their impious rites and rituals.
This story brings God down from heaven and confines him into the ordinariness of a family home in a tiny suburb of Jerusalem. This story wrongfoots a people who are waiting, expecting, a conquering hero as their Messiah, and instead offers up God as a weak and vulnerable child, living cheek-by-jowl as a neighbour among other families who lose their children to political violence and indiscriminate attacks.
This is the most human of stories. This is the Epiphany of our God. The telling of Matthew’s story about Christmas can perhaps only really be told once the distraction of Christmas is done: when the magic and excitement and animation is over and things settle back into the ordinariness of everyday life. For it may be then, when we can see – in this child – what God is really like. Our neighbour, living in a land stalked by death and among people who are afraid in the lives they live. Our neighbour, willing to get his hands dirty in the real stuff of human life, a victim of our anger and vengeance. Our neighbour willing to be wounded, to join in our suffering, and who calls us to join him in the suffering of others.
And in this, ultimately our perception changes, as an epiphany reveals this child has become our Saviour, not by whisking us away from the realities of life but by himself moving in as our neighbour in all of our struggles.
Colin Setchfield
© 2024 St Edmund, Chingford
St Edmund, Chingford 