Author: lorna

Non-Stipendiary Assistant Priest.

WEEKLY PRAYER LETTER

We have decided to make this, Easter 4, the last week of putting together the prayer letter. Thank you to everyone who has read it and for all the encouraging feedback we have received from people over the last year or so.

We will still e-mail round the pew-leaflet each week to those on e-mail and, if wanted, we will arrange for a pew leaflet to be put through the letter-box of those who can’t get to church and don’t use e-mail. We also hope to soon be able to offer home-communions to those who can’t get to church and are of course very happy to still be contacted.

We started sending out these letters on Mothering Sunday in 2020 little knowing that we would still be sending them out over a year later.

We cannot know the future but we can know the Good Shepherd!

May God bless you and your loved ones. Simon.

Sunday 17th January 2021

Simon’s Reflection for the Second Sunday after Epiphany

As our gospels tell us, one of the first things Jesus did as he began his public ministry was to bring a group of disciples together. Those disciples would become in time, the people God would use to make his Gospel known and they would be most successful in making Christ known when they were most united. They would be given the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to help to bind them together. But they were real people like us, precious but with flaws, and like any group of real people they argued!

We read St Paul, following his Lord, and busy at work in the First Letter to the Corinthians in community-making. If you read the whole of that letter you will see how important the message of unity was to that community and it is in that letter, that St Paul uses his famous, inspired image of the Church as the Body of Christ to remind those Christians and to preach to posterity, i.e., to us, of the deep unity and mutual belonging we share in Christ even if we don’t always live up to its implications.

Tomorrow sees the start of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. We certainly need unity of a positive sort at the moment. We need unity of purpose to help us to overcome the pandemic and we need to pull together and look after one another. The news last week focussed on the deep and dangerous divisions in the USA but, of course, we have plenty of divisions in our own society in need of reconciliation and healing.

Christians are called to set an example of loving unity for Christ’s sake in the way that we work together, not least by responding together to the huge need for healing and help that has been caused by this crisis. I guess if you were in a hospital being treated for a bad case of Covid right now, it would not much matter to you whether your doctors and nurses were protestants, catholics, orthodox or muslims, hindus, jews or humanists for that matter, you would be grateful for their dedication and help. Some things remind us that there are deeper and more important sources of unity. The Hebrew man who was helped by the Good Samaritan would not have been bothered about the “orthodoxy” of his religious views!

I’ve been working my way through Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall” this year which is set in a period in which the differences between Catholics and Protestants and between various shades of protestant were literally burning matters! A reminder perhaps that even when there seemed to be more unity in “Christendom” that unity was often achieved by force. It is mystifying how official Christianity could have got from Jesus’ teaching of love of enemies and turning the other cheek to the burning of heretics!

Thankfully we have moved on and we recognise that Christians need to proclaim the gospel together and that while there are differences between the denominations and not all of them insignificant, there are much more important things which unite us and also things that we can learn from one another. We recognise that we should look to what unites us and work together as much as we can.

I think it was the great Calvinist theologian, Karl Barth, who, writing on the subject of church unity suggested that it was by being as faithful as we can to Christ in our own denomination of the church, that we will be doing our best for church unity. Being faithful to Christ where we are, he was suggesting, is more important than searching around for the “perfect” church denomination.

There are reasons of course why we are more comfortable with being Anglican/Episcopalian or presbyterian or Catholic or Baptist or Pentecostal or Evangelical and they are not all just matters of taste and preference. There are real issues about how we understand the sacraments, the bible, the proper organisation of church, mission and discipleship and of course Christians sometimes disagree about moral issues.

We can’t agree about everything. Sometimes, if we have the wisdom to hold some aspects of our own traditions with humility, we can learn from the differences in other traditions and be enriched by them or challenged by them. We all after all have a mixed history and there is no perfect denomination. But we can’t rationalise away all differences and say that they enrich us. It remains true that it is a shame that Christians don’t agree with each other about more things and our disunity is something in need of healing.

We must, however, take seriously the call to follow Christ together and think about what Christ wants us to do. Think about Christ’s deep desire to bring us into unity with Him and with each other. Think about the way in which one of his first acts was to call a disparate group of people together. Nathaniel, in his encounter with Christ is led beyond his initial scepticism to faith. Then he is led beyond his rather nationalistic idea of the messiah as the King of Israel to a vision in which Christ Himself is Jacob’s ladder from the Book of Genesis; the one who unites heaven and earth, God and humanity and humans with one another. If we stick close to Him, he will give us a better vision and a deeper desire for loving unity between all peoples. Amen.

Sunday 10th January 2021

Simon’s reflection for the Baptism of Christ.

St Louis of France used to sign his documents not, “Louis IX, King” but “Louis of Poissy.” Someone asked him why, and he answered: “Poissy is the place where I was baptised. I think more of the place where I was baptised than of Rheims Cathedral where I was crowned. It is a greater thing to be a child of God that to be the ruler of a Kingdom: this last I shall lose at death, but the other will be my passport to an everlasting glory.”

I wonder if we remember or celebrate our own baptisms in the way that St Louis of France did. In similar vein, Martin Luther said we should think of our baptism every time we wash our face. We’d be thinking of our baptisms a lot in these days if we did!

The reason that many of us have been baptised of course is that the Church over the centuries came to be believe that Jesus, Himself, instituted it. There have been many questions in the Christian tradition about how to understand baptism. Does the act of baptism itself strengthen us through the action of the Holy Spirit to become the children of God? Is it a means of grace or just a sign of God’s love and acceptance? Is it just about individual repentance and faith? Should we baptise infants? I’m sure you can think of many others.

This Sunday as we celebrate the feast day of the Baptism of Christ, we are taken back to the roots of the Christian practice of baptism in Jesus’ acceptance of the baptism of John but also in the difference between the baptism that Christ would bring and the baptism of John.

The practice of John the Baptiser in calling the people of Israel to Baptism was really something that was extremely radical. Before that, baptism was probably only known as a rite for non-Jews who wanted to become Jews; an act of repentance and acceptance into the chosen people. To call on people who were already Jews to be baptised was a profound challenge to any sense of self-righteousness or entitlement people might feel by simply being descendants of Abraham and John’s call certainly gave offence for that reason to many of the religious leaders.

John called the people to the wilderness; the place where the faith of Israel was originally nurtured. He called them to a renewed sense of dependence on God. Participation in John’s baptism was a sign of a person’s willingness to change and of God’s willingness to forgive. It was also a baptism of preparation for something that God was about to do. It was about getting ready for a new age. John wore the clothes of the prophet Elijah who was expected to appear before the messiah and his message was that one was coming who would bring a greater baptism than his; a baptism not just with water but also with the Holy Spirit.

Many people in the early church puzzled themselves about why Jesus asked John to Baptise him. They reasoned that he was a greater figure than John and also that he had no need of repentance.

Yet Jesus’ request for baptism from John at the start of his public ministry shows in a profound way what his ministry was to be about. In his divine humility, he identifies with those he came to save. As St Paul puts it, he became sin, who knew no sin, in order that we might be saved.

As Jesus is baptised, the heavens are rent open, the lines of communication between God and humanity re-established. The Holy Spirit, who hovered over the waters at the time of creation, descends anew and the divine voice affirms who Jesus is as God’s Son  and as the suffering servant from the prophecies of the Book of Isaiah and tells us to listen to Him.

This is not a god who just shouts at us from the sidelines but God who meets us in Christ in the mess of human life and who is absolutely drenched in our humanity for our sakes. The God who becomes one with us, because he wants to help us to be at one with Him.

Because of Jesus’s baptism, our baptism is not only about repentance and preparation but also about the assurance of God’s love, about belonging to God and belonging to each other as the church, a reminder that God’s love came before our decisions of faith and was not something we had to earn but something freely given because we are his. Baptism becomes a bridge between God and us.

Jesus goes on in his deep trust that He is God’s beloved to withstand the trials in the wilderness. These difficult times are a bit like a wilderness experience, reminding us of who we really need and depend upon.  We all need resilience and endurance. With Jesus baptism comes the assurance that we too are loved by God and the promise that God is alongside us as well as the challenge to listen to Christ and to follow Him in all we do.

 So, on this feast day of the Baptism of Christ, we should take all this to heart and dust off our baptism certificates. We should remember and celebrate the dates, give our children and God-children if we have them reminders or gifts on theirs. If I took Louis of Poissy’s practice, I would sign myself Simon of Peacehaven, what would be yours?  Amen.

Sunday 3rd January 2021

This week’s reflection for The Epiphany comes from our Assistant Priest.

Reflection

One of the things I really appreciate about living where I do is how clear the sky can be at night. Towards the end of this past year people’s attention was drawn to the night sky because of the possibility of witnessing the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn on 21st December. Unfortunately, for us that evening was overcast and wet with no chance of seeing the event. However, people in other parts of the world did witness the single bright object that was created by these planets passing close together in the night sky. Because it happened so close to Christmas it has been called the Christmas or Bethlehem star. In fact, some scholars have theorized that the original Christmas star, known as the Star of Bethlehem, might also have been a great conjunction although other theories say it may have been a supernova explosion or comet. Whatever it was, it was so spectacular that it led the wise men to leave their homes and make what must have been a treacherous journey to where it led – a simple manger in Bethlehem and the Christ child.

Who were these people who abandoned everything to follow a star not knowing where it would lead?

Matthew tells us very little about them. We don’t actually know their names – it was the Venerable Bede who named them Caspar, Melchior & Balthasar. They are most usually described as wise men or Magi, the Magi being the Zoroastrian priests of the ancient Medes and Persians; men who studied the heavens and explored astrology.

The Bible doesn’t tell us much about the Magi but what it does tell us is important. It tells us that they were from foreign lands – Gentiles. Jesus came to save not just Israel but the world and here is the first evidence of that. We don’t even know how many Magi there actually were, Matthew only states that ‘wise men from the east came to Jerusalem’, but we know exactly what they gave to Jesus – gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Why does Matthew go to the trouble of identifying these specific gifts? One possibility is to demonstrate that this event fulfils Isaiah’s prophecy:   

A multitude of camels shall cover you,

the young camels of Midian and Ephah;

all those from Sheba shall come.

They shall bring gold and frankincense,

and shall proclaim the praise of the Lord.

However, if this was Matthew’s only reason for mentioning the gifts, why include myrrh? It’s not mentioned in any prophecy so why didn’t he just say gold, frankincense and other gifts?

Each is mentioned because each of these gifts has a very special significance.

Each of the gifts the wise men brought revealed something about who Jesus was and what he came to do. The gold shows that Jesus came to rule the hearts of people as the King of kings. The frankincense speaks of Jesus’ role as our great high priest making offerings for the faithful and that Jesus came as God in the flesh – the object of our worship. The myrrh reminds us that Jesus came to die for the sins of the world. All three of the gifts foreshadowed both Jesus’ life and death.

But this was not all that the wise sages brought to the manger, for they came to give, not just their treasures to the infant Christ, but to give of themselves. They made no requests, plied him with no questions, and bombarded him with no woes, troubles or complaints. They asked nothing of him – nothing that a child couldn’t give. Yet they left content. Their journey, harsh though it must have been, had been everything for which they had hoped.

Christina Rossetti, in that beautiful hymn, In the Bleak Midwinter, wrote:

What can I give him poor as I am?

If I were a shepherd I would bring a lamb

If I were a wise man I would do my part

Yet what can I give him, give my heart.

How often do we simply bring our love and our treasures to God? Part of our spiritual maturing is to learn to relax in God’s presence, to enjoy the company and fellowship he gives and to experience the intimate joy of silence that exists between really close friends. That’s when he will speak and we’ll be able to hear because we won’t be cluttering up the airwaves with an interminable monologue of petitions and pleas.

God is present to support and guide all those who listen to his word and who look for the light he gives in the lives of his saints and in the stars of the heavens themselves.

The challenge in front of each of us is to make each breathing moment a gift worth giving to the King.

The Magi have shown in what spirit we must take up our own personal pilgrimage. By their humility, their willing obedience, they encourage us all to worship in spirit and in truth.

God gave himself to us because he loves us. May his love be reflected in our lives as we worship him with all that we have and in all that we say and do; that’s our gold, frankincense and myrrh.  Amen.

Simon’s Reflection for the 4th Sunday of Advent

20th December 2020

I wonder if this extraordinary year has deepened our trust in God or weakened it or left it about the same.

Going through a hard time, can sometimes make us less inclined to trust God or believe in God. We are confronted with the age-old question, repeatedly voiced in the bible too, of why God allows suffering to take place if he could stop it and if he is loving. It is to some extent an Advent question too and a subject of Advent longing that God would come and put things right: “Why don’t you tear open the heavens and come down?” It would be wrong to think that question is easily answered or to be unkind to people’s doubts or to our own doubts. Sometimes faith is a struggle, like Jacob wrestling with God.

But sometimes going through a hard time can deepen trust. I remember talking to someone once, who was going through something awful and goodness knows it would have been understandable for them to have doubts about God but she said: “No I don’t doubt God. I couldn’t get through this without God.”

It’s not easy. Trust isn’t always easy. It exposes our vulnerability and is always a risk but in very many ways we have to live by trust and learn to place it wisely.

We had an interesting discussion on trust in our Advent group and this Sunday in the much-loved story of the annunciation, trust is a theme that goes right to the heart of the reading.

There is Mary’s trust in God. She is asked to believe something that seemed impossible. Was it someone in children’s literature who objected to being asked to believe five impossible things before breakfast. She cannot understand how the angel’s message will come true. But she believes in the message and the messenger and accepts not knowing all the answers.: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

I wonder where that act of trust came from. Trust takes time. I imagine Mary as a prayerful person who had some experience of the goodness of God to draw on and people in her life who showed her something of the goodness of God. In the end the act of trust comes from her. She is free to choose as we all are and it would be a much lesser creation and a lesser God if we weren’t. God wants us as we are and God wants us to choose Him. He graciously invites our response.

Mary’s trust and co-operation will bring vulnerability and risk. The immediate risk of exposure as an unmarried mother in a time and society where that would lead to certain disgrace and poverty and possibly worse. She is dependent on Joseph’s choice to believe in turn. And there are many scary things to come for her. The Christmas story is not as cosy as we sometimes make it appear! So there is great vulnerability here and risk.

But the trust in the story is not all one way. I mentioned a story last week from a sermon I heard years ago by a Franciscan friar about prayer. He also told a story of sitting in a train-carriage in a compartment with two young men who were being a bit loutish. They got up to go and before they went, one of them confronted the friar and said: “I don’t believe in your God.” “No”, he replied, “but he believes in you!”

Here’s a wonderfully inspiring fact about the Annunciation. God believes in Mary. God trusts Mary and entrusts her with His Son; entrusts her with himself. He puts Himself into her hands and becomes vulnerable for her. Mary becomes a partner in God’s work of salvation.

God also trusts us, believes in us and entrusts us with the responsibility to love and care for each other and to be for each other in the way that Jesus is for all of us. He makes us also partners in God’s work of salvation. God uses us to help each other. He sometimes uses us to answer each other’s prayers. He sends help by sending us.

We might feel that we fall short of that trust, far more so than Mary, so that it is God who seems to be prepared to believe five impossible things before breakfast! He’s rather like a determined mother or father who won’t give up on the belief that their child will come good and do good even when it seems against all the evidence! Who will not give up the belief because of sheer love and a determination that it must be and whose love will help it to be so in the end.

If we embrace it, God’s love can teach us to love and God’s trust can teach us to trust. “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to thy word.

Simon’s Reflection for the Third Sunday of Advent

As I read that passage from St John’s gospel, I’m struck by two ideas that come from John the Baptist’s message. On the one hand, there is a sense of preparation for something that will happen in the future. Then, on the other hand, there is a sense that that something is already here. In Advent, as we prepare for the future coming of Jesus, how do we recognise the ways in which he is already among us? These two things must, I think, be linked. If we are living lives in which we are prepared for the future coming of Jesus, we will at the same time notice that he is already here among us.

There’s a lovely and profound story of St Francis of Assisi; one of many of course. St Francis was busy hoeing a garden when a pilgrim came up to him and asked him: “If you became aware that you were going to die a few hours from now, what would you do?” St Francis replied: “I would finish hoeing this garden.” St Francis was already with his Lord in the present and experiencing time as a gift and his work as co-working with Jesus. So he was ready.

What are the things that we need to do to be ready to meet Christ in the future and to recognise that he is among us?

Well, prayer is one thing. On this Gaudete Sunday, with its theme of rejoicing, we may not feel that rejoicing is very close to us. We may also think that St Paul was rather tactless in telling the Thessalonian Christians in the middle of a time of persecution to rejoice, just as I might be rather tactless telling everyone simply to rejoice in my sermon on Sunday with all that is happening at the moment.

Rejoicing was not particularly easy for St Paul, though, with all that he was going through; imprisonments, opposition, failure, physical ailments. It doesn’t come easily but is something to be worked at. It doesn’t come so much from externals but from finding Christ within and without. That is why Paul links it to prayer and to prayerful thanksgiving which are, again, things which have to be worked at.

The former Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Basil Hume, wrote a lot of good, grounded and realistic things about prayer and he was particularly good in talking about the need to keep going when it was difficult. He said that while prayer brought moments of peace and inner joy to all of us, it could also be hard work. At such times, he said, it is important to keep going because we pray to please God and because God wants us to and not just to make ourselves happy so he writes: “Carrying on when we seem to be getting nowhere is a proof of our faithfulness to God, and it shows that we are selfless and generous in our service of him. We are prepared to do the right thing for his sake, and not for ours.”

There are two ideas here which link to the themes of today’s readings for me; being ready for Christ by praying and being ready for Christ by living for others. When we do those things, we will reflect something of his light to others and we will reflect Christ’s light through who we are and in our own particular way. It is a light that is given not a light we have to generate.

We see these themes in our reading from St John’s gospel about John the Baptist. John the Evangelist is very clear about who John the Baptist is. “He is not the light. He is a witness to the light.” Nonetheless, like all of us, he has been given something important to do. He occupies a special place that God has given him to prepare the hearts of the people of Israel to receive their Saviour. But that role is self-effacing. It is to live for others to be a person who lives for others.

It must have been very tempting for him, with all those voices urging him, “Are you the Messiah?”, to say “Well, yes I am actually!” If he had been thinking about his own ego or his own glory, perhaps he would have succumbed but John knew that the loving thing to do was to point people to Jesus not to himself.

We sometimes think of Christians as having a “messiah” complex in the way they approach being a Christian. That may or may not be egotistical. Sometimes it can be about having an over-extended sense of responsibility or thinking that we have to do it all on our own or that we need to know all the answers. We don’t. Like John the Baptist we are pointing people to Christ not to ourselves.

Our Isaiah reading today is of course the passage that Jesus chose to read out in the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4:17 – 21). It gives the manifesto of a Messiah who Himself came to live for others and maybe in a sense we could read that list of actions as a list of places where we can find him.

It is by being more aware of the opportunities in our own lives to live for others and by rising to them, that we will find and bring joy and that we will be both ready for the Lord who is to come and we will also meet the Lord who is here among us. We will be more prepared for him and we will also know how much he loves us for who we are.

 Amen.

Simon’s Reflection for the Second Sunday of Advent

If you go into the Gallery of the Ancient Near East in the British Museum in London, you will find the famous Cylinder. The cylinder is covered with writing telling of the glories of the Persian Emperor Cyrus. It tells of his conquest of Babylon “without any battle” and of his policy of allowing captives to return to their homelands and rebuild their temple. One of these captive peoples were the Israelite Exiles in Babylon.

In these events, the prophet known to us as  “Second Isaiah” saw God’s action in history for the good of his people, Israel, and the ultimate good of all people.

The Book of Isaiah is really a compilation of the prophecy of three prophets put together by an editor and united by certain recurring themes. The first prophet is Isaiah of Jerusalem who preached around 742 – 700 bc in the times that led up to the Assyrian Invasion of Judah and the destruction of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. His message was mainly to the people of Jerusalem and was really like a wake-up call to a self-indulgent, materially prosperous, over-confident people.

Second Isaiah’s prophecy comes about 150 years after this. His message is for the people of the Exile in Babylon. Still later in the Book of Isaiah, we find the writings of a third prophet, “Third Isaiah” who is speaking to a later period when the Israelites have resettled in the land and have rebuilt the temple and are struggling with many problems and again in significant ways failing to live out their calling as we all sometimes do.

Advent is a time when we think about the theme of prophecy and we think about the church’s calling, i.e., our calling to be prophetic. So, it’s a good time to think about what that might mean for us.

We often think about prophecy as being about predicting the future but prophecy as it’s understood in the bible is wider than that. That’s not to say that they didn’t sometimes have messages that had a future fulfilment but more broadly, the prophets were messengers of God, forthtellers rather than foretellers, “seers” who could see what God was up to in the world. Their message varied; sometimes it was a message of warning and judgement, sometimes it was a message of hope. William Temple’s words that the gospel message “challenges the comfortable and comforts the comfortless” is also a good description of prophecy.

The message of Second Isaiah is one of hope. It is a gospel. It is good news. In the events of the fall of the Babylonian Empire, the prophet sees God at work. He sees God accomplishing a new Exodus. Things which seemed impossible were being accomplished with divine help. A new road was being made through the wilderness back to the promised land.

The people had been through a dreadful time of Exile; a time of wondering whether God had cast them off but God hasn’t cast them off. God is finding a way to rescue His people from the mess that they have got themselves into. Here is a new beginning.

To a demoralised people, the prophet brings a message of God’s continuing love and faithfulness. He gently leads the people back to the light of hope; showing them that obstacles that seemed insuperable are being overcome. There is a path across the wilderness and a warm welcome home is predicted.

That is where St Mark’s Gospel begins too. God is coming to the rescue of his people again and St Mark uses the images of the Old Testament to describe the ministry of John the Baptist: “a prophet and more than a prophet.” Who calls the people back to the wilderness to repentance and promises that God is coming soon to rescue his people.

I wonder what these things might say to us in this time where perhaps we are beginning to see new hope after a difficult time but there is still a difficult time to get through. Perhaps, the prophetic voice, can challenge us to see God at work in the world even if it may not always seem that way.

The prophetic message may change according to the situation but some things are always there; the faithful love of God and the sheer determination of God not to give up on God’s people.

We have a prophetic voice too; sometimes to challenge, sometimes to comfort. We are called to do both things because of the hope that is within us. We are called to to repentance so that we can live more faithfully to that calling.

Peter’s letter finally gives us a reminder of what the Advent call to us is as he says to his impatient listeners that they should live in such a way that they are “waiting for and hastening the coming Day of the Lord.”

 Amen.

Sunday 29th November 2020

Simon’s Reflection for the First Sunday of Advent

Advent is a future-focussed season. The words of Advent all have a future-focus about them. The word itself means “coming.” Something important is coming and the words associated with the season have a future-focus. We think of words like waiting, longing, preparing, expectancy, readiness, hope.

So what is coming? One thing that is coming is Christmas and Advent is partly a time of preparation for Christmas; of getting our hearts ready for Christmas. But that’s only part of its meaning and our readings today point us forward to the Second Coming of Jesus and ask us questions as to our belief and trust that God holds the future. Do we really believe that and do we live as though we do?

So what do we think about the future at the moment? I wonder if we were to go back in time one year, as we approached the year 2020, what we would have been expecting. Perhaps we might have been wondering about where we might go on holiday. Perhaps we might have been wondering about what a 2020 vision would look like for the church; it had a nice ring to it that phrase! Perhaps, we may have been thinking that life would unfold through the year much as it normally does. Well what is it they say: “life is what happens when we are making other plans.”

Maybe there were some people who had an inkling something like this could happen but I doubt whether many of us expected it. I certainly didn’t. It has shown us all too painfully that life is uncertain in certain key respects though we may have a tendency to forget that and live as if it were not so. Advent addresses the question what is certain and what is uncertain. Can the things that are certain help us to live with the uncertainties?

One response to uncertainty is to want to know what is going to happen in the future. To know what is going to happen in the future is a very human desire. It is one that keeps fortune-tellers in business! Whether it would be a good thing if we could know more about the future, I don’t know. It is certainly difficult to live if we dread the future and if we can’t face the future with a credible and grounded sense of hope. So how do we think about the future and how does our faith in Christ fit into that?

Today’s gospel passage is prompted by a question from Jesus’s disciples about what was going to happen in the future. Advent begins a new year in the church and this year’s gospel readings will be mainly from St Mark’s gospel.

In Mark chapter 13, we are given an account of a last discourse to the disciples before Holy Week. The discussion is prompted by a visit to the temple in Jerusalem. Jesus predicts the destruction of the temple and the disciples ask Jesus about when these things will happen and what will be the signs. In the chapter Jesus is partly talking about the destruction of the temple and there are very good reasons for believing that Jesus did prophesy the destruction of the temple but is usually assumed, though not by everyone, that he is talking about the end of the world and the Second Coming in some of the verses we heard today though again the times he is referring to may be a bit mixed up.

The passage repeats a message that is found elsewhere in Jesus’ teaching. The future is not entirely knowable and even the earthly Jesus has to live with a level of uncertainty which is surely partly what it means to be human. No-one knows when exactly these things will happen he says. Even Jesus Himself doesn’t know. Only the Heavenly Father knows.

Jesus makes predictions of course. He also says that there will be false dawns. Famously, in this passage he predicts “This generation will not pass away until all these things have taken place.” If Jesus said this, did he mistakenly believe that the world would end within a generation I wonder? Certainly, many in the early church seemed to have believed the end of the world was imminent. Is the earthly Jesus, like us, sometimes mistaken about what will happen in the future? Or was he talking about something else; the Fall of Jerusalem in ad 70 or the Resurrection or Ascension. These are all suggestions that have been made.

At any rate the passage says that we can’t know some things but we can know others. We can know that God is faithful. Heaven and earth may pass away but my words will not pass away. God will be to us in the future as he has been in the past. The prophet knows this in our Old Testament passage. As he laments the apparent absence of God in the present, he still knows that God will not give up on his people. God is the potter and they are the clay. God is here for us in the present too. We don’t have to wait for the future to know him. We can get greater strength to face the future by holding on to those things which are certain and seeking for God and listening for God in the here and now.

Jesus tells the disciples that they can look to the signs of the times. They can learn from experience if they are listening in the right way and if they are alert. The ripening of the fig tree is a sign that summer is on its way.

God’s light is shining in the darkness. We don’t have to generate that light. We just have to look for it, to see it and to reflect it.

We are all waiting at the moment. We are all very much in Advent. Are we waiting with hope or dread? Are we seeing signs that summer is on its way? The Advent call is as powerful as ever and it is to live for the good future that God is bringing into being and to help Him bring it into being and to live for the future that is real and not one that is imagined. Our faith tells us that the future that is real is much better than any future we could imagine. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sunday 22nd November 2020

Simon’s reflection for Christ the King

The image of Christ as King, like the image of Christ as Lord, is a powerful and evocative image but to get at what it might be saying to us, we may need to do a bit of archaeology, a bit of digging into the past.

That’s because kingship and lordship mean different things today in our everyday experience and they don’t consume our attention in the way that they may have done for people of former times. Kings and Queens don’t have the direct power over our lives they once had. They don’t govern or command in the same way. They are not of course without power or authority. The fascination with monarchy has not gone away and indeed many people still see it as a thing of value in our contemporary society but how we understand our allegiance to them, if indeed we accept that idea, has changed.

In the past, though, Kings and Queens were often direct rulers. The fortunes of their realms to some extent rose and fell with their own fortunes. They commanded allegiance and they commanded. Some of them were good leaders and some were bad; most were in between like any other human being would be in that situation. They were sometimes a figure of majesty and glory and could command a mystique and a romantic attachment.

In the bible kings and queens get a very mixed press. The people desire for a king so that they can “be like the other nations” in 1 Samuel. That request is granted but also interpreted as a rejection of God’s Kingship over them and Samuel gives them warnings about the downside of having an earthly king. At the same time, God works for good with the human monarchy and raises up David to be their king and later promises a messiah from David’s line.

You can see both of these themes in today’s Ezekiel reading. The earthly kings have failed. The people are oppressed and scattered but God promises to be their king and their shepherd Himself and to rescue them. He promises to raise a messiah, a king of David’s line to be their shepherd and rescue them. God will be their shepherd and King and so will the Davidic king to come. Christians believe that both statements are fulfilled in Jesus but the fulfilment is still in a sense hidden.

Christ’s kingship is in one sense hidden. For one thing, it doesn’t look like an earthly kingship. Jesus doesn’t seem powerful. He wanders around like a poor, homeless man. He dies on a cross next to condemned criminals. He doesn’t seem to come from a family of any power or influence as those terms were understood.

Yet on another level, he has a unique power and authority which is unlike any other human power. We think of the miracles, the teaching, his authority, the resurrection. All these things speak of a power far greater than any normal power. Some people of his time glimpse something of this and become his disciples. Some, however, don’t see it. They just see him as a nobody, a Galilean upstart with no pedigree or education, a rabble-rouser and a nuisance.

The kingship of Christ is hidden to us too of course and apprehended with the eyes of faith. Allegiance is invited not demanded. He is our King whether we choose Him or not but he wants us to choose Him. He’s a very democratic sort of king. He wants us to vote for him!

Despite the hiddenness or perhaps because of it, Christ’s Kingship is supremely loving. The great historian Thomas Carlyle once said: “power corrupts and absolute power, corrupts absolutely.” In the world “power” has become a dirty word because of its misuse. But with God there is no contradiction between power and love. God’s power is the power of a supreme love.

The King is also loving shepherd and victim on the cross. King Jesus tells us that if we want to look for him in our world now, we will find him when we feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, tend and visit the sick, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, welcome the stranger. We will see the face of King Jesus in their faces.

That is part of what it means to recognise Christ as our King. It means recognising a claim to our obedience which is above every claim.  It means doing what Christ calls us to do like the blessed in the parable. It may mean following even to the point of self-sacrifice taking up our crosses.

It also means being on the receiving end of his help. St Paul tells us that the power that was in Christ is in us. We should never think of ourselves as powerless. When we seek to do good, we have God’s power to actively help us.

Finally, it means that we are given a huge dignity. I used to visit a lady in a nursing home and her husband at one time. Often an African nurse would come in while the lady was asleep and we were talking and she would say: “Good morning princes!” She would go on to explain: “You are brothers of a King. You are princes!” Amen.

Sunday 15th November 2020

Simon’s Reflection for the 24th Sunday after Pentecost

I heard a lovely story last week about a teacher. One of my Godsons, has recently begun attending a special school which he really enjoys. Now, he has a thing about hedgehogs and he really likes hedgehogs for some reason. Well, one day recently, the teacher said to him: “I know you don’t like English so we’re not going to do English today.” “We’re going to find out about hedgehogs and then we’re going to write a letter to explain to people why we need to look after hedgehogs and what they need at this time of year! My Godson was really excited and wrote down all that he found out about hedgehogs. At the end of the day when his mum came to collect him, he said to her really excitedly, “Mum we didn’t do English today, look I’ve written all this letter about hedgehogs!”

What a talented teacher! It’s good to see people using their talents well. I’m sure at the moment we are all deeply, deeply grateful for the talents of medical researchers who have made possible the success of the latest vaccines for Covid. Where would we be if they hadn’t developed their talents? On a more prosaic level, I believe one or two people have enjoyed the talents of the Scottish football team this week and of course of their manager!

In English, the word “talent” to describe someone’s gifting or ability comes from the gospel parable for today. In Jesus’ time the word “talent” did not mean “ability.”  It described a measure of weight used particularly of a large sum of money but because in the story the master gives these sums of money to his servants “according to their ability” the word “talent” came to be used to mean ability.

So, often, the parable is interpreted as just a story with a moral; like Aesop’s story of the hare and the tortoise. The moral usually attributed to the parable of the talents is that we should all make the most of our abilities. This is true, and thank goodness for the people who do, but there is probably more to understanding the parable than this.

Probably closer to the meaning of the story is that there is something in it about the way that Christian’s should behave with the gospel that has been entrusted to them. The story appears in Matthew’s gospel just before Jesus is about to go to the cross. There is a challenge in it to those who have been entrusted with the treasures of the faith but have not used them to God’s glory. What have they done with their special calling to spread the light of God to the world?. Have they spread that light or buried it? At the end of time, when the Lord returns unexpectedly, what will we have done with the good news that has been entrusted to us as the church?

Like the servant in the story, or the Thessalonians Paul was writing to, we do not know when the master is coming back. One danger for us is that we might live as though we are not expecting him at all. We might live in a world of false security; as if all that mattered were the things of this world and not the things of God’s future.

We have some insight from this year as to the fragility of the things of this world that may make us want to check that we are anchored in the security that is real. Another danger is not be ready for God and the only way to be ready for something which is happening but you don’t know when is to always be ready, like a pregnant woman with her bag packed ready for the hospital though she knows not the day.

The call is to live in such a way that we hope for God rather than dreading God. Paul tells the Thessalonians to put on the armour of faith, hope and love and to remember that God’s will for us and his love for us is shown in Jesus.

Of course, one of the ways that we can live in greater readiness for God and be lights to the world as Jesus said we were (Matthew 5. 13- 16) is by using our talents for the glory of God. That way, we will help to share the gospel and not bury it. I read once a suggestion that Christian ministry is what happens when we use our talents for the glory of God. We respond to God’s call and join in with what God is doing in the world. That’s what we’re meant to do and that is what the church as the people of God is together meant to do.

If we are Christians, we are all ministers. We all have something to offer and we are all needed. Our churches can only flourish and be communities that spread the good news rather than bury it, if we’re all ready to use our abilities for God’s glory and to build up the church – not just to maintain the building – but to build a community of people which can be a light in the world; “a city built on a hill.”

Perhaps some of you may be able to consider offering your talents to your church community by serving on the vestry as we approach our coming AGMs. There are plenty of other ways to help of course too and we are blessed by the many ways we support each other. We can all do something; praying for each other, practising stewardship of our time, attention and resources reaching out to those who are isolated, serving our community.

Above all, we can all work together to be a church that takes risks for God and builds up a community of people nurturing one another in faith and being moved to serve the world out of our deepening discovery of who God is to us. Amen.