Christ Church - Words and Thoughts - 2022

2022

Christmas Day - Sunday 25 December

As Kia's Christmas Day sermon made great use of a number of props - chocolate and biscuits! - to illustrate her messages, the text is not really suited to being read 'bare'.  So, we are publishing Virginia Smith's Christmas Day sermon which she delivered at St John's Wotton.

Texts: Isaiah 52 verses 7-10, John 1 verses 1-14

Kept in my handbag is a very small torch just over two inches long and the light it gives when switched on would be completely outshone by that of any of the wonderful Christmas lights with which so many homes and gardens have been so beautifully decorated. But it gives me sufficient light to make my way on a dark night, making sure I don’t fall over some obstruction or place my foot in some pothole, and thus ensure I do not fall victim to any accidents on my journey; I have no wish to join the queues in our overwhelmed A and E departments. Its beam is so small that it doesn’t allow me to wave it around and see what might lie ahead or even to the left or right but that doesn’t matter, its guiding light is to ensure that like those wise men I can arrive safely and thankfully at my destination. A celestial star would be much more of a miracle but, being realistic, I am happy to make do with my small black functioning torch. 

Now, back in the time of the birth of Jesus my small torch would have seemed almost like a miracle to anyone who saw it. For some two thousand years ago there was no electricity to provide glittering festive displays, no gas light, no candles even but simply small clay vessels often with a spout into which olive oil or some other oil was poured and the linen wick then lit to provide what must have been a very small amount of light. If you were rich you could afford to leave such a lamp burning all night and could even boast a lampstand on which to hang it but for the majority, their little lamps would be placed on an upturned bushel basket and hence Jesus’s reference to not hiding your light under a bushel. How incredibly dark the winter nights must have seemed to the people then and it is hard for us to imagine just how constrained their lives must have by this lack of light whereas, with a flick of a switch, we can dismiss the night, the blackness and the shadows. 

Christmas is the season of light and in that wonderful reading from John we hear the words ‘What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.’ For all of us who believe in the wonder and mystery of the incarnation these are words resonant with meaning and most especially with hope. Hope that the light that the Christ Child has brought into our sad and sorry world can, and will, transform it. Can help, in the beautiful, joyous  words of Isaiah,   to ensure that ‘the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; the lame leap like a hart and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy.’

Christ’s light is the light of love and if we let it will show us how to transform and live our lives so we too can bear some very tiny part of that light. Can we, in our imagination, humbly kneel today at that manger just as those shepherds did; just as the magi did? Can we sense the depth of darkness of that enclosed space, but as we focus on that crude manger can we truly be blessed to see in the miracle that is every new-born baby and even more glorious and unfathomable miracle? The miracle that is God incarnate. the light beyond all light that has come to our world and will dispel the darkness of sin, the darkness of sorrow and grief, the darkness of pain and suffering, the darkness of hopelessness and in their place bring the glorious overpowering light of God’s love made manifest here on earth. And may we then, by God’s grace, be given our own small lamp of light to carry which like my small black torch will be more than sufficient to show us the way of Christ; the way of light, on which to make our life’s journey. And as we do so can we also recognize that together our small lamps can and will form a great pool of light to dispel at least some of the darkness of our world and in its place bring to others the great, wondrous and incomparable blessings of Christmas; the blessings of hope, of peace, of joy and of love.

Born in You by Ian Adams
Into this world, brutal and brilliant, comes the holy child.
Now let the child trusting and wonderful
be born in you-
flooding you with light
so that in the company of countless others
translucent
you may ignite
an aurora of rippling light,
glorious,
a dance of earth and heaven
that will never be extinguished.
May the holy child be born in you today.

Virginia Smith

The Carol Service - Monday 19 December

What’s your favourite thing about Christmas?  The presents? The food? Family games?  For me I know that Christmas has started when we go and choose our tree.

 If you’re anything like my family this can turn into a military operation. First you have to decide on the right size – a 5ft one and put it on a table so the presents fit underneath or a 6ft one and cut some of the branches off? The shape is of vital importance. It can’t be too bushy, too straight or too crooked but it has to have character. You have to hold it in a certain way and look at it from every single angle to make sure there aren’t any funny sticky out branches or bare bits.

And when you get it home, who decorates it? Children, do your parents give you free reign? Do all the wonderful, sentimental, handmade decorations get pride of place – the amazing creations you made when you were 2 – the 5 legged reindeer, the robin that looks more like a Christmas pudding and that suspicious looking snowman? Maybe it starts out like that but, miraculously, the following morning it has turned into something resembling the front cover of the Christmas edition of vogue.

Another of my favourite parts of Christmas is watching the Nativity play. Always full of surprises. But maybe not as surprising as the first ever nativity.

The first account of the nativity scene as we would recognise was in 1223 – over 1000 years after the birth of Jesus, when St Francis of Assisi asked the Pope if he could stage a nativity scene in an Italian cave with an Ox and a donkey.

All the information, or should I say, what little information we have about the first Christmas, can be found in the Gospels of Luke and Matthew.

Firstly we have no idea how Mary got to Bethlehem, no donkeys are mentioned. 

We don’t know where Mary and Joseph stayed, no Innkeepers are mentioned or any stables. We do know that Jesus was laid in a manger which leads us to think that there were animals there. No. no mention of any oxen, sheep, cows, chickens or lobsters.

An Angel did appear to the shepherds on the hillside to tell them of Jesus’ birth, but it doesn’t say that he sang.

We know that some shepherds came and some Kings. Well, actually, no, not Kings. Magi. Magi were wise men, probably astrologers. And there were three, right? Well, we don’t know. They bought three gifts but there could have been 5, 6 or 20 of them.

But surely we know when all this took place. Well, the latest on that is that, err, no, not really. Most scholars now put Jesus’ birthday as sometime from 7BC-2BC.

So once we strip it all back what are left with? Mary and Joseph somehow got to Bethlehem. It was busy as there was a census and they stayed somewhere with a manger. She had a baby. Shepherds came and wise men with 3 gifts.

So no donkey, no Innkeeper, no stable, no animals, no kings. Bit of a let-down really.

Or maybe we’re missing the point?

The biggest, life changing, revolutionary and most surprising birth in history had just happened. God had come to earth in the form of a vulnerable, helpless baby. Not born into royalty, in a palace to a King and a Queen but to an unmarried teenager and her boyfriend in a small run down town. 

God chose to enter our world in this way to show us the love on offer to each one of us through his son. Simple really. We can dress it up all we want with donkeys, wise men, angels, stables and Innkeepers but the message remains the same 1000’s of years later. God came as one of us to show us the way to live and the way to love.

So this Christmas maybe it’s time to strip it back. Maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s a 5 ft or a 6 ft tree, maybe it doesn’t matter that the Angel is a bit skew whiff on the top. And maybe Vogue will have to find another tree for their front cover.

Let us pray
Father, we thank you for all you have given us and most of all we thank you for your son Jesus Christ. We ask that you would help us to hold him in our hearts this Christmas and let the love you have for us overflow to our friends, families and neighbours.

Rev'd Kia

Sunday 18 December - The  Fourth of Advent

Texts: Isaiah 7 verses 10-16, Matthew 1 verses 18-end

Emmanuel! God with us. What do those words mean to you or are they, to be honest, just another part of the complex  jigsaw puzzle which is Christmas? We have all sung quite lustily I’m sure,  O come, O come Emmanuel, but how far have we allowed  those words to penetrate  into our inner conscience and thus, at least in part, reveal  the immense  depth of their meaning, or do they simply remain an unconsidered  part of the Advent, Christmas tradition. God with us! God here in this church this morning; God back in our homes; God in our villages and towns; God in the farthest flung parts of the globe. Can we affirm that this is what we truly believe or are we paying lip service to the idea that God truly, truly is ever present, ever with us? Now? This minute, tomorrow and all the days ahead and beyond this life to the life that lies beyond

If we go back to the times both before and at that of the birth of Emmanuel who is Jesus Christ our Lord God was regarded as truly awesome figure, the Holy of Holies kept hidden away from God’s children only to be approached once a year by the current High Priest. A God who was seen, I am sur, by most people of the time as utterly remote and as far removed from the ordinariness of their lives as it was possible to be. God was very much the province of the elite of society who provided others with a plethora of rules which must be adhered to if they were to worship God in the correct manner. Rules that, in effect, far too often prevented them from even beginning to come close to God.

And then we have Isaiah and, indeed, other prophets forecasting the actual physical coming of the Lord, the coming of Emmanuel, the coming of God into the very lives of ordinary people to walk and talk and eat with them, to share in their joys and more importantly their sorrows. What a concept! What an amazing concept far too hard, I think, for any to properly comprehend and even after Jesus was born people, including his own cousin John, queried again and again if he truly was the Messiah. Could this perfectly ordinary man be seen as being God with us?  If we had been alive then what would we have thought? Would we in all honesty have been able, like Peter, to say with utter conviction ‘You are the Messiah.’  I think I would have struggled, especially given the times and the way God was thought of then. We have had over two thousand years to assimilate the facts and to believe that Mary’s son whose name was to be Jesus was the one to whom Isaiah was referring and who would save us from our sins, would redeem fallen Israel, fallen Britain, fallen Coldharbour. Even now the concept if properly thought about is beyond our rational processes.

At the beginning of this talk I asked if we could recognise the presence of God in this church, in our homes, in our world, but now I ask can we recognize that presence actually within us or is that asking too much? When we sing those words from O little town of Bethlehem do we know what it is we are asking? ‘O holy child of Bethlehem, descend to us we pray; cast out our sin, and enter in, be born in us today. We hear the Christmas angels the great glad tidings tell; O come to us abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel.’ Will we know that Holy child descending right here into our parish of Coldharbour, our own  homes to redeem and save us in his infinite grace from all those sins that come between us and the utter purity that is God? 

In Old Testament times God was presumed to be kept separate and hidden away in the inner sanctuary of the Holy of Holies but now if we mean the words we sing we are recognizing that each and everyone of us provides an inner sanctuary for the presence of God, Emmanuel? We too, like Mary, can be enabled by the power of the Holy Spirit to give birth to that holy child.  Can we pray  these words of St Patrick and know their incarnational truth: Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me,  Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit, Christ when I stand, Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,  Christ in every eye that sees me, Christ in every ear that hears me.

Just a week until we go with the shepherds to see that thing which has come to pass, to hear the song of the angels glorifying God in the highest and in the lowest and, as we kneel in wonder and awe at the mystery that is the incarnation of Emmanuel with us, the  life that  is the light of all people that has come to our fallen world, pray that the Christ Child will also be born in us and that we may  bear a glimmer of the light that is God’s love to all whom we meet and in that meeting see the responding glimmer of the love within them.

Virginia Smith

Sunday 11 December - The Third of Advent

Kia's homily for today is in two parts - each focussing on our readings

Reading: Luke 1 verses 26-38

The angel Gabriel is sent with an extraordinary message to Nazareth, to an unmarried girl called Mary. She will miraculously bear a child who will be the Son of the Most High, the promised Messiah who will sit on the throne of David and will rule over Israel for ever in a kingdom that will never end.

Familiarity with the Christmas story often makes us overlook the details.

First, in this culture, as in the rural middle East today – a woman had to belong to someone, and her sexual purity was enormously valued. So at a relatively young age – anything from 12-14 – a marriage would be arranged with someone suitable.

There would then follow a legally binding engagement – the pledged to be marry part – in which the girl stayed with her parents under supervision. Only after this did the formal wedding occur; after which, she moved to her husband’s house. 

These traditions are important in understanding what happens with Mary, who is in the ‘in-between stage’ of the marriage process: still with her parents but legally bound to Joseph.

What happens is remarkable…

Consider the time.

At least 400 years have passed since the last book of the Old Testament was written. Silence has fallen on God’s people.

Consider the place.

Nazareth was as far as you could get from the Temple in Jerusalem and there were longstanding suspicions that here the Jewish faith – and the Jewish people – had become polluted by the non-Jews. ‘Galilee of the Gentiles’ is the term used in Isaiah 9. It is not a promising place.

Consider the person.

Given Mary’s youth, the status of women and that nothing is said to her parents, we may presume that she was, in effect, of no significance. That is reinforced after Jesus is born and she and Joseph give offerings for the infant Jesus: they give the sacrifices expected of poor people.

A nobody girl in a nowhere town at a time when Jewish history appears to be going nowhere.

There is an encouragement here – we may sometimes think that we can’t make much of a difference – a bit of a nobody, in an out of the way place with nothing much going on. But you never know – we may well be in for a heavenly surprise!

Let’s carry on with the story with our second reading.

Reading: Luke 1 verses 46-55

The announcement that Gabriel makes to Mary is probably one of the most extraordinary statements ever made to anybody. It’s not just that she will have a son from a miraculous conception but that in him all the prophecies of the Old Testament will be fulfilled. The promises she is given are utterly overwhelming and, as she heard them, I wonder if Mary wrestled with three emotions.

Mary must have been afraid.

We perceive angels as harmless, but from what we learn in the Bible, angels are holy and powerful, even wise and saintly people are reduced to quivering wrecks. How would we feel if one was to approach us?!

Mary must have puzzled. – perhaps a slight understatement!

The promises are so extensive and extraordinary that even to try and take them in must have been demanding – if not, near impossible. You can imagine half a dozen questions surfacing in her mind. Who? What? Why? When? And of course – Why me?

Mary must have faced doubt.

What is promised seems to go beyond everything remotely believable. She must have felt that the angel had got the wrong village, the wrong house,  the wrong Mary. Indeed, Mary feels obliged to point out to the angel the basic facts of biology: as a virgin she is going to find producing a baby a little difficult!

Yet Mary’s final response is mindblowing and worthy of praise.

‘I am the Lord’s servant; may it be to me according to your word’. And the Magnificat we have just heard expands on this acceptance and utter confidence in the truth of the angels’ words.

There is a contrast here that shouldn’t be overlooked: Zechariah the priest, old in years and full of knowledge, dithers over the angels’ words; Mary, a teenager, simply says, ‘May it happen as you have said’.

There are at least two things we can learn from this.

First, don’t let inexperience, lack of knowledge or youth make you think that God can’t use you. Christianity has had two thousand years of the church as a professional organisation, full of educated people, yet, as he did with Mary, God often makes a detour around so called ‘professionals’ and instead uses people who do not meet the usual criteria.

Second, when you feel God nudging you to do something, just say yes. But, as Mary’s example demonstrates, even when fear, puzzlement and doubt are in the air, obedience to God is the best policy.

As Francis of Assis said – ‘Start by doing what is necessary; then do what is possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible’.

So let us take a moment and consider what saying yes to God in our own lives would look like.

Has something been nagging at you, has God been encouraging you to get in touch with someone, to build bridges, to step out of your comfort zone? To go deeper with him in your discipleship? 

But life isn’t as straight forward as just saying yes and then we follow a straight path. It’s a great start but then the journey just begins.

We can often find ourselves echoing Mary’s words – in some translations it says ‘She was much perplexed’.

Life throws us a curve ball – we are led out of our familiar spiritual territory and into Holy bewilderment as we spend a lifetime of pondering, wondering, questioning and wrestling. This is necessary if we want to grow in our life as disciples.

And we are in good company.

Our Yes to God is our first consent to a lifetime of adventure as we learn what it looks like to live life to the full. But it is not without its confusions as we try and live our lives within the constructs of this world with all the paradoxes surrounding us.

This is of course what Mary has to do in the aftermath of Gabriel’s announcement. She has to consent to evolve. To wonder. To stretch. She has to learn that faith and doubt are not opposites – that beyond all the easy platitudes and pieties of religion, we serve a God who dwells in Mystery.

If we agree to embark on a journey with this God, we will face periods of bewilderment.

But this frightens us, so we compartmentalise our spiritual lives, trying to hold our relationships with God at a sanitized distance, removed from our actual circumstances. We don’t realise that such efforts leave us with a faith that’s rigid, inflexible, and stale.

In his wise and beautiful memoir, My Bright Abyss, Poet Christian Wiman writes,
Life is not an error, even when it is. That is to say, whatever faith you emerge with at the end of your life is going to be not simply affected by that life but intimately dependant upon it, for faith in God is, in the deepest sense, faith in life – which means that even the staunchest life of faith is a life of great change. It follows that if you believe at 50 what you believed at 15, then you have not really lived – or have denied the reality of your life.

In other words, it’s when our inherited beliefs collide with the messy circumstances of our lives that we go from a two-dimensional faith to one that is vibrant and textured.

So, can we say Yes with Mary? Yes, to a God we can never fully comprehend, but trust in the bigger better plan. Can we trust that God is in charge. And are we ready to have our conception of that God change as we journey through our lives?

Big questions for Advent as we wait. Wait for the baby, wait for the man and wait for God to birth something new in each one of us.

Rev'd Kia

Sunday 4 December - The Second of Advent

Texts: Isaiah 11 verses 1-10,  Matthew 3 verses 1-12

This is the Sunday in Advent when we remember the part that John the Baptist played in the coming of our Lord. John the Baptist who came to fulfil the prophesy of Isaiah of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’

And as I was thinking about writing this homily I was struck by the idea that in John the Baptist and Jesus we have a ‘bad cop’, ‘good cop’ scenario. Two men who outwardly, at least, appear completely different, be it in their clothing, their life- style or their teaching and preaching.  John, the lonely fiery preacher whose austere life style was one of genuine abstemiousness with his camel hair clothing and eating what was surely a very strange and minimal diet. Compare him to Jesus, who was far more of a bon viveur whose clothing included a rather upmarket seamless robe and who really relished and enjoyed a convivial meal with good food and drink. John who spoke with distaste to the people who flocked to hear him calling them vipers and warning them in no uncertain terms of the wrath to come if they did not repent and change their ways. Jesus who spoke words of love, healing the sick, feeding the hungry. Could there be such a marked contrast? Yet, surely, at heart they were the same in wanting people to turn away from all the temptations of the material world and the evils that such temptation lead to and find, instead, the straight path that leads to God.

And here it is interesting that Isaiah spoke of the straight paths in his prophesy for by the time John was born the Romans were in power and, as we all know, they were dab hands at building remarkably straight paths. Straight paths which we can still travel on today and wonder just how straight they are compared to the ‘rolling English road.’ So, surely, when John told the people he was the one to make straight the path for the Lord they would immediately have understood the metaphor. The Romans built their roads to lead to the centre of imperial power; the Lord’s roads which John began building lead to the seat of divine power.

And to make these paths straight for the Lord meant that people had to sort out the tangle of all the diversion in their lives, reverse the wrong directions they had allowed themselves to be led into and generally straighten themselves out.  

The sort of preaching which John engaged in is no longer popular today; we do not have hell fire sermons, or at least I haven’t heard any of late. But, that said, we do need to be aware that we may need considerable straightening ourselves if we are to travel on that divine road without being diverted by signs that direct us to the temptations and frivolities of the material world. Signs to byways that can look so alluring compared to the seemingly monotonous direction of what at times may appear the endless straight road.

And this season of Advent is, of course, intended to become that time of preparation for the coming of the Lord and once it really was a penitential season where there was no suggestion of the riches that accompany Christmas but, in its place, fasting and prayer; a contemplative time, a holy time.  But now some two thousand years since all the miraculous wonder and awe of the coming of the Lord, might I suggest that fasting has given way to a plethora of pre- Christmas parties where we are tempted by so much festive food,  with not a locust in sight, and in place of prayer a general frantic bustling as we try to create that perfect Christmas that the advertisers are so expert at portraying and tempting us to emulate, regardless of cost.  Quite what John would make of it all I dread to think but I suspect that he would, if nothing else,, be saddened that so many seem to be travelling on roads which are far from straight and which draw us away from that divine road. What I do know is that any mortifying of the flesh will come after Christmas as you hope to remove both those extra pounds of body weight and of increased  debt after all the eating and spending.

This is not a hell fire sermon, and I doubt if I could give one however hard I tried, but that said I do seriously think that we do need to reflect upon just what road we are attempting to travel upon to reach Bethlehem. Is the road we are on so off the beaten track of true Advent preparation and so full of twists and turns demanded by those tempting sign posts that point to the delights of material stopping places that, assuming we do arrive at that humblest of birth places, we are too exhausted, too drained to take in what we are seeing or hearing? Glitter and sparkle detract from that one brilliant Christmas star ablaze in the darkness of the night sky; Christmas jingles and raucous jollity drown out the singing of the angels; demands of others take us away from the imperative to worship in complete humility alongside the shepherds; the shepherds who had indeed left everything of previous importance in their lives to race down the straight road to Bethlehem.

I pray that all of us can accept that we may well need to readjust our Satnavs to ensure that we, too, like John are making the path straight for our Lord and that travelling on this path, the way of peace, we may like the shepherds be guided to the very heart of Christmas, to be enfolded within the love of God revealed within the Christchild.

Virginia Smith

Sunday 27 November - The First of Advent

Texts: Isaiah 2 verses1-5, Romans 13 verses11-end

I’d like to start by telling you a story. It’s from a book called ‘The Orthodox Heretic’ by Peter Rollins. It’s called awaiting the Messiah.

‘There is an ancient story that speaks of a second coming of the Messiah. It is said that he arrived anonymously one dull Monday morning at the gates of a great city to go about his Father’s business.

There was much for him to do. While many years had passed since his last visit, the same suffering was present all around. Still there were the poor, the sick, and the oppressed. Still there were the outcasts, and still there were the righteous who pitied them, and the authorities who exploited them.

For a long time no-one took any notice of this desert wanderer with his weather-beaten face and ragged, dusty clothes – this quiet man who spent his time living among the sick and unwanted. The great city laboured on like a mammoth beast, ignorant of the one who dwelt within its bowels.

The story goes that the Messiah eventually decided to reveal his identity to a chosen few who had remained faithful to his teachings. These people met together in a tiny, unknown church on the outskirts of the city to pray and to serve the poor.

As the Messiah entered the modest sanctuary one Sunday morning, his eyes fell upon the tiny group huddled in the corner, each one praying and weeping for the day of the Lord. As they prayed, those who had gathered in the church slowly began to feel the gaze of Christ penetrate their souls. Silence began to descend withing the circle as they realised who had entered their sacred home.

For a time no-one dared speak. Then the leader of the group gathered her courage, approached Christ, fell at his feet, and cried, “We have waited so long for your return. For so many years we have waited patiently for you to come. Today, as with every other day, we prayed passionately for your arrival.”

Then she stood up and looked at Christ in the eyes:
“Now that you are with us we have but one question.”

Christ listened, knowing already what it would be.
“Tell us, Christ, when will you arrive?”

The Messiah did not answer but simply smiled. Then he joined the others in their prayers and tears.

He remains there still, to this very day, waiting, watching, and serving in that tiny, unknown church on the outskirts of the city.

In our Bible readings we have heard from the prophet Isaiah who is pointing to a time of peace and communion with God, and in Romans, Paul is urging his listeners to awake and be ready for the return of Christ. Both speak of a time to come, a time in the future but with a need to be ready and alert for what is to come.
A time of waiting.
A time to prepare.
A time to wake up.

Advent is a time rich in symbolism. Darkness to light. Asleep to awake.

But these things don’t just happen. There is a transition period from dark to light, asleep to awake. A transformation occurs.

The darkness gradually recedes and gives way to the dawn and if you’re anything like me it takes a little while to come to, out of a deep slumber to fully functioning.

For most of us it is the same in our walk with God. There may have been a road to Damascus experience when our scales fell away from our eyes and suddenly we saw the world clearly for the first time or, more likely, we have had to rub our eyes quite vigorously at times as we blink in the strong sunlit reality of God’s world.

We live in the now and not yet times. We have had the incarnational mystery of Jesus showing us how to live life in all it’s fullness, but we operate within the twilight of our fallen world where it is not easy to shine brightly 24/7; where it is easy to confuse the morals of the world with its success driven, materialistic culture with our own success in life.

The story I read at the beginning is challenging. Would we recognise Jesus when he comes again, or would we be so caught up with our own troubles and woes that although he stood before us we could not see him? Would we know what we were even looking for?

We have a great gift to help us to navigate in this world, to help us to recognise Jesus, to guide us, renew us, encourage us and affirm us. God knew these times would be tricky so he gave us the Holy Spirit. We have the capacity within us to live in the light, to wake up to God’s reality and to be signposts for others who are searching.

How bright is our light shining today? How can we ensure we stay close to God, to stay awake, to thrive and flourish now in the waiting?

By being church is one way. And what I mean by that is by supporting each other in our Christian faith, praying together, loving each other, allowing God to use us by sharing the fruits and gifts of the Holy Spirit with each other and those we meet – demonstrating love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.

These are attractive qualities and will attract attention in our self-centred society, and, if we allow it, will point to Jesus.

This Advent as we wait we can lean into and glean strength from God with us, Emmanuel, and the Holy Spirit shining his light before us, around us and within us as we share the love of Jesus. We have a great gift to offer the world but so often we hide it. Let us uncover our light this advent and not be ashamed to tell others what gives us hope, what gives us strength and what gives us the power to love others as God loves us.

Let us pray,
Father, help us to surrender to your love and your will in our lives. May we shine brightly for you this Advent season and may others see something of you in us we pray. Amen.

Rev'd Kia Pakenham

Sunday 20 November, Feast of Christ the King

Texts: Jeremiah 23 verses 1-6, John 18 verses 33-37

Just a short time ago a prince stood by the bed of his dying Mother and as she drew her last breath on this earth he transformed not from a frog to a prince but from a prince to a king. To effect this transition nothing more was required of him; his lifetime destiny was fulfilled without any effort on his part, it just happened in the space of a moment as that last breath of his Mother the Queen was expended. Nothing outwardly had changed and yet for him everything had changed as he was acknowledged as King Charles the Third and we all learned to sing God save the King after all those years of singing God save the Queen.

How different was our Lord’s assumption of his true sovereignty for it could only be realised through intense and agonising pain both physical and mental and it was with his own last gasping breath that the crown was truly his. No longer a mockery of a crown made of piercing thorns but the crown of heaven which established him as ruler over all. Not just a ruler of Israel or some other single nation but ruler of all the kingdoms of this earth. The notice pinned above his head proclaiming him to be King of the Jews was made in jest but that dying breath revealed it was, in fact, no jest but the realisation of God’s will that His Son should come and give his life for us, his adopted children, that we might know the truth of a divine monarch reigning over all his children , his subjects.

Today we celebrate that kingship and I always regard this festival as one of the really joyous ones with its regal red colourings and such wonderful hymns as we are enjoying this evening which glorify the majesty of Christ. And, of course, for us in Coldharbour it is also our patronal festival to give us all the more reason to celebrate with joyful thanksgiving. To celebrate having a King who is so unlike any other monarch that has ever been. To celebrate a king whose rule is a complete paradox compared to that of earthly rulers, which is why Pilate had such difficulty in comprehending the sovereignty of Jesus; a sovereignty which is completely real and yet not of this world.

This is a King who is often referred to as a servant king; a servant king who washes the feet of his subjects; a servant king who touches the leprous and the sick; a servant king who feeds his people; a servant king who ultimately makes the supreme sacrifice that of giving his life for us. There can be no comparison between Christ the King and our earthly rulers although, at times, we can see in the lives of exceptional monarchs like our late lamented Queen a true sense of a commitment to lifelong duty and service.

King Charles, whatever his personal inclinations may be, must, as Head of State, reflect the aspirations of this nation to be of far more importance than its size would indicate and hence the need for royal palaces and royal gardens and for sumptuous state occasions, full of pomp and ceremony. Whereas Christ the King has no such trappings; Christ the King reflects the aspirations of His Kingdom by simple acts of love and care, acts of compassion and respect for all. Simple acts which are clothed, not in regal purple, but in all the majesty and wonder of God’s love for us.  Simple acts which we, as his subjects, are called to emulate and make central to our lives if we are to truly serve him. Four lines of our last hymn this evening say it all: ‘As thou Lord has loved for others, so may we for others live. Grant, O grant our hope’s fruition: here on earth thy will be done,’

Christ our King and Saviour grant that by the power of the Holy Spirit  we may be inspired to serve you; that filled with breath anew we may love what thou dost love and do what thou wouldst do. Amen

The Kingdom by R S Thomas
It’s a long way off but inside it
There are quite different things going on;
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It’s a long way off, but to get
There takes no time and admission 
Is free, if you will purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf. 

Virginia Smith

Sunday 13 November, Remembrance Sunday

Why are they selling poppies Mummy?         
Selling poppies in town today
‘The poppies, child, are flowers of love
For the men who marched away.’
‘But why have they chosen a poppy, Mummy,
Why are the poppies so red?’ 
‘Red is the colour of blood, my child                      ,     
The blood our soldiers shed.’

‘The heart of the poppy is black, Mummy,
Why does it have to be black?’
‘Black, my child, is the symbol of grief
For the men who never came back.’
‘But why, Mummy, are you crying so?
Your tears are giving you pain.’
‘My tears are my fears for you, my child,
For the world is-FORGETTING AGAIN.’

Lord grant that we may never forget and learn to live in trust and in love for all your people.

There were those who believed that they were giving themselves to build a world for us. They died for the future, for an ideal world that we could live in, an earth at peace. Now it is our turn to strive for peace on earth. War is not only made by statesmen. It is made by us, ordinary people who strive to achieve our own selfish ends, quarrelling and hating as we pursue our petty, sordid, self-seeking quest. We can make peace, with God’s help, if we have faith, and hope, and love for one another. We are responsible for peace. Let us begin here, to build what the dead of the wars left unfinished. Perhaps we were not worth dying for; but without their sacrifice we would not be alive today.
Let us thank God for them and let us honour them.                    Michael Davis

And as the war in Ukraine continues, a war which is almost on our doorsteps and which has left such destruction and grief in its wake  it is perhaps time to pray again the prayer written  at the beginning of this terrible conflict back in February by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York.

God of peace and justice, we pray for the people of Ukraine today. We pray for peace and the laying down of weapons.  We pray for all those who fear for tomorrow, that your Spirit of comfort would draw near to them. We pray for those with power over war or peace, for wisdom, discernment and compassion to guide their decisions. Above all, we pray for all your precious children, at risk and in fear, that you would hold and protect them. We pray in the name of Jesus, the Prince of Peace. Amen

Virginia Smith

Sunday 6 November, All Souls

Only a few weeks ago I am sure most of us here were glued to the television to watch what has to rate as one of the most impressive funerals ever staged with its mixture of ceremonial pomp and heartfelt, incredibly moving and quite beautiful worship. The funeral of our beloved Queen Elizabeth the Second was one that I am sure none of us will forget. But I wonder if, like me, you found the tears simply would not stop coming and I seemed to have a permanent lump in my throat for most of that day and indeed also when  the following day I read the newspaper reports of that long, long  funeral day? 

I have never met the Queen; she was neither a slight acquaintance nor a close and much loved friend but, in a way, I did know her,  just as all her subjects did both here and in the Commonwealth. She had been a part of my life, from the time when I remember I had a much treasured book about the two little princesses to that last final farewell. And reflecting afterwards as to why I was so moved, why the tears would come, I felt the answer lay in the fact that in some way I could not begin to explain her funeral represented, in part, the funerals of so many in which I had attended whether as a member of the congregation or as the officiant.  So many funerals and yet at the majority I held back the tears, even when it was a baby funeral but now, suddenly, this extraordinary State Funeral let loose tears not just for the Queen and her grief stricken family but for all those I’d known who have been commended and committed into the eternal love of God.

You are all here today to remember with love and, quite probably, with tears those whom you have witnessed travelling from your longing to God’s care and, if you are like me, those memories were also tugging at your heart strings on the day of that State funeral. But I do pray that all those memories are deeply precious to you and that each one in some way reflects the love, the affection, the fun and also the sorrows that you shared. Cherished, wonderful memories that are stored in your very own Memory Library where each and every one is, I am sure, truly well thumbed. Simple memories such as of hearing one’s name called to come in for supper or of the hand sewn blanket made by a beloved Grandmother. Some memories will be yours alone and others you will happily share, maybe with someone who has that same incident in their Memory Library or else in the course of a conversation where it seems appropriate to bring it out and show it to others. I know, with my clerical collar on, I will, when appropriate, share the memories of my children’s illnesses with parents at the beside of a sick child, or my own personal experiences of grief with those who need the reassurance that they are not going mad and that grief can be the cruellest taskmaster.  But, as I do this, I never forget that these memories are superseded by the wealth of good memories, of magical memories, of thankful memories and that all these memories are tinged with my Christian faith that our earthly deaths are not and cannot be the end. A faith that Her Majesty held and bore testimony to throughout her life as she continued, no matter what, to serve this nation with fortitude, courage and dignity until God called home such a long serving and truly faithful servant.

And there is, I think, one other memory, or rather memories, in our box that we may not even be properly aware of and that is the memory of all those times when we were made so acutely aware of God’s presence in our lives and the lives of those we loved. The God to whom we lift our eyes; the God who never sleeps but watches over us and always cares for us; the God who upholds us when grief strikes us down;  the God with whom, ultimately, we will dwell for ever in the home his Son Jesus Christ has prepared for us, When we are struggling with those tear laden memories let us look for those possibly dusty memories and bring them  from the box and feel again the wonderful uplifting reassurance of hope in God’s infinitely compassionate and caring love for each of us his children. A love which will never desert us in this earthly life and beyond. I would like to end this reflection with the words of part of a poem by Malcolm Guite.

Lines which  so cleverly contrasts  the act of remembering with that of being re-membered, that is  made whole again through his love. 

The night withdrew and joy came in the morning, when I remembered that I was remembered. That even through the bitter tears of mourning I was sustained. The darkest powers were hindered in their insidious work within my soul. And I was held together and remembered by your unceasing love.

They are not dead who leave us this great heritage of remembering joy. 
They still live in our hearts, in the happiness we knew, in the dreams we shared. 
They still breathe, in the lingering fragrance, wind blown, from their favourite flowers.
They still smile in the moonlight’s silver, and laugh in the sunlight’s gold. 
They still speak in the echoes of the words we’ve heard them say again and again.
They are not dead; their memory is warm in our hearts, comfort in our sorrow.
They are not apart from us but part of us.
For love is eternal, and those we love shall be with us throughout all eternity

Being a fifth Sunday, when we have a Benefice service, there was no service in Christ Church on Sunday 30 October

Sunday 23 October

Celebrating the 150th Anniversary of the Birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams

Texts: Psalm 104, Luke 15 verses 1-11

Having a compliment paid to one can be a very pleasing experience although we also recognize that sometimes they can convey a hidden message such as ‘You are looking well.’ being code for ‘Oh my goodness you have put on weight!’, so I wonder what Dr Ralph Vaughan Williams would have made of this tribute paid to him by a lady admirer: ‘I liked it when Mr Vaughan Williams played the organ sometimes. I admired him immensely because he was tall and nice and played so beautifully.’  Being tall and nice being given preference over his musical abilities and what about that word ‘sometimes’ which certainly allows for two very different interpretations. But maybe I am being unjust to the lady in question as she did go on to say ‘he seemed to make the organ speak.’ Mind you Vaughan Williams could also provide a slightly mixed compliment as on the occasion he wrote of Miss Ault, once organist here in Christchurch, as a ‘most efficient player’, and who, at a recital, played pieces which were ‘simple and mostly of the very best.’ Mostly of the best?!

If you are, as I am a listener to Radio 3, you cannot but have been made aware that they were determined to celebrate the one hundredth and fiftieth anniversary of Vaughan Williams’ birth in a big way and we had programme after programme devoted to his vast catalogue of  musical opuses and to discussion of individual works as well as his private life. Vaughan Williams, our own local composer, who of course founded the Leith Hill festival which continues to this day and which he himself conducted for fifty years. His opus includes so much but what we will perhaps mostly remember today is his magnificent compilation of the English hymnal which contain hymns such as all those we are singing today set to some of his glorious melodies. 

Vaughan Williams, having had a spell as a proclaimed atheist when younger (over exposure to school chapel going can have that effect) then softened this hard line stance and became, in the description of one biographer, a ‘cheerful agnostic’. He loved the Authorised Version of the Bible, and a biographer again tells us that its beauty remained one of his essential companions throughout his life. And it was surely influenced by the beauty of the words, the beauty of the poetry that inspired him to write such often transcendental music to reflect, interpret, magnify and enhance that beauty. Music in which he wanted, perhaps more than anything else, to carry on and keep alight the great English tradition of choral church music down through the ages from Thomas Tallis to his idol Hubert Parry, who taught him to play the organ. Music which brings to worship a whole new dimension of uplifting and sacred beauty 

Just a ‘Cheerful agnostic’? Or was he in reality far more than that as he bore a lifetime of the most excellent and diverse musical fruit. Who, listening to the music we are hearing and singing today, will not have some experience of the sublime, which is the song of angels, the music of the spheres, the very presence of the wonder, magnificence  and the  mystery which is God Himself.  Perhaps, as we participate in the glories of this service, we will even be  blessed with a very real sense of transcendence. So, too, a piece like The Lark Ascending will surely lift our thoughts, our hearts heavenwards and it is no wonder to me that it is a piece so often heard at a funeral. And again, at Christmas as we sing O Little Town of Bethlehem the words and the tune so perfectly complimenting and enhancing each other do you, like me, have a frisson of sheer delight and joy as we celebrate once again the birth of the Christ Child with that carol? I wonder if Vaughan Williams would have possibly agreed though, maybe, not in the same words with the words of Hildegarde of Bingen ‘My new song must float like a feather on the breath of God.’ Isn’t that a wonderful image and isn’t it true of some of the music we are hearing today. 

Malcolm Guite wrote these words ‘We wait to hear the whole creation sing, but even here today, we start the song, begin the praise of heaven’s Lord and King.’ Thanks to all the delights and richness of the fruits that Vaughan Williams has left us, whether we are, in truth, contented agnostics or fully fledged, contented believers, we are given the means to open our ears, open our mouths, open our hearts and join in the harmonies of earth and heaven; to sing together with the angels  as surely Vaughan Williams intended us  to do in voicing our praise to the  glory of God  the Highest.’ And thus in such praise be filled with contented joy.

Virginia Smith

Sunday 16 October

Texts: 1 Kings 8 verses 22-30, Ephesians 4 verses 1-7, 11-16

We are just three days short of the original date in 1848 when this church was consecrated by the then Bishop of Winchester initially as the delightfully termed ‘Chapel of Ease’ and then, two years later, as a parish church in its own right. So we are just a year away from its one hundred and seventy fifth anniversary and I wonder how many people through the years have come to worship here; to be baptised, married or buried here. No doubt the registers could tell us but for us this evening it is the very fact that this beautiful church designed in part to reflect the beauty of holiness is still active and central to the community of Coldharbour. Reading the excellent potted history of the church on the website it makes clear that since its consecration there have been considerable changes to the structure including the cross beans which were inserted to ensure the walls didn’t bulge outwards and the roof to sag. Not something anyone would have wanted to happen. And, of course, in more recent years there has been the making of the Annabel room and the new lighting to list just two improvements of which I am sure the original architect Benjamin Ferry would have approved of, or at least I do hope he would.

But of course any church is, in effect, far far more than the building, for it is the people who come and worship that bring it alive and ensure that the space, within which was built to reflect the glory of God,  is filled with worship and praise to really bring that glory to reality. As we heard in our second reading we are all part of that church, the body of Christ, each of us bringing our own gifts to be used in building up and maintaining that body as healthy and hence promoting, as Paul writes, ‘the body’s growth in the building up in love.’  And just as the building itself has been altered and improved over its lifetime, so the worshipping body has altered and, I hope would agree with me, improved in some ways. For faith has to be a living faith, a vibrant faith and reflect the spirit of the times. Just as the new lighting has helped those with poor eyesight to see better and lit up even more effectively the beauty of the church’s features so, in our worship, we should surely look for new ways of worship to shed even greater light so that we can rejoice that we are given increased insight into the glory that is the gospel of Christ. Greater insight and understanding into the mystery that is God our Father both for those who count themselves cradle Christians and those who are new to the church or on the fringes of faith.  This does not, of course, mean dispensing with all the old ways, such as this beautiful service of Evensong with all the wonderful poetry of its much loved words, but this is not, and cannot be, for everyone. If we stuck simply to the Book of Common Prayer how quickly would the walls bulge outwards and the roof sag.  We need the crossbeams of more modern worship and imaginative and easily accessible liturgy and music to ensure the wellbeing of the structure of the Body of Christ here in this parish of Coldharbour. Just as none of us ladies here would like to be encased in the whale bone corsets of those Victorian ladies who first attended this church, so we need to think if we are still tending to keep our worship within similar corsets, making worship for some restrictive and uncomfortable. All of us, I believe, need to feel free to use all our many gifts in the power of the Holy Spirit with imagination and with an innate sense of what makes worship come alive, and fill this church with wonder and delight at being together as one body in the presence of God.

Whether Christ Church will celebrate another one hundred and seventy four years of its consecration is not for us to worry about but guided by the hand of God let us endeavour to use all our gifts as one body to ensure we celebrate its two hundredth with worship which continues to keep alive the beauty of holiness and the glory of wonder expressed in word and music in this sacred space

Virginia Smith

Sunday 9 October

Text: Luke 17 verses11-19

Just how good are you at saying Thank You? Are you unfailingly polite or maybe let’s be honest a tiny bit casual with your ‘thank you’s’, your expressions of gratitude? And here I can admit to what makes me really explode with some decidedly unflattering language and that is when I have oh so generously made space for another car to pull out in front of me and not a suggestion of a thank you. Grrrr! I’m quite sure this does NOT apply to any of you. Likewise, my daughter was also expressing herself forcibly as to the failure of a nephew to acknowledge the present she had sent for his birthday. 

In today’s age, writing thank you letters is probably a pretty rare occurrence among the so-called Generation Z and Millennials; in other words those aged between seven and forty- one, but they can of course express their thanks by texting, e-mail, Whats App Groups and using their mobile phones to actually voice their thanks. Whereas those of us who feature at the other end of the Generation Scale may at the very least still write a pretty notelet to express our gratitude for a gift or being treated to some delicious meal. 

But, given that customs chang,e does saying ‘Thank You’ matter or is it a form of etiquette which is a bit old fashioned? And thinking about this I am reminded of that amazing queue of people who wanted to witness the lying-in-state of our late lamented Queen Elizabeth and in so doing express their thanks for her incredible example of life-long service and duty to this nation and its people. So no! I am sure thanks are still very much a part of life but maybe our sense of gratitude has, in some instances, been replaced by a sense of entitlement. And here I note how many more complaints our hospitals receive from aggrieved patients and families than genuine thanks for their completely free treatment and for staff who, although not perfect, (and who is?,) work extraordinary hours to try to effect the healing of those in their care. Is this a perfect modern-day example of the nine who never offered Jesus, the supreme healer, a word of thanks, and the one who turned back and showed true gratitude for the miracle of his cure from the dreaded disease of leprosy? Have we all been unwittingly feeding our sense of entitlement, be it to medical care with not a waiting list in sight, education, clean water, well stocked supermarket shelves or indeed our assumed place on our roads?

Have we forgotten just how incredibly blessed we are in this country even when the media is trying to intimate that everything is a disaster and we are living in a time of crisis which is robbing us of our presumed entitlement to cheap energy, cheap food cheap interest rates etcetera, etcetera.  Which is why the poem so beautifully read by John (See below) is so relevant this morning as it recognises that everything in our lives, and I mean everything, is bound up with other people from all around God’s world. How often, if ever, do we say Grace before meals or just start right in as soon as the food is placed in front of us again with that unrecognised innate sense of entitlement to good nourishing food?

God’s world! A world which is crammed full with blessings and the greatest blessing of all surely being that of being counted a child of God, loved and cherished by him even when we sin including the sin of ingratitude when we forget to stop and give him our heartfelt praise and thanks. Again, let us think of those nine lepers who took their healing for granted and recognize, too, how much we simply take for granted and never give a proper thought as to the need to thank God, thank others both known and unknown.

There is a special slot on Radio 4’s Saturday Live programme when individuals express their belated thanks to someone nameless who has in some form of emergency helped them and, because of the circumstances of that event, never properly thanked them. It is a beautiful slot as it reminds us of just how selfless, kind and good perfect strangers can be to those in need and it is touching that the memory has never been allowed to fade and belatedly the thanks are expressed. I recommend a listen one Saturday morning or of course hear it on BBC i player or Catch-up! 

And again, reflecting on all this how often do we properly give thanks for this beautiful church and for the opportunity to worship here week by week with your very own Rector to shepherd and guide you. My brother in the Isle of Wight has not had an incumbent at the church he goes to for over three years, and they have only one Communion service a month taken almost always by retired clergy with Permission to Officiate. Think closer to home of St Mary Magdalene South Holmwood, whose future now they are no longer permitted an incumbent of their very own remains in doubt. For you to have your own Rector albeit shared with Abinger and one as gifted and pastorally sensitive as Kia is I consider a most wonderful blessing and yet I know that like all clergy she will, from time to time, be the butt of complaints and moans, some of which will result as yet again a sense of entitlement as to what you can expect from her forgetting she is but one human being and as such not  and cannot be super human

Gratitude is I strongly believe meant to be an intrinsic part of our Christian faith and thanks and praise should surely be a part of all our prayers. If we are to be like the one leper who returned to give thanks nothing must be assumed, nothing taken for granted but instead we need by the inward working of the holy Spirit to recognize all the blessings of life we encounter day after day all through our lives and give over and over again our wholehearted thanks to a God whose generosity towards us his beloved children knows no bounds. 

I awaken before dawn, go into the kitchen and fix a cup of tea
I light the candle and sit in its glow on the meditation cushion.
Taking my cup in both hands, I lift it to my Lord and give thanks.
The feel of the cup against my palms brings the potter to mind
and I offer a blessing for his hands.

I give thanks for the clay, the glaze and the kiln.
I take a sip and follow the warmth into my body.
I offer a blessing for those who brought electricity to my home,
who dug the ditches for the lines,
who built my home and put in the wires,
who made my tea kettle and brought me water to fill it.

I take a sip and bless the people in India or China who grew the tea,
cultivated it, picked and dried the leaves, took it to market,
handled it through the many transactions to bring it to my home.
I take a sip and bless those people in Florida, California or Central America
who grew the tree that blossomed into flowers.

I give thanks for the warmth of the sun and the rain which turned the blossoms into lemons,
and I bless the hands that picked the fruit, sorted it, touched it as it travelled from the orchard to my table.
I take another sip and bless the hands of those who provided the sugar
which sweetened the tea, harvested the cane, processed it,
bagged it and sent it on its way to me.
I take another sip and lift my cup in gratitude as I feel the interconnection of my body now with theirs,
my blood now with theirs,
my bones now with theirs,
and my heart fills with love for all of creation.
I give thanks.                         Helen Moore

Virginia Smith

Sunday 2 October - Harvest Festival for Abinger and Coldharbour inChrist Church

Harvest Prayers
Led by Lucy Pakenham, assisted by Kia

As we pray my assistant is going to help us – so you may need to keep your eyes open!

Let us pray:

Father God, we come to you this morning to give thanks for your world, to pray for those in need and to ask that your kingdom will come.

See this farmhouse loaf.
It is a large loaf, enough to feed many.  It  reminds us of God’s bounty and provision.
We give thanks for the earth, it’s beauty and abundance and ask forgiveness for the times we have wasted it’s resources and not cared for the environment as we should.
May we always remember to be thankful for all that we have been given and for those who produce our food.

See this wrap.
It has been rolled and stretched thin.
It reminds us of those occasions when we feel stretched and stressed and feel we cannot take or do any more without breaking.
We pray for all who feel they are at breaking point because they have too much to do or because they are in pain.
Help us to recognise our limits, to rest and seek your peace.

See this bagel.
It has a hole.
It reminds us of those holes in our lives where we feel something or someone is missing.
We pray for all who feel lost or lonely, for those who slip through the holes in society.  Help us to be aware of your love and to share that love with others.

See this bread roll.
It is a smaller version of a loaf, similar and yet different.
It reminds us of children.
We pray for all children everywhere, especially those who struggle to be children because poverty or lack of family forces them to be like adults.
Help us to support the children and families in this area.

See this pitta bread.
It is plain and dry.
It reminds us of the places in our world which are dry, where crops do not grow easily, and where just having enough to eat, however plain, is a luxury.
We pray for people everywhere who are hungry and give thanks for aid workers and foodbanks.
Help us to support them however we can, through our prayers and our giving.

See this “best of both” bread.
It uses a mixture of white and wholemeal flour.
It reminds us that difference does not always need to lead to conflict.
We pray for the parts of our world where there is fighting.
Give wisdom and courage to all those with influence and bring your peace.

The earth is fruitful , may we be generous.
The earth is fragile, may we be gentle.
The earth is fractured, may we be just.
Creating God, harvest in us joy and generosity as we together share in thanks and giving.
Amen

Kia's Homily

We’re going to start with a little quiz.
I’m going to give you a line from a book or a film and you’re going to tell me where they’re from.

Start with an easy one.
‘Please sir, can I have some more?’

‘Now he wasn’t hungry any more- and he wasn’t a little caterpillar any more.’

My mama always said, ‘Life is (was) like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.'

“As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.” 

“A census taker once tried to test me. I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.” 

“Fish are friends, not food.”

‘Just one more wafer thin mint’ 

“I’ll get you for this, (Wonka) if it’s the last thing I’ll ever do! I’ve got a blueberry for a daughter.”

Food is one of life’s great pleasures – but as Augustus gloop found, you can have too much of a good thing!
What can you eat just one more of?
For me I can never say no to chocolate, for Guy it’s just one more prawn – what might it be for you? What have you always got room for?
The thing with food is even when you’re full to bursting, eventually you get hungry again.

Our reading this morning follows on from the feeding of the five thousand where, despite there only being five loaves and two fish, Jesus performs a miracle and all the thousands of people eat their fill with baskets left over. 

Their food was scarce, yet Jesus made it plentiful – extravagantly so with leftovers. What does this tell us about God? Partly it speaks of God’s abundance – it speaks of his demonstrative love in wanting to shower us with good things. But, as Jesus goes on to explain in our passage this morning – it is pointing to a deeper meaning.

All our appetites are insatiable – we are always left wanting more of this worlds limited resources, whether that be food, clothes, popularity or money. We are all addicted to the drug of ‘more’.

Jesus offers us an alternative.

‘You see what I did on the mountain with the bread and the fish - I gave you more than you need, more than you could eat. I want to do this with your life.

Come to me and I will satisfy your needs – I will more than satisfy your desires’.

When the disciples demanded more miracles like Moses in the desert Jesus redirects them to God.

It was not Moses but God who provided the manna. It is God, through Jesus that provided for the hungry on the hill. It is our belief and faith in God that quenches our demand for more. 

In relationship with Jesus we can find the contentment and the peace we are so desperately seeking.

We can look all we want, search for satisfaction in the temporal things of life and eventually and when we discover that they can’t ultimately satisfy our cravings for more, we can stop, pause and maybe try a different way.

Jesus says to us ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty’.

Who doesn’t want that?!

So today we celebrate the season of Harvest. We give thanks to God for his ample provision, his extravagant abundance and perhaps most of all we thank him for the living bread we have in Jesus.

Amen.

An early Harvest Festival used to be celebrated at the beginning of the Harvest season on 1 August and was called Lammas, meaning 'loaf Mass'. Farmers made loaves of bread from the fresh wheat crop. These were given to the local church as the Communion bread during a special service thanking God for the harvest.

So it is very apt that this morning we are celebrating communion together with fresh bread and have a wonderful display from our very own master baker Mr Neville Trussler!

Sunday 25 September, 15th After Trinity

Texts: Psalm 91 verses1-6, 14 – end; 1 Timothy 6 verses 6-19

How often have we heard the saying ‘the love of money is the root of all evil’, or even ‘money is the root of all evil’?

As is so often the case with the bible this has been misquoted and misinterpreted by those who would rather use the bible as a stick to beat with than by a tool of love to inspire with.

What Paul actually wrote was ‘for the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pieced themselves with many pains’.

The important words, it seems to me are the small ones – a, kinds and some.

The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. And some have wandered away from the faith.

Money in and of itself is not evil with a capitol E but can lead to distorted values and consequences if our hearts are not first and foremost devoted to God.

Money can be a contentious topic to talk about and a fiercely private one. We tend to keep our finances pretty close to our chests.

I wonder why this is?

Do we feel guilty for having money? If so is it because we have echoes of this passage reverberating in our heads – voices telling us that having money is basically a bad and selfish thing?

Well, fundamentally this is not what these verses are telling us.

Paul is instructing his dear loyal child Timothy in all that is wise and true about the faith so that he can pass on these teachings to his disciples.

Paul is concerned about the motivations and the intentions of Christs’ followers.

This letter presents a vision of household ethics that brings together instructions on Christian godliness, outlines some potential pitfalls and reminds Timothy and the hearers of their public commitment and confession of faith.

So we too can hear it as such.

I’m focussing here on the passage concerning money and being rich, as it is the one most often misheard and the one we perhaps shy away from but within this letter the overriding message is for us to keep firm in the faith; not to be swayed by cultural or materialistic transitory comforts and to know, really know with our whole hearts that a life lived in all it’s fullness depends on us surrendering to God and his way of life.

There is no illusion that this will be easy. Paul recognises this as he uses battle speak to drive home his point – ‘fight the good fight of the faith’.

We will be blown, swayed and tempted but we must stay true to our own good confession made at our Baptism and Confirmation and in the creed we recite each week; that our foundation is in Christ Jesus and our hope and salvation rest in him and not in the temporal things of this world.

For those of us who are rich – and we here represent the top 1% of the world – so all are rich – we have added responsibility.

Money affords us freedom and choice and with freedom and choice comes temptation and harmful desires.

In our marriage we have had periods of wealth and periods of poverty; periods of spontaneous frivolity and periods of being sensible.

We haven’t always been good stewards of our money but mercifully we have a forgiving and compassionate God who delights in our goodness and desire to do his will, even though we stumble and fail.

Money can be a burden if held too tightly if we have a mindset of entitlement. 

So often we hear statements like ‘well, I’ve earnt it, I’ve worked hard for this, it’s mine’, and we build walls around it, become over protective and want to defend it at all costs.

But what if we were to acknowledge that all is gift; the talents with which I earnt my money are a gift from God, my health which enables me to continue earning, is a gift from God. Then perhaps we wouldn’t hold onto our riches so possessively.

Our response to our riches would be gratitude, thanksgiving, and a desire to share with the have nots.

A few years ago Guy and I had a similar vision – that the next chapter of our life would be do something in Ministry together.

Guy has enabled this; through his gifts and talents in business I have had the freedom to offer my services here unpaid. God’s grace has given us the freedom to choose, our financial stability has given us the freedom to choose this way of life, to put God first, to hold riches lightly and to recognise that all is gift, all is grace and through that God has granted us a life in all it’s fullness. **

Don’t get me wrong, I can be as materialistic as the next person – I have a weakness for cars and clothes and the nice things in life and I have to keep this in check daily. It’s a choice and I often choose badly, but I am trying!

Paul is reminding us through Timothy that riches are just a means to an end, part of the tool box in helping build God’s kingdom – in sharing, with humility with those that are less financially fortunate.

The accumulation of wealth is not the goal, the goal is to pursue righteousness – that is being right with God – godliness – what would love do – faith, love, endurance – don’t give up – and gentleness.

Money is not bad but as Paul reminds us in this passage ‘we are commanded not to be haughty, or to set our hopes on the uncertainty of riches, but rather on God who richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment. We are to do good works, be generous and ready to share, thus storing up for ourselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that we may take hold of the life that really is life.’

Money and the pursuit of wealth must not detract us from this, but held lightly, with gratitude, responsibility and humility we can demonstrate one of Jesus’ final commands stated in Johns gospel, ‘By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another’.

Amen.

Kia Pakenham

Sunday 18 September - Commemorating the Life of Queen Elizabeth the Second

Readings:  1 Corinthians 15 verses 20-26, 35-38, 42-44a, and 53-end, Revelation 21

To begin I would like to share with you five little snapshots, as it were, of our late lamented Queen Elizabeth the Second. The first is one which must be known by millions of people not just in this country but around the world and that is Her Majesty having tea at Buckingham Palace with Paddington Bear and producing that marmalade sandwich from her handbag. The second, which is really two together, is of Her Majesty receiving both the outgoing Prime Minister and his incoming replacement just two days before her death when she was clearly very unwell but still immaculately dressed and as always so gracious. The third is that heartrending one of the  lone veiled figure attending the funeral of her beloved husband Philip. The fourth are the pictures of the Queen and Prince Philip at her Diamond Jubilee travelling down the Thames in a cavalcade of boats stalwartly standing for no less than four hours with little protection from the cold wind and the rain. . And the last again is a montage of photos of the Queen all in black attending the annual Service of Remembrance and in which at least one she can be seen to wiping away a tear.

To me, the Paddington vignette I consider the equivalent of the decoration on the cake that is made up of all the quite extraordinary and remarkable ingredients of the Queen’s life.  And I have to say that I find it in some way a little sad that for so many people this could be their lasting memory of the Queen rather than so many others which are the true substance of that cake. Of course that sketch was great fun as was her role as a ‘Bond Girl’ ten years previously Sketches we all loved and which did show quite brilliantly a Queen who could unbend from all the demands and duties of her constitutional role  and who had  a truly lovely sense of humour and a ready wit to which all those close to her have readily testified.

But it is my other memories that point to the true character of the Queen and her unique sense of unparalleled duty and devotion to service which I do not consider any other world leader could, or would claim, to match. Each of the other four vignettes I have chosen to describe point to a woman who never once shirked her duty; never once took advantage of her supreme position; never once put herself before the needs of the people to whom she had promised a lifetime of service. And also, it has to be recognised, a woman who throughout her monarchy had so often , in effect, had to walk alone. Walk alone as the Head of State, our Queen, our Defender of the Faith who outranked all with whom she associated.  Yes, she may have had a Private household to help and advise her; she certainly had the unconditional support and love of her liege Lord Prince Philip but at the same time she must at times surely have felt the loneliness of her position, the loneliness resulting from her supreme rank.

And, thinking and reflecting on this, it was surely at such times that it was from  her lifetime of  faith that she derived  the support, the guidance and the comfort that only God can give.; the teachings of that faith that provided  for her ‘a  framework in which I try to live my life.’  And it was in her Christmas broadcasts, especially those of latter years, where she spoke so naturally and confidently of the faith that lay at the centre of her life and inspired all that she did. To quote from just three of them In 2008 her words were: ‘I hope that, like me, you will be comforted by the example of Jesus of Nazareth who, often in circumstances of great adversity, managed to live an outgoing, unselfish and sacrificial life … He makes it clear that genuine human happiness and satisfaction lie more in giving than receiving; more in serving than in being served.’

In her 2014 Christmas broadcast the Queen said: ‘For me, the life of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, whose birth we celebrate today, is an inspiration and an anchor in my life. A role-model of reconciliation and forgiveness, he stretched out his hands in love, acceptance and healing. Christ’s example has taught me to seek to respect and value all people of whatever faith or none'. And finally, in 2020 the Queen said: This is the time of year when we remember that God sent his only son “to serve, not to be served”. He restored love and service to the centre of our lives in the person of Jesus Christ. It is my prayer this Christmas Day that his example and teaching will continue to bring people together to give the best of themselves in the service of others'.

Sacrificial service, accountability and a genuine and caring respect for all people; surely these were the qualities which, inspired by her faith, above all provided the hallmarks of the late Queen’s reign and which we too are called to emulate in our own lives. 

A faith which I feel must surely have led her to have implicit trust in the words of both our Bible readings today which point with complete certainty to a life beyond this one. ‘When this perishable body puts on imperishability and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled; “Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where O death is your victory? Where, O death is your sting?” and, in the words of Revelation, ‘Death will be no more'.

As each of us have our own little  and memories  of the life of the Queen; that often lonely life graced only by the presence of God in her life; may we too share her faith and in that faith try to live out her legacy by emulating her example of duty, of service and of kindness all graced with good humour and a smile for all whom we meet and share, if not our marmalade sandwiches at the very least the blessings which life has given us with others.

 ‘We continue to be inspired by the kindness of strangers and draw comfort that - even on the darkest nights - there is hope in the new dawn'. 

Virginia Smith

Sunday 11 September - Remembering Queen Elizabeth the Second

Theme Thoughts

This morning we are going to hear a parable for our reading.

Parables are a wisdom genre. They belong to mashal, the Jewish branch of the universal tradition of sacred poetry, stories, proverbs, riddles, and dialogues through which wisdom is conveyed. 

We can see the razor edge of Jesus’ brilliance as he takes the familiar world of mashal far beyond the safety zone of conventional morality into a world of radical reversal and paradox. 

He is transforming proverbs into parables—and a parable, incidentally, is not the same thing as an aphorism or a moral lesson, it’s more like a paradox. 

Their job is not to confirm but to uproot. You can imagine the effect that had on his audience! Throughout the gospels we hear people saying again and again, “What is this he’s teaching? No one has ever said anything like this before. Where did he get this? Where did he come from?” 

Stories were Jesus’ stock-in-trade, the main medium by which he conveyed his message. The parables occupy 35 percent of the first three Gospels. But one of their most surprising features is that they are not about God. They are about weddings and banquets, family tensions, muggings, farmers sowing and reaping, and shrewd business dealings. God is mentioned in only one or two.  Jesus obviously wanted us to look closely at this world, not some other one. It is here and now—all around us in the most ordinary things—that we find the divine presence. 

 While some stories aim at changing one’s perception of the world, Jesus wanted people to see that the world itself was changing, and that therefore, they had better change the way they looked at it. He invited them, in effect, to become part of the change.

Time after time he said, “They that have eyes to see, let them see, and they that have ears, let them hear.” He simply wanted people to pay attention to what was going on around them and to discern a reality that was just under their noses. To describe this change he used a term that his listeners would have found familiar, though they might have been startled by the way he used it. He called it the coming of the “reign of God.” What he meant was that something was happening, not just in the consciousness of the listener, but also in the world itself. Something new and unprecedented was happening, and they could be a part of it. 

The Reflection

I started worrying about what kind of ground I was on with God. I started worrying about how many birds were in my field, how many rocks, how many thorns. I started worrying about how I could clean them all up, how I could turn myself into a well-tilled, well-weeded, well-fertilized field for the sowing of God’s word. 

I started worrying about how the odds were three to one against me—those are the odds in the parable, after all—and I began thinking about how I could beat the odds . . . by cleaning up my act.

That is my usual response to this parable. I hear it as a challenge to be different, as a call to improve my life, so that if the same parable were ever told about me it would have a happier ending, with all of the seed falling on rich, fertile soil. 

But there is something wrong with that reading of the parable, because if that is what it is about, then it should be called the parable of the different kinds of ground.

Instead, it has been known for centuries as the parable of the Sower, which means there is a chance, just a chance, that we have got it all backwards. We hear the story and think it is a story about us, but what if we are wrong? What if it is not about us at all but about the sower? 

What if it is not about our own successes and failures and birds and rocks and thorns but about the extravagance of a sower who does not seem to be fazed by such concerns, who flings seed everywhere, wastes it with holy abandon, who feeds the birds, whistles at the rocks, picks his way through the thorns, shouts hallelujah at the good soil and just keeps on sowing, confident that there is enough seed to go around, that there is plenty, and that when the harvest comes at last it will fill every barn in the neighborhood to the rafters?

If this is really the parable of the Sower and not the parable of the different kinds of ground, then it begins to sound quite new. The focus is not on us and our shortfalls but on the generosity of our maker, the prolific sower who does not obsess about the condition of the fields, who is not stingy with the seed but who casts it everywhere, on good soil and bad, who is not cautious or judgmental or even very practical, but who seems willing to keep reaching into his seed bag for all eternity, covering the whole creation with the fertile seed of his truth.

Our Queen knew the generosity of the Sower in her life through the good times and the bad. Her sense of duty and of service was empowered by her love of God and of his Son Jesus Christ who was her strength and her constant companion.

May we too know this extravagance of love in our lives and may it be our guiding light in times of joy and in times of trial.

Let us pray

Father, it is hard for us to comprehend the extravagance of your love for us and for all your children. As we sit here this morning would you touch us afresh with your Holy Spirit, open our eyes, our ears and our hearts to receive the truth you have for us – that we are loved extravagantly and unconditionally and accepted by you.

Amen.

Kia Pakenham

Sunday 4 September, 12th after Trinity

Texts: Psalm 139 verses 1-7, Luke 14 verses 25-33

The news at the moment is full of tales of collapse and point to a failure to build properly; to build for the future and not just for the present. With the energy crisis coupled with climate change we begin to realise we are woefully unprepared, not having invested nearly enough in renewable energy or in better and improved water supplies.

We have relied upon outside interests to provide much of what we need and now find those interests do not coincide with ours and again we are gravely unprepared, akin perhaps to the example in our gospel reading of finding we have not enough resources to equip or sustain us, or at least negotiate with our enemy.

So much of what is done both by governments, businesses and indeed individuals is short term and often done for immediate profit and not for long- term prosperity and the well- being of all. 

Look back at say Victorian times when they invested in both the provision of mains water for everyone and a railway system that served even the smallest village and recognise that there is no such forward thinking or similar investment today. Quick fixes which are all too prevalent are not the answer.

And thinking of ourselves as individuals, maybe we can recognise that we have built some pretty shaky structures ourselves which are not strong enough for present times. Humanity has built on ever more comfortable, even luxurious living and are now discovering we cannot afford to maintain that standard.

I’m sure some of us here remember waking up to ice on the inside of the windows and the horror of chilblains – and we certainly don’t want to return to those times but I think there maybe a need now to think far more carefully as to just what heating I can afford and how to use our resources more wisely and cost effectively – indeed this is now surely a necessity. 

So too with food; do we really need all the expensive imported food or can we learn to live more simply and still be nourished just as we were in the last war despite rationing?

And here I must emphasise that the last thing I want to see in this country are people who are cold, hungry and in the utter despondency and hopelessness caused by mounting debt but I do feel that we have somehow allowed, and perhaps become complicit, in the building of a very unequal structure which is causing so many to despair.

And in line with Jesus’s words in the gospel I think maybe we have to seriously reassess whether we have been building beyond our means and without adequate resources  and how we can make sacrifices as a nation to rebuild something which we can afford and which will prove of long standing worth to future generations.

Sacrifice is not a word I’ve ever heard our politicians bandy around but maybe it is time they did. Just as in wartime people knew that in order to win that war  they were called upon to make sacrifices common to all.

As Christians the idea of sacrifice is well understood but might I suggest that it is something more people need to recognize for the good of all and indeed for the good of our threatened planet? Is it time for us to say we have become too materially rich and have built luxurious but fragile structures for ourselves which now look decidedly shaky in the light of all that is happening in today’s world? 

Again and again our Lord preached the gospel of humility and of poverty. The one shirt, the one pair of shoes, the lack of a healthy bank balance and a wallet full of credit cards and which of us could claim that this is now true of our way of life? Have we allowed ourselves to become too soft, too comfortable, too unprepared even and hence incapable of standing up to the enemies that now beset us?

And it is not just sacrifice that I feel we are called upon to enact now but even more importantly trust in the Lord our God. The Lord our God who as it says in the opening words of psalm one hundred and thirty nine knows us infinitely better than we know ourselves. Had we heard more of that psalm we would have read these words ‘If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night”, even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.’ 

The media daily paints a picture of darkness and of dismal negativity, and we are continually treated to stories of misery and unhappiness filled with complaints and whinges, and yet surely as Christians we are called to build solid and wonderful structures of hope, of positivity, of gratitude for the countless blessings of life based on the bricks and mortar of our faith. We are called to go out armed with the unconquerable power of the gospel which speaks of God’s incomprehensible love for all his children to defeat the enemies of despair, hopelessness and victimhood and help rebuild a society where our reliance is on mutual love, selflessness and generosity and not on an accumulation of wealth and an unhealthy seeking after ever more comfort, ever more ease of living. Think of the example of Job who was stripped of all his wealth, stripped of his family, stripped of his health and still retained his faith in God. What an example for us to follow as we try to rebuild, restructure a better way of life for all God’s children. 

I’m aware this talk has been a little heavy, so I’d like to end on a positive note! As you know Virginia writes a poem weekly for her colleagues’ at the hospital – so this is a little reminder that although times can be tough, there is always joy to be discovered.

The news is so bad it can make you quite 
Blue but here are a few more fun things to do.
Soak in a bath and forget all your troubles
As you puff out your cheeks to blow perfect soap
bubbles. Or simply go out and buy some to blow,
they’ll surely make your happiness grow.
Watch a glorious sunset illumine the sky,
It’s a painting of genius no money can buy.
Or try skimming stones across a lake or the sea
I’ve never scored more than a miserly three.
Or sneak to a playground when no one’s about,
Swing as high as you can and then give a shout.
It’s a brilliant way to work off frustration,
And leave you with such a joyous sensation.
Try sucking a Polo Mint so it doesn’t crack,
To meet with success requires quite a knack.
All simple things but they make you more cheerful,
And stop you thinking of things which are tearful.
And once again I do urge you ‘share smiles’,
They really can lift up your hearts for a while.
And sharing a bear hug is quite the best thing to do
Guaranteed to banish all those thoughts that are blue!

Amen.

Kia Pakenham

Sunday 28 August, 11th after Trinity

Text: Hebrews 13 verses 1-5

My husband Colin has many talents, but sadly DIY is not one of them! If anything in the house needs to be fixed, he will just say, ‘We’ll have to get a man in.’ This is fuel to the fire in my feminist soul and so I immediately (and rather rashly) start looking for instructions as to how to fix said problem – the internet, old DIY manuals, etc and do my best to solve the problem. Unfortunately, the instructions are not always enough and we still have to get a man – or woman – in!

The Bible as a whole is our instruction manual for life and shows us how we can have a relationship with God. He has also sent us a man – Jesus to fix the problem of sin and show us in person how this manual works.

The letter to the Hebrews was written by an unknown author between 50 and 70AD as a specific instruction manual for Jewish Christians living in a society, like ours today, which doesn’t always conform to the morals of Christianity. It’s theme is the importance of Jesus – his one perfect sacrifice of himself replaces the old animal sacrifices which the Jews had to make for forgiveness of sins.

Our reading from the final chapter of Hebrews sums up these instructions with 5 marks of Christian living: Hospitality, Compassion, Faithfulness, Contentment and Worship

The first instruction is to be hospitable both to those we know and to those we don’t.

The Greek word used in verse one ‘Let mutual love continue’ is ‘Philadelphia’ which, if you remember one of Kia’s sermons where she talked of the 4 words for Love in Greek, means ‘brotherly love’. We are to care for our brothers and sisters in the church family. 

Verse 2 goes on to tell us to extend that care to strangers and prisoners – perhaps not as easy as caring for those we know – to be compassionate. 

By showing hospitality to strangers, we may even ‘entertain angels’. There are stories in the Old Testament of Abraham, Gideon and Manoah doing just that, but what about now? Well, the word ‘angel’ in Greek means messenger and I wonder if I met such an angel once. Some years ago, I met an amazing young woman called Nicky, whose life was directed by Jesus’ command to the disciples in Matthew 10 to travel the country and preach the Gospel. She obeyed this command, only carrying a Bible, no money and not even a change of clothes, relying on the hospitality of people she met, sleeping in church porches if there was nowhere else. We spent a day talking about faith and praying together and she then moved on, refusing to take any money but trusting in God for her next appointment! As I said – amazing! I was certainly blessed by my encounter with that stranger!

As Christians we are asked to care for prisoners as though we suffer with them – we may not all be able to visit prisoners, but there are many charities we could support that help those in prison and their families in different ways. In David’s sermon last week, he reminded us of Mother Teresa’s hospital where each poor and starving patient was treated as if they were Christ himself – this is what Jesus taught us when he said “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” (Matthew 25:40)

The next couple of verses talk about the sanctity of marriage and the danger of loving money – both attitudes are as counter-cultural now as they were 2,000 years ago. 

If we are faithful and trust in God, he will provide all we need – we can be contented not covetous, always wanting someone else or something more. The American financier Bernard Baruch was asked, ‘How much money does it take for a rich man to be satisfied?’ He replied, ‘Just a million more than he has.’ In this country, we are so much better off than the majority of the world who struggle just to survive and yet we all strive to have a better house, a smarter car or even (in my case anyway) yet another pair of shoes! Contentment comes from being happy with who we are and what we have, not from always wanting more.

Jesus said ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you’: This promise is the foundation for contentment. We can’t count on material things, but we can always depend on God. He is always there for us.

This lovely passage written so many years ago and yet still so relevant to us, contains practical instructions and wonderful promises – 

So, we are commanded to be Hospitable, Compassionate, Faithful and Contented and lastly to worship and praise God, in thanks for all he has given us.

We can’t earn his favour and we no longer need to make sacrifices of animals to gain forgiveness of our sins. We’re not all expected to travel the country preaching the Gospel like Nicky, but we are asked to not only worship God by praising him and praying to him but also by living according to his instruction manual. In fact, Jesus condensed these instructions still further so that even those who don’t like long instructions can follow – “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself.”

And as verse 16 in the reading from Hebrews says, ‘Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have.’ 

The Message version of the Bible expresses it like this: ‘Make sure you don’t take things for granted and go slack in working for the common good: share what you have with others. God takes particular pleasure in acts of worship – a different kind of ‘sacrifice’ that takes place in the kitchen and workplace and on the streets.’

May God give us all the grace to live well, wherever we are – as he has instructed. 

AMEN

Hilary Swift

Sunday 21 August, 10th after Trinity

Texts: Psalm 103 verses 1-8, Luke 13 verses 10-17

If any of you have known someone with scoliosis you will know just what a disability it is, with some sufferers bent almost at a right angle from the waist and, like all back ailments, it can, but not always, cause considerable and grindingly relentless pain.  Can you imagine not being able to walk upright?  Can you imagine always needing a stick or maybe two sticks and know, too, that with each year the curvature of the spine will most probably worsen? Can you imagine always having to lift your head if you need to look at anything other than the ground and know that there simply is no cure? So, imagining such a scenario we can fully understand I hope just what life was like for that woman who had suffered for no less than eighteen years; her back bent, possibly in considerable pain, and whose vision for the most part had to be restricted to the ground beneath her if only to ensure she did not trip over any obstacle and cause more damage. No wonder she wanted to approach Jesus although such an approach by a woman to a man would have been regarded with horror by a good many of the onlookers as it broke with the taboos within the customs of society at that time. But, in her desperation she simply did not care about taboos and what others thought of her. From all she had heard about Jesus her one and only hope of being cured was through his healing powers; only he could work the miracle which could release her from her bondage, her life sentence of disability.

And this is what he did with those simple but liberating words which must have seemed to her beyond price: ‘Woman, you are set free from your ailment.’ And instantaneously she found herself able to stand upright; to be a recognisable healthy woman rather than a bent and twisted cripple. Stand upright and be able to look around her; to look properly at this man Jesus and others present in that synagogue. Look, without the struggle of lifting her head, at the scenes all around her; look up to the heavens and marvel at such freedom to absorb all the wonder of God’s creation as she stood proudly upright once more. What an almost incredible transformation that must have been for her; what a life restoring moment; what a sense of utter joy must have radiated from her.

And, thinking about all this, I did wonder if maybe spiritually we are sometimes bent over with a form of spiritual scoliosis with our eyes on the ground and not lifted to heaven and all that is around us. Bent over by the worries and pains of our suffering world. Bent over by our own little, unsatisfied egos.  Bent over, perhaps, by ingrained tradition and over familiarity, leading to staleness with our forms of worship. In our Common Worship Communion service we begin the consecration of the bread and wine with the words ‘Lift up your hearts’ eliciting the response ‘’We lift them up to the Lord.’ But are these just over familiar words or do we, indeed, truly lift our hearts and feel that we are seeing, somehow, something of the wonder and the mystery that is inherent in that celebration and sharing of communion? Or are we keeping ourselves bent over in our own private world of seemingly solemn ritual and unaware of the joy that comes from truly lifting our hearts as one to our amazing, wonderful, omnipotent and almighty God? 

Long ago I recall preaching along the same lines and saying how so many seem to think that Communion is such a serious ritual that we leave the communion table with heads bowed instead of raised to acknowledge and share the joy of the occasion with others. Sharing a sumptuous meal in a restaurant or home, we would all be exclaiming over the richness of the food and the pleasure we took in the company with smiles and laughter. So why do we not do the same when we share all the riches of the incomparable feast Christ has given us? Why are our hearts not lifted up and our eyes too? Didn’t Jesus himself say ‘And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ 

Are we too bent over to lift our eyes to that figure on the cross and recognize there the supreme sacrifice made by God to reveal his love and his forgiveness of us, his children? And are we too bent over to lift our eyes to that second lifting up when the resurrected Christ was taken up into heaven to fulfil his promise that he would go and prepare a place for us that where he is we may be also? For me, both such lifting ups fill me with awe and with wonder at the mystery that is our God. The God who loves us so much, the God to whom our hearts should surely be raised time upon time.

We are the only species of God’s amazing and wondrously diverse creation who walk upright and surely it should not be only our physical bodies that walk erect but our spiritual bodies too.  Do we heed these words of David Steindel-Rast?  ‘We look with the eyes of our heart, are overawed by the wonders we see, and celebrate that vision by a gesture that taps the very source of life.’ In the same vein, Gregory of Nyssa wrote: ‘Who, surveying the whole scheme of things, is so childish as not to believe that there is divinity in everything, clothed in it, embracing it, residing in it? For everything that is depends on Him-who-is.’

That unnamed woman was, after eighteen years of suffering, of being bent over eyes focused on the ground, released from her bondage and able once more to stand straight and marvel at the vista before her. God grant that we too may be freed  by Christ’s healing words ‘you are set free from your from your ailment’; set free from any scoliosis of the spirit and be enabled to  stand spiritually erect and look up, look up to the hills, look up to the cross, look up to the reality of the risen Christ, look up to all the divinity that is in everything. And in that looking up feel the joy of freedom which will enable us to truly worship the Lord our God with hearts and hands and voices.

Look for the Christ by Ian Adams
This is an invitation to seek the Christ.

To look for signs of his presence.
To move from vague awareness
to the more intentional possibility
of presence

The seeking is not for proof, or for your own satisfaction.
But rather that in the seeking you will open yourself up
to a presence that is always present 
if often ignored.

And the tradition is clear-
this presence has both a personal 
and a cosmic-all nature.

The risen Christ will be with us- with you- always.

He is close.
Look for the Christ

Virginia Smith

Sunday 14 August, 9th after Trinity

Gratitude is not only the posture of praise but it is also the basic element of real belief in God  Joan Chittister 

The aim of spiritual life is to awaken a joyful freedom, a benevolent and compassionate heart in spite of everything.    Jack Kornfield                                            

When I looked up the lectionary gospel reading appointed for this Sunday my heart sank. Did we really want a dire warning of the end times with all its dire threat of fire and division between families? Haven’t we had to endure enough bad news lately? Bad news that is unrelenting and ceaseless it would appear, be it war, economic hardship, drought which incidentally has led to some horrendous fires, or the parlous state of the NHS just for starters.

And I thought no, that is not what we want just now but instead we need to boost our spirits, boost our sagging morale and remember that, come what may, we have the greatest gift of all that can never be taken from us and that is God’s love for us, His children. And in that recreated awareness give our praise and our thanks and, in so doing, will surely know that, come what may, we have a God in whom we can trust; a God who has promised his covenantal care for us now and for all eternity. The words of Catherine of Siena are so apposite here: ‘If you choose me as your companion you will not be alone, my love will be always with you. You will never fear anyone or anything, for you will find your security in me. With me as your companion you will live in the light of faith with hope and fortitude, with true patience and perseverance all the days of your life.’

These words are, I find, incredibly affirming and really help to remind me that however grim the news we should not fear, for, indeed, our security lies first and foremost in our trust in that ceaseless and unchanging love of God. And in acknowledging that affirmation we are surely then called to respond with praise and with thanks. Praise and thanks which are always so positive and indeed life enhancing and in giving them they surely help us to have a sense of the goodness of God, the joy of God surrounding us as we lift our hearts and maybe our voices as well to give him the glory.  Malcolm Guite expresses it with such poetic perfection in his version of Psalm 96 entitled Cantate Domino       Our Saviour, King and Shepherd calls us home
And on our homeward journey bids us sing,
To join that all- renewing song to him.

Which all creation sings. The valleys ring
With praises and the mountaintops rejoice;
The greenwood trees and meadow flowers bring

Their silent praise and call on us to voice
It for them in our songs, to worship him
In awe, in beauty, and in holiness.

It is not for ourselves alone we hymn
The great creator, for we lift our song
To voice creation’s praise. The drowsy hum

Of honey laden bees, the lovely, long
And lapsing sigh of waves along the shore,
And our own joy, must all make up the song. 

As Guite makes clear, our songs of praise and thanksgiving are integral to the praise we sense in all God’s miraculous creation and reminds us that, whatever airs we may give ourselves, whatever superiority we may assume, we cannot exist outside that creation. True joy comes from recognising that we are part of that wonderful amazing creation which God has gifted to us. And the words of Thomas Traherne confirm that belief: ‘It is an inestimable joy that I was raised out of nothing to see and enjoy this glorious world: it is a Sacred Gift whereby the children of men are made my treasures, but O Thou who are fairer than the children of men, how great and unconceivable is the joy of your love.’

And if you think I’m advocating escapism form the woes and worries which are current in today’s dysfunctional world, I’m not. I am not suggesting for one moment that, like ostriches, we should stick our heads in the sand and try to pretend none of this is happening. But I do think to always make praise and thankfulness central to our lives will help give us the trust, the confidence and the hope that we can weather the storms and God will bring us through them as history tells us he has done so many times in the past.

And as two examples of thi,s let us remember that at the end of the Last Supper Jesus and his disciples sang a hymn before going out into the darkness of that fateful night. What did they sing? The answer, albeit a guess, is that they would have followed the Passover tradition of singing what were known as the Hallel psalms; the psalms of praise which were psalms 113 to 118 inclusive. Psalm 117 epitomizes this sequence with just two verses filled with jubilant praise: ‘Praise the Lord all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples! For great is his steadfast love towards us, and the faithfulness of the Lord endures for ever. Praise the Lord.’ And somehow reading these words I can imagine Jesus singing his heart out to give himself the courage, the strength and above all the trust that he could face and would overcome all that lay in front of him.

And my second example is that of Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest who along with nine other concentration camp inmates were deliberately starved to death in retaliation for the escape of a prisoner. Kolbe who stepped forward to take the place of another man and who then led those men in prayer and hymn singing until one by one they succumbed to death. Kolbe who was the last one to die and in fact not from starvation but from a lethal injection since the guards wanted the underground bunker in which the victims had been incarcerated for other purposes.

It is surely such incredible examples which should inspire us to voice   our praise and our thanks for all God’s blessings which he gives us with such abundance.  And I am certain that having done that we will be strengthened and inspired  to go out and play our small but essential part in bringing the joy of loving and selfless  care to those in need in a suffering world.

Virginia Smith

Sunday 7 August, 8th after Trinity 

Text: Luke 12 verses 32-40

Are you always ready to receive the unexpected visitor or are there times when you just pray no one will drop in and be witness to the fact that neither you nor your home is as presentable as you would like them to be? I am fully aware of my habit of abandoning my Henry vacuum cleaner in the middle of a room or on the top or bottom of the stairs when I’ve had enough of that particular chore and there the poor creature can well sit for a day or two before I realise that perhaps I should finish the task I started. The other day I popped around to my neighbours and was invited in, much to the horror of the man of the house who having completed a rum was sitting drinking a much needed beer in just his shorts and socks. I couldn’t have cared less that he was bare chested, but he was mortified and rushed off to find a clean, sweat unstained top.

So, what are our thoughts when we read the gospel for this Sunday? Are we expected to lead our lives in a constant state of high alert in case Jesus comes knocking at our door with both our homes and ourselves looking immaculate? Somehow, I don’t think this is exactly what Jesus was getting at and, indeed, I am sure he would not look at all askance at a dusty surface top or indeed a bare chest.

And the more I thought and reflected upon these questions, the more it seemed to me that what we are really called to do is not to wait in nervous apprehension for Jesus to come calling but to embrace him in the here and now as a part of our lives. To make him central to all that we do so that he is not a stranger but always a welcome integral and, indeed, essential part of our lives. And perhaps, most of all, we are called to be in the words of the gospel ‘dressed for action’ and with our lamps lit. Not dressed in the actual sense of wearing our best outfits to receive and honoured guest but dressed in the sense that we are always prepared to go to anyone who needs us and in whom we will surely find Christ himself if our lamps are well lit and able to reveal the Christ that is within all of us.

So, to me the answer to all this is make sure you begin the day with prayer if only to remind yourself that you have woken again to the blessing of being in God’s presence and just enjoy that time of quiet reflective peace to prepare you to make the best possible use of the gift of another day. And, of course, make sure you’ve washed and cleaned your teeth, made the bed and even done the washing up so you are at least able to answer the door to anyone who may come knocking without a hint of embarrassment, well apart from that abandoned vacuum cleaner! And surely, then you can have confidence that the time of prayer has helped recharge the battery of your lamp and you are literally dressed and ready to meet however unexpectedly the Christ who is to be found in others. 

And I think there is one other factor to be taken on board and that is that the waiting for Christ to come is not like the waiting for someone, anyone to answer the phone while declaiming ‘your call is important to us’, or the waiting in the lengthy checkout queue in the supermarket where everyone seems to have been buying for the next six months rather than merely the next few days. In both these and similar scenarios you are impotent to expedite the wait but just have to accept it, preferably with martyr like patience and only the slightest of mutterings under your breath at the time it is all taking. No, the waiting for Christ is, I think, far more proactive and, like Jesus and his disciples, it involves not sitting still and wondering to oneself when on earth it might happen but going about God’s business and being always alert to what you can be doing in His service. And I’ve already emphasised to be most of all alert to His presence in others whom we meet.

The coming of Christ will always remain a mystery but that does not mean as our reading emphasises that we can just ignore the possibility of its happening relegating it to some unknown and unforeseen future but instead take to heart the core message of this gospel passage to expect the unexpected and be ready always to respond with alacrity and willingness not simply to serve the Lord our God but far more importantly to meet with him.

Look for the Christ by Ian Adams
This is an invitation to seek the Christ.

To look for signs of his presence.

To move from vague awareness
to the more intentional possibility
of presence.

The seeking is not for proof, or for your own satisfaction.
But rather in the seeking you will open yourselves up
to a presence that is always present,
if often ignored.

And the tradition is clear-
this presence has both a personal
and a cosmic -all nature.

The risen Christ will be with us-with you-always.

He is close.

Look for the Christ

Virginia Smith

Sunday 31July, 7th after Trinity

Text Luke 12 verses 13-21

My children cannot but be aware that unless I decide to spend the rest of my life on round the world super luxury cruises or change my will to the benefit of either assorted stray dogs, cats, hamsters and the odd pangolin or maybe a weird religious cult they will in time inherit at least a penny or two. They will also, I fear, inherit, unless I manage to be incredibly proactive and ruthless which honesty dictates is highly doubtful, a house stuffed to the gunnels with the accumulated possessions of most of a lifetime, much of which will be of little value and will end up, quite probably, in a skip. At least they can console themselves that it is only a relatively small house and not two large barns.

But money and, maybe, the odd memento of Mum apart what else might I be leaving them? That of course is impossible for me to answer and I must leave it to them to decide what my non material legacies might or might not be. 

And all these thoughts have been engendered in part because of today’s gospel reading and in part because just recently I have been privileged to officiate at two funerals where the tributes were just so heartfelt and spoke not so much of actual achievements or of highly successful careers, but of the love, the friendship, the warm-hearted affection that had bound the family together. A love, affection and friendship that had rippled out far beyond the family and accounted for the fact that in both instances the churches were full. And here. it has to be said. that a church funeral somehow gives so much more scope for such tributes than a crematorium service where both time and atmosphere mitigate against providing any true sense of the spiritual however hard one may try.

In both instances the deceased had not been a regular church goer but church had not been absent from their lives, even if it was simply to observe the long held tradition of going to a Christmas service and, for the families, church was to them the only place in which they wished to make their farewells and pay tribute to their loved one.

So, I think for all of us the question has to be what would we most want our legacy to be? And here it must first be recognised that for the majority of people it will not be two barns full of grain whose price keeps on escalating. Yes, I’m sure the benefactors of our wills, and I do hope you’ve made one, might find a bit of extra wealth to be extremely helpful, if only to pay off a mortgage, get that first foot on the property ladder, pay off their student loan or quite simply to indulge in a new washing machine or a state of the art barbecue.. But, unless they are entirely mercenary and cannot wait for us to pop our clogs, what else would we like to feel we have bequeathed to them? What, if anything, have we garnered into our spiritual barns that will be treasured and in itself perhaps bring spiritual feeding?  Have we, indeed, been rich towards God? Difficult questions I know and ones, in a way, it is not for us to answer because so often we are completely unaware of the seeds we have sown which have then born fruit.

But if Jesus was warning his listeners of paying far too much attention to the material riches of life and harbouring ambitions to be able to simply sit back, relax, eat, drink and be merry in our old age, he was also very clear that it is incumbent upon us to be ‘rich towards God’. We may all have different ideas as to what is meant by this; some may argue for a life of prayer, others for an exhaustive study of the scriptures and others for good and selfless needs towards the poor, the captives, the blind and the oppressed. And here I think it is important to recognize that we are certainly blessed with different gifts and, as such, will use them, I hope, to the full in the service of God and thereby find our lives   enriched  as well as, one hopes, the lives of others.

Rich towards God? What can that really mean and how does it help make others see us? And here I am struck by words about St Francis that I read this week: ‘As anxious as Francis was to leave this world which he saw as a temporary place of exile, he saw in it not just a place of potential danger but a shining image of its Creator’s goodness. He saw the Artist in the art. He saw the Maker in all that he made. He rejoiced in the works of the Lord and looked through them to see the source of their being and their life. in everything beautiful, he saw Beauty itself. In all things he recognized and followed the footsteps of their Creator-his beloved. From all things he made a ladder on which to approach the King of Kings. In all things he found God and he begged these things to join him in praise of their Creator.’

I love the idea that from all the riches, all the blessings with which God fills our lives  we are enabled to build a ladder to approach the wonder, the majesty, the supreme being that is the King of Kings and in so doing find ourselves all the more enriched with our hearts full of praise.. Yes, our barns, our houses may be full of the accretions of a lifetime but our true riches surely come in knowing the presence of God in all we see, all we hear and perhaps most of all within the people we meet. The people who maybe unknowingly reveal to us all the richness which is the love of God and, in that revealing, call us to respond to others with the same overwhelming desire to share that love with others and thus ourselves find ourselves ‘rich towards God.’ 

I do not know if this is how our children will see us, but let us pray that in some way they are able to know and to recognize that our lives were, at least in part, engaged in that construction of a ladder reaching upwards towards our King of Kings from which we can sing our praises and somehow be enriched themselves to build their own ladders of love and trust in God’s bountiful goodness and care.

Receive, O Lord, all my liberty. Take my memory, my understanding, and my entire will.  Whatsoever I have or hold, you have given me; I give it all back to you and surrender it wholly to be governed by your will. Give me only your love and your grace, with these I will be rich enough, and ask for nothing more.  St Ignatius of Loyola

Virginia Smith

Sunday 24 July, 6th after Trinity

Texts: Psalm 85 Luke 11 verses 1-13

Just how many prayers have you said this week and what have you been asking God for? My guess is that between us we’ve racked up a great many prayers of almost every description from the seemingly trivial ‘please help to find me a parking place or my glasses’ to the deadly serious ‘please heal my loved one from cancer’ or ‘please bring peace in Ukraine.’ And then I am also sure that as well as these there have been silent prayers where you’ve just sought the peace, the comfort and the reassurance of God’s presence with you.

We are all, I’m sure, familiar with the saying ‘If you don’t ask you don’t get’ and this is exactly what Jesus seems to be teaching in our gospel reading but, given that so many of our prayers do not seem to be answered as we would like them to be, how can Jesus claim ‘Ask and it will be given to you’? ‘No it hasn’t’ I hear you say. My loved one has not been healed from cancer, the war in Ukraine is as bad as ever but then, if you’re honest, you did find that parking place or those elusive glasses. And here it is perhaps wise to consider just why the seemingly trivial prayers are answered and not the great big seriously important ones. And maybe the answer is that actually we don’t, in all honesty, need God for those trivial ones; one way or another there will be a parking place, even if not in the exact spot we’d like it, and those glasses will turn up, as I discovered for myself last week after they’d been missing for a week

But, in accepting this we are left with the problem of the big unanswered prayers and that is when we have to learn to accept the truth of the words of the Lord’s prayer which we heard at the beginning of the gospel reading. And, to begin, we have to learn to accept that it is God’s kingdom, not some imagined kingdom of our own making, that we want realised; that kingdom where there will be no more death, mourning, crying or pain, but is not, and cannot be realised, in all its wonder and mystery yet. Death and disease are intrinsic to our earthly life and although modern medicine means that many diseases can now be effectively treated and some even eradicated, not all can, and that, however hard, we may try to prevent it and seek ways to prolong life, death is inevitable until God’s kingdom is realised in its entirety. So, although we will always pray, often agonisingly, for those who are suffering, those whose earthly life draws to an end, we have to have the wisdom to sometimes simply put our complete and unquestioning trust in God and his purposes for our loved ones and for us. And perhaps that is when we most need those times of silent prayer when we just place ourselves and those for whom we have prayed into God’s care and simply allow God’s grace to enfold us in its calming and reassuring peace. Put ourselves into his hands and find the truth of the words of today’s psalm: ‘Let me hear what God the Lord will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his faithful, to those who turn to him in their hearts.’

Luke’s version of the Lord’s prayer does not include the words ‘your will be done’ but in a sense that is implicit in praying for the kingdom to come. Again, we need to have that complete trust that God knows exactly what he is doing and proved it by allowing his own Son to be put on trial and put to death in the cruellest manner possible. And we remember Jesus’s own words in the Garden of Gethsemane ‘Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.’ Perhaps these are words we might well adopt when we are praying desperately for something to be radically different for our loved ones, for ourselves; ‘not my will but yours be done.’ And in the same way heed the words of today’s collect: collect and pray that ‘loving you in and above all things may obtain your promises which exceed all we can desire.’ Your promises of covenantal care and love for each of us in all circumstances and all times which supersede any longings and desires of our own.

And the last point I would like to make this morning is to look at the final words of today’s gospel reading; ‘If you then who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.’ First of all, it strikes me forcibly that in these words Jesus is seeking to remind us that we are all his Father’s children and, as such, endowed by him with a plenitude of good gifts and blessings, but the greatest of these is the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. The Holy Spirit who will be there with us as we pray and, if we allow him, guide and inspire the words of our prayers so that while they will always include prayers for individuals and for the burning issues of the day such as the restoration of peace in war torn countries and for genuine efforts towards climate change they also accept the reality that it is God’s will, his grace which must prevail if this kingdom is to be seen not just in the future but now. And in such acceptance, know the truth of these words from today’s psalm: ‘Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other. Faithfulness will spring up from the ground and righteousness will look down from the sky. The Lord will give what is good, righteousness will go before him, and will make a path for his steps'. A path, I pray ,that we can all follow in complete trust and confidence that thereby God’s will is done.

A modern version of the Lord’s Prayer by Bill Wallace
O most compassionate life-giver, may we honour and praise you; may we work with you to establish your new order of justice, peace and love. Give us what we need for growth, and help us, through forgiving others, to accept forgiveness. Strengthen us in the time of testing, that we may resist all evil. For all the tenderness, strength and love are yours, now and for ever. Amen

Prepared by Virginia but delivered by Kia as Virginia was suffering from Covid.

Sunday 17 July, 5th after Trinity

Texts: 1Peter 3 verses 8- 15a  Luke 5: verses 1-11

Why choose uneducated most probably illiterate fishermen to be your especial disciples? Why, on earth, not seek out educated and widely experienced people to be part of your team if you really want to make a success of things? What if anything was special about four roughly spoken Galilean fishermen? And the answer in many respects has to be nothing at all, or at least not in the terms by which the world likes to make its judgements on such matters.

But when you look more carefully at the life of a fisherman at the time of Jesus, it is quickly apparent that these men did have attributes which helped make them the perfect choice for Jesus. Fishing at the time was a flourishing business thanks in part to the money invested in it by no less a person than King Herod himself and it is estimated that there were as many as two hundred and thirty boats working on the Sea of Galilee. These boats were sturdy affairs as they needed to be on such an unpredictable stretch of water, some twenty-three feet long and seven wide and could carry as many as eleven passengers: just the right number for Jesus and his chosen twelve. Fishing was done at night with a crew of five; four to row and one to steer and supervise, and boats would work alongside each other so they could spread the net between them to haul in their catch and, if successful, would maybe land as much as half a ton of fish from a night’s endeavours.

Such endeavours demanded not only considerable physical strength but also the ability to work as a team and alongside these qualities the philosophical outlook that not every night could result in a good catch; and the last quality required was an acceptance that this was dangerous work and that lives could be, and were, lost in the dramatically sudden storms that would arise over the lake.

Thus, recognising that those four men called by Jesus on that morning by the lakeside had such qualities it makes a great deal more sense as to why Jesus chose them. Physically tough to withstand the rigours of an itinerant and uncertain life; team players who knew what it meant to support and encourage one another and the realisation that they were involved in a way of life which would bring its own threats and dangers. As with all that Jesus did, he knew exactly what he was doing when he called them to become fishers of men. I think it is clear that Simon Peter, Andrew,  James and John could, were they so inclined, boast that they fully complied with those words written by Peter himself: ‘Finally, all of you have unity of spirit, sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart and a humble mind.’

Thinking about all this I am, once again, aware of how the call to follow Christ, to make him part of our lives, is never based on a plethora of academic degrees or of being part of the elite of society, of the so- called establishment. This call is made on completely different principles to those we are now witnessing as the Conservative Party seeks to appoint a new leader. The call to follow Christ, to be fishers of men, I would like to suggest, goes to very ordinary people  who will never gain a place in our history books but, nevertheless, people blessed with a multitude of different gifts such as those of the four fishermen which he can use in his service. And here I would like to give two examples of the breadth of choice shown by God as he calls people to follow in the footsteps of his Son. My first example is that of Her Majesty the Queen who, although definitely a part of the establishment, was not particularly gifted academically but whose humble and certain faith has been such a shining example to all of us. Of how many other world leaders can one make such a claim? And my second example is of the lovely helper whom  I met when I took Holy Communion at Bramley House Care Home this week. She was constantly alert to the needs of those present, continually leaping from her seat to point to which part of the service we were on with such patience, such care and, indeed, with such compassionate love, and who later told me how important these little services were to her personally. It is just such people who spread their nets wide and bring others to faith. And again and again I am blessed by meeting such people, wonderful ordinary people and I do not mean to flatter when I say people like all of you whose faith is central to their lives and in ways you may never know bring others to faith.

I pray that all of you here may recognise the many many gifts with which you have been blessed, never thinking of them as worthless in any way, and in faith use them as those four first disciples did to be yourselves fishers of men and of course women too.

Become a Gift to those around you.
Sometimes you slip into preoccupation with yourself.
With your life, your direction, your losses and your findings.
The invitation here is to look outwards. 
To become a gift to those around you.
And you will become a gift by becoming truly  the person you  are.
By living the life that has always been waiting for you.
Your life aligned to the true North
Will be a life that offers hope for others.
Love for god and love for neighbour will become as one.
And quietly you will become a gift to all around you.

Virginia Smith

Sunday 10 July, Sea Sunday (see the Note at the foot of Virginia's homily)

Texts: Luke 10 verses 25-37

This homily has been written in response to two conversations in which I have been part of recently and which I have to say have greatly perturbed me and left me feeling so sad that some people are still what might be termed tribal or even ‘little Englanders’. The first was when in a conversation about how many shops had now closed in Dorking one of the people present erupted into an outraged diatribe that in Dorking, of all places, we should have a shop that sold Indian saris. The second was with two members of the St Peter’s Hospital Play Team one of whom is Polish and has lived and worked in this country for over seventeen years. Yet ever since Brexit she told us she has been subject to questioning as to just why she was still living in this country and even told that it was no longer a place where she was welcome. She said she was becoming increasingly uncomfortable living here which struck me as quite shocking Hence the following homily which is based on the lectionary reading for today and thus to my mind yet another gift from the Holy Spirit:

I confess I’m still feeling hopping mad after my brush with that man Jesus and frankly if I never see or hear of him again that will be fine by me. Of course, even before that day I had heard about him and had been told by several people all about his disparaging and quite unfounded criticisms of Pharisees and lawyers, such as having the temerity to refer to them as whited sepulchres, and had come to realise he was trouble; which was why I thought as a much respected lawyer it was incumbent on me to test him and try to uncover what he really was. Was he just a poorly educated carpenter’s son or, as people seemed to think, some sort of prophet or, as some were daring to suggest, the promised Messiah? Or was he as so many of us more intelligent people had begun to suspect simply a troublemaker, a rabble rouser, who needed to be put firmly in his place?

I knew he was always on about how people should lead their lives and it had not gone unnoticed that he was more than happy to break the religious laws if it suited his purpose and so I came up with my question as to what I must do to inherit eternal life; the answer to which naturally I knew but wanted his take on it. But instead of giving me an answer he countered it with two of his own; ‘What is written in the law? What do you read there?’ Well, if he thought he could trick me he was seriously mistaken as if there is one thing I do know about it’s the law in all its forms. So of course, I was quick with my answers as to loving God and loving one’s neighbour and of course he could do nothing but approve my answer. But then he has the temerity to tell me to ‘do this’ and that I would then live. As if I as a leading member of the establishment would do anything else. After all everyone knows I, as one of God’s chosen people, lead an upright, God fearing life and observe all the stipulated religious practices so what more did he expect of me? Which is why I challenged him again with what I thought was a really clever, astute question namely ‘And who is my neighbour?’ And with that he launches into this story about a man attacked and left badly wounded on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho which we all know is a dangerous place to travel especially on your own. And he’s good, I give you that, and he really made his story come alive with all sorts of brilliant touches and again I admit he had us spellbound. When he talked about the priest coming along and walking by on the other side you could see the people around me chuckling because, let’s be honest, some of the priests are just so high and mighty always preaching as to what we should or shouldn’t do but in reality they’re mostly a bunch of hypocrites always looking out for themselves and toadying up to the Roman authorities. So, we could all imagine that priest hastily crossing to the other side and probably muttering some prayer for his own protection.

And, after this, Jesus has this Levite coming along and doing exactly the same thing which again the majority of his listeners loved because again these Levites do like to think of themselves as somehow special in God’s eyes and a cut above the rest of us even if they are subordinate to the priests themselves.

So yes, up to this point it was a great story but then Jesus introduced this third character a Samaritan of all people. You could even hear the intake of breath from the crowd as he mentioned the very word Samaritan. You must be joking I thought as he describes how this outsider, this foreigner stopped and actually helped the victim! I mean come on a Samaritan doing something like that is just not conceivable because, in all honesty, they’re a despicable, untrustworthy lot believe me. You must know the sort of person I mean; those people who are not like us; foreigners who have different ways and customs, different beliefs too. And here again if we’re being strictly honest let’s face up to the fact that there are just some people who don’t belong in our society and to suggest that they can is simply a load of twaddle. As long as they stay in their own country that’s fine, but we don’t want them here and I’m confident that there are plenty of people who think like I do. There were certainly some in that crowd whom I could see were not at all happy with the way the story was going and there was quite a bit of muttering and words like ‘disgraceful’ and ‘unbelievable’.

So, what on earth was that man Jesus doing suggesting that a Samaritan could be good and would go and help a Jew in the way he described? Good! Samaritan!; it’s a contradiction in terms! And, more to the point, how could he suggest that I might like to do the same; did he really think that I would go out of my way and as in the story in effect cross the road and go and help some wretched Samaritan in distress? Did he honestly think I’d entertain the idea of a Samaritan as my neighbour? And at the end when he asked me who the neighbour was in the story well I couldn’t even bring myself to say the word ‘Samaritan’ and just muttered something to the effect ‘the one who helped him’.

Is it any wonder I’m seething and I tell you if this man goes on in this way I’m confident he’ll come to a bad end and good riddance to him. A Samaritan my neighbour? Forget it!

And I know that the Spirit of God is the brother of my own, and I know that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the women my sisters and lovers, and that a kelson* of creation is love. Walt Whitman

*Kelson in shipbuilding is a beam used to stiffen and strengthen the keel structure.

Virginia Smith

Note: John Venus, Vicar of Coldharbour 1983-1993, had previously been a Chaplain in the Royal Navy and we always celebrated Sea Sunday, with the Dorking branch of the Royal Navy Association, whose standard rests in the Christ Church balcony. 

Sunday 3 July Festival of Thomas the Apostle
Published here a little late.

Habakkuk 2:1-4 John 20:24-29

Doubt, confusion, misunderstandings and disbelief are all common themes throughout the bible – from the beginning to the end we have wrestled and misinterpreted God’s word over centuries.  It starts with disobedience and thinking we know better and ends with a rag tag bunch of illiterate fisherman who consistently fall short of understanding who Jesus is.

We are in good company if the world, our God and our faith don’t seem to make much sense at times.

Our readings today both have an element of confusion and frustration about them. Habakkuk – a minor prophet from the 7th Century is bewailing God at the injustice of the brutality of the Babylonians. He can’t understand how a God of Love can just stand by and watch all the carnage and destruction that he sees around him as the Temple in Jerusalem is plundered and pillaged to the ground and the vast majority of God’s people are carted off to exile.

Thomas can’t believe that Jesus, the man to bring salvation and redemption to the Jews, who was going to be such a promising leader in overthrowing the Romans, has been killed, let alone bought back to life.

Confusion and disbelief.

What do we struggle believing about our Christian faith and what we can we learn from these two mens’ battles and frustrations with God? 

Two things sprung to mind as I read and meditated on these passages –

The first was a quote that came to me from Isaiah when God says to him ‘For my thoughts are not your thoughts’ And the second is that Faith is a gift from God. As a precursor to explaining this I want to take a moment to acknowledge something; Don’t you just hate it when some well meaning person quotes some pithy portion of scripture when you are up against it? When the issue of real suffering raises it’s ugly head and you are fobbed off with a quote similar to the one I’ve just used in Isaiah?

Holding that aside I do believe the quote is a valuable one. 

Which one of us here can claim to know the inner workings of the mind of God?

I have been studying, praying and contemplating God for a lot of my life and yet I am so aware of how little I understand or know him.  He was once described to me as a diamond. A multi- faceted stone that as you gazed at it you glimpsed all the different sides – all the different ways of seeing, all the myriad reflections and mirroring. 

And the more I learn the less I know. ‘His thoughts are not my thoughts’. Or in the words of a great Hymn - Who can know the mind of our creator, who can speak of wonders yet unseen, who can each the height of understanding, to play the notes of wisdoms melody?

In Habakkuk and Thomas we find men not afraid to voice their confusion and disbelief and neither should we. 

We need to ask the questions, voice our fears and our doubts – God can take it. We may not get a clear and unequivocal answer – it may be, that like Habakkuk we need to wait, we need to trust in God’s power even when not apparent. We need to lean into his promises that he will never leave or forsake us and that he is with us in the suffering and the darkness.

Or he may help us like he did with Thomas – he may reveal himself in our need of him.

When we ask for more faith to believe, when we are down on our knees, wanting to trust, yearning to meet with him, we may, in that moment, encounter his grace and mercy and with Thomas respond – ‘My Lord and my God’. 

So ask the difficult questions, have patience and trust with a power that is greater than ourselves that we will never comprehend – and have faith – have faith that we have a God who is infinite love, never- ending grace and will meet us where we are in our searching and are longing.

Amen.

Kia Pakenham

Sunday 26 June - Second after Trinity

Texts: Galatians 5: verse 1 and 13-25; Luke 9 verses 51-end

Making excuses! My goodness don’t we all do it and not just the one about the dog eating our homework. And here I found a delightful variation on this one which was ‘the cat ate it knowing I would blame the dog’! Making excuses! Yes, we all do it don’t we? And I fear that, like the homework one, not all of them adhere to the strictest veracity. ‘I’m sorry I can’t come; I’m seeing someone else.’ may have a ring of truth but actually the other meeting is not at the same time, and you have made such an excuse simply on the basis that you just can’t face two meetings on the same morning. And of course there are those sorts of procrastination, excuses one makes to oneself of which I am most definitely guilty. Making a start on washing the kitchen floor, a much loathed chore, can always be delayed by finding the excuse of some other more preferable task or even let it be acknowledged the excuse that I really do need a quiet sit down with a cup of coffee.

When we study our gospel reading, we see a couple of excuses being made to Jesus as to why people can’t follow him there and then. The first about having to go to bury a father does not even have the smack of truth as by Jewish law bodies had to be buried within eight hours of death, so what on earth was this man doing not observing the   ritual preparation of the body or sitting sharing the grieving with everyone else in the family? Had he been unable to face that preparation and all the wailing and breast beating and made another excuse to slip out for a while? We will never know, but I am sure Jesus did and maybe in that seemingly harsh response ‘Let the dead bury their dead’ he just might have been suggesting that, in a sense, this man was spiritually dead.

Then we have the person who wants to go and say farewell to those at home and no doubt while there spend time deciding just what to pack and ensuring everyone knows his forwarding address and, oh yes, maybe having a last prolonged meal with his family because who knew when he might be home again and while he’s at it he might as well have a last sleep in his own bed!  Again, Jesus’ response sounds so harsh, but here we must remember that Jesus, as was the custom at the time, used hyperbole to get his point across.  

As we read these excuses, it’s good to remind ourselves of Jesus’ call to the four fishermen, Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John, who in Luke’s words, ‘after they brought their boats to the shore, they left everything and followed him’ Or even Marks’ words which are all the more emphatic ‘immediately they left their nets and followed him.’ Absolutely no excuses here but instead what must be seen as an extraordinary response to that call. And we really do have to ask ourselves if it had been us would we have acted as those four fishermen did, or would we have concocted some sort of excuse as to just why it was not possible immediately? I rather expect I might well have done, if only to weigh up and consider just what was being asked of me

So, what do we learn from all this and just what is expected of us? As always with such questions there are simply no easy answers and, once again, we have to take on board that following Christ is not and never will be an easy option. It does demand so much from us and we are not always prepared to meet these demands, instead finding excuses for ourselves as to why we simply can’t carry them out. Thomas Merton lists these demands as ‘the total renunciation of the business, ambitions, honours, activities of the world - a bare minimum of concern with temporal necessities.’ My goodness, that really is huge. Can he really mean that? Is this really what God wants from us if we are to be seen as true followers of Christ? Can he really expect us just to have the bare minimum of concern for temporal necessities; the essentials, as we see it, of what makes up our everyday life?

And the answer has to be ‘Yes’; it is in the sense that to be true followers of Christ our entire life has to be centred around him, and him alone. Everything else, business, ambitions, honours, activities, have to be, must be peripheral. And here we could well take note of the wisdom of Meister Eckhart who said that the spiritual life has far more to do with subtraction than it does with addition. To be true followers we are, I think, called to recognize that Christ cannot be other than central to our lives and, as a consequence, this means Christ is in all that we do. He is in our business and how we conduct it; what our moral and ethical principles are that determine how we conduct that business; those works of the flesh listed in our epistle reading must not play a part in how we enact our lives.  Any ambitions we may have should, again, be centred on Christ and to be recognized by others as his followers ready to reach out to all whom we meet. Should we be fortunate to receive honours, and this includes, I think, people showing their gratitude for something we have done to help them, then Christ must be given all the true credit and humbly acknowledged as the inspiration that has led us to be accorded such honours.

 And finally, to be true followers all our activities, however mundane, however humble, should be carried out  in the sense of those hymn words of George Herbert’s ‘Teach me my God and King in all things thee to see; that what I do in anything to do it as for thee.’ To be true followers we cannot compartmentalize our lives and make wonderful and often implausible excuses as to why some parts are none of God’s business. Everything is God’s business.

I would like to end with a few lines of poetry written by Malcolm Guite.
You call us all to live, and see good days,
Centre in Christ and enter in his peace, 
To seek his Way amidst our many ways,
Find blessedness in blessing, peace in praise,
To clear and keep for Love a sacred space 
That we might be beginners in God’s grace

Virginia Smith

Sunday 19 June - First after Trinity

Texts: Galatians 3 verses 23- end; Luke 8 verses 26-39

 There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ.

The other day I listened to an excellent radio play about the events revolving around the nationalisation of the Iranian oil industry in 1951. And listening to it I was able to appreciate that in approximately seventy years our attitudes have changed quite dramatically but still not enough. Then the British were in charge of the whole operation known then as the Anglo Persian Oil Company and were deeply scathing of the locals even when they were just as well or even better qualified than the Brits were. Social mixing between the Brits and Iranians was almost unheard of and there was a very real sense that the Brits were superior in every way and had an unassailable right to lord it over the local workers. The entire history of the British Empire echoed such a mind-set but with the demise of that once great Empire and ever expanding globalisation we have shown, often reluctantly, that we need to rethink how we relate to others; how we see others.   Do we categorise everyone into Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female or do we see that, at heart, each and everyone of us as a child of God?

And thinking and reflecting on this question I was drawn to our gospel story today. of the man who had demons in him and when asked his name by Jesus replied: ‘Legion’ because he felt many demons had entered into him. And it struck me that. in a sense. we are the same because within each of us are all the ‘demons’ of our carefully structured ego; the ‘demons’ of our upbringing and nurturing; the ‘demons’ that we have allowed to shape us and which control how we regard others.  I have, over time, come to recognise and acknowledge that personally I walk through life with an innate confidence simply because I am both white and British. I do not mean to be superior or. heaven forbid, racist. But I have become increasingly aware that I have this confidence and I have no idea whatsoever what it must be like to be in a minority group where their skin is not white, and they cannot boast a British ancestry going back generations. It was not until I began work after leaving school that I was first introduced to and spoke to non-white, non-British people and then at university I encountered a few more but back in the early sixties that was the norm. Now. of course. it is all very different and I and others like me must learn to name and release that ‘demon’ of assumed privilege; of inherent rights simply because we were born here. as were generations of our families. I love the fact that my granddaughter has a best friend who is not white skinned, and whose ancestors came from far away shores and it never occurs to her that it is in the least odd as it would have done if it had been me and would, I know, have appalled my parents.  We must grow to accept and to give our heartfelt thanks and indeed, our praise that God’s children come in a glorious and quite beautiful mix of skin colour. 

And linked to this is the ‘demon’ of nationality which we see at such evil work in Ukraine as Putin pursues his dream to build up, once more, the great Rus Empire and reclaim the land over which Russia once ruled.  He sees the Ukrainians not as a separate nation but people who must be restored to his autocratic rule. We may not ever dream as going to such lengths as to wage war but, we all have our ‘demons’ of nationality when it comes to it. Should you press me I would declare myself English through and through and I admit, in making that claim, I am making a clear distinction, a proud admission even, that I am not Scots, or Welsh or Irish, although I suspect that if I did a gene test I might well discover how very wrong my assumption has been. And in the same way we southerners may well compare ourselves with those funny northerners and again show signs of prejudice or disparagement because they speak in what we regard as a strange accent or eat mushy peas and deep -fried Mars bars.  Do we categorise everyone as to where they have come from or, again, do we give thanks and praise that we are all so diverse, speaking in strange tongues and accents and with fascinating traditions and history for us to explore and tha,t despite all the differences, they are at heart, like us, simply children of God?

And one last ‘demon’ to explore today and that of course is the male, female one and here I know I’m skating on thin ice given the current heated debate on the whole question of sexuality. But for me I am happy to define myself as a woman but in so doing I recognise that I think as a woman, act as a woman and am happy to let that particular little ‘demon’ suggest that while I can cheerfully and expertly multi- task men can only do one task at a time! Just as I can’t know what it is like to be non-white I cannot know what it is to be male or indeed anyone from the LGBT community. I can try to imagine but I can never truly know and that is just how it is.  But can we see beyond and beneath the defining labels of male and female or of LGBT and find just another vulnerable, needy child of God who longs for the comfort of the pure unchanging love that only God can give? 

There are of course so many more ‘little demons’ I could explore, education, body image, politics, religion etcetera, etcetera but I hope you can grasp the point that I am trying to make. Whoever we are, we do have ‘demons’ of definition and characterisation which have shaped who we think we are, who we have made ourselves and our egos, and that these intrude in any relationship we have with others. Whereas if we look at the example of Jesus there was never any sort of barrier of definition or characterisation in his approach to people.  He met with Jew and Greek, with those who were free and those who were slaves; he met with men and with women and all this in direct contrast to the norms and practices of the time. For Jesus, each and every person, even a raving demonic, was at heart a child of God, an adopted child of Abba, His Father, and as such he showed them all the same open hearted and utterly gracious love and that is what he now calls us to do in his name that we might truly be one in Christ. 

There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.

Virginia Smith

Sunday 12 June - Trinity Sunday

Abrahams Hospitality: Genesis 18 verse1-8

The idea, the concept of the Trinity often has us tied up in knots.

We are not alone – for centuries us humans have struggled to comprehend this mystery. Theologians with their massive intellects, with brains far bigger than ours, have wrestled with it and written great tombs about it in efforts to try and explain and pin it down.

Words have their limits. There are spaces between words and it is in those spaces that the mystery exists.

It is in the space in between the words that can be the vehicle of grace; that somehow can reach us, touch us and then the incomprehensible can suddenly, inexplicably begin to make sense.

Pictures, paintings, and images speak into our hearts in ways that just words can’t. Images fill in the gaps.

Like when you see a beautiful sunrise – you can try describing it but it doesn’t quite capture it in the same way a picture can. Like when you try and take a photo of fireworks at night – when you look back at the picture the next day it is just a small flash of light in the sky- rather disappointing – it doesn’t look the same as when you were actually there looking up at it in person.

So it is with the Trinity. Words can’t capture a dynamic flow, a cosmic dance of three divine beings, an energy – a movement.

So we are going to look at three different ways of imaging the Trinity.

One is a painting, one is a fidget spinner and one I will describe and you will need to employ your imagination!

So first is this image. Do you know what this is called?

Abrahams Hospitality created by Russian iconographer Andrei Rublev in the fifteenth century which was based on the reading from Genesis that we’ve just heard.

In this icon there are three primary colours which illustrate facets of the triune God.

He used Gold to depict the Father – illustrating perfection, fullness, wholeness – the ultimate source. He considered blue the colour of the human – both sea and sky mirroring one another and therefore God in Christ taking on the world – taking on humanity. So Christ is in blue and he is displaying his two fingers to tell us that he has put matter and Spirit, divinity and humanity together within himself. And then there’s green representing the Spirit – a quality of divine aliveness that makes everything blossom and bloom, grow and thrive – a transforming presence.

The Holy one in the form of three, eating and drinking in infinite hospitality and utter enjoyment between themselves.

If we take the depiction of God in the Trinity seriously, we have to say ‘in the beginning was the relationship’.

Every part of it was obviously mediated on with great care: the gaze between the three, the deep respect between them as they all share from a common bowl. And notice the hand of the Spirit pointing towards the open and fourth place at the table.

Is the Holy Spirit inviting, offering, and clearing a space? If so, for what? For whom? If you look at the front there seems to be a little rectangular hole painted there. Some historians say that that there was glue there – perhaps for a mirror. So as you stood and gazed upon this picture you yourself would have transported into the scene – a table laid, waiting for you to join in, to participate in this divine flow.

Lets move to the next image. You will need to use your imagination for this so can I invite you to close your eyes.

The Franciscan philosopher/theologian Bonaventure (1221–1274) described the Trinity as a fountain fullness of Love. Picture three buckets on a moving waterwheel.

Each bucket fills and empties out, then swings back to be filled again. The Father empties into the Son, nothing held back. The Son empties into the Spirit, nothing held back. The Spirit empties into the Father, nothing held back. The reason they can empty themselves out is they know they will be filled again. They know that the centre of the universe is infinite love.

But if you don’t believe that infinite love is the centre of the universe, you live in a scarcity model where there’s never enough—food, money, security, mercy—to go around. You can’t risk letting go because you’re not sure you’ll be refilled. If you’re protecting yourself, if you’re securing your own image and identity, then you’re still holding on.

The Three all live as an eternal and generous self-emptying, the Greek word being kenosis.

Your ego remains full of itself, which is the opposite of kenosis. This is the nature of almost all human institutions and systems created by the egoic mind.

This third way of looking at the Trinity involves this fidget spinner.

When still, a fidget spinner clearly has three different lobes; however, when it spins we lose sight of the distinct wings and simply see unbroken movement or flow. Even more significant than the qualities of the individual members of the Trinity is the flow between them. At the Trinitarian level, God is a verb more than a noun, God is a flow more than a substance, God is an experience more than a deity sitting on a throne. And we live naturally inside that flow of love—if we do not resist it.

Infinite love is planted within humans and all of creation. Everything is attracted to everything: life is attracted to life; love is attracted to love; God in you is attracted to

God in everyone and everything else. This is what it means for everything to be created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-27). God placed this alluring attraction of life toward life in everything that God created. Thus, we might say the Trinity is the soul of creation.

So these are three different ways of describing the Trinity.

But as we said at the beginning, words can’t do it justice and, in many ways, miss the point. This flow, this divine dance between Father, Son and Holy Spirit is something to be experienced, to be felt, to be embraced; something to be joined in with.

Poetry can sometimes fill the space between the words too, so I’d like to finish with this poem of the Trinity by Malcom Guite. You may like to close your eyes.
In the Beginning, not in time or space,
But in the quick before both space and time,
In Life, in Love, in co-inherent Grace,
In three in one and one in three, in rhyme,
In music, in the whole creation story,
In His own image, His imagination,
The Triune Poet makes us for His glory,
And makes us each the other’s inspiration.
He calls us out of darkness, chaos, chance,
To improvise a music of our own,
To sing the chord that calls us to the dance,
Three notes resounding from a single tone,
To sing the End in whom we all begin;
Our God beyond, beside us and within.
Amen.

Kia

Sunday 5 June, Pentecost

Genesis 11 verses 1-9,  Acts 2 verses1-21

When our children were small they were fiercely independent – especially our youngest – Lucy.

Perhaps because she was the youngest of three and wanted to do what her older siblings did she often thought she was more able than she actually was. 

Her favourite phrase that echoed round the house, at increasing levels of frustration, when either trying to tie her shoe laces or button her coat, as we scrambled to leave the for the school run, was MY DO IT!

The United nations diplomatic core has nothing on the skills of a frazzled parent!

But we too have traits of ‘My do it’! Guy in particular is not great at accepting help – his grown up version of ‘My do it’ is ‘I’ll do this’! From carrying boxes in our move – to unloading the shopping – he is not great at accepting help!

On first reading our passage in Genesis might appear a little baffling.

Why wouldn’t God want all the people to speak the same language? Surely it would have alleviated a lot of issues and misunderstandings throughout the world?

What was wrong with building a huge tower to reach God in the sky? Because that’s where he is – right?

One of the key verses and what I believe God had a problem with was this in verse 4 ‘Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves”. ‘Let us make a name for ourselves.

My do it. I’ll do this.

Self sufficiency can be a necessary and important thing but in the context of a relationship with God it is one our major problems.

Where is there room for God if we think we can do it all?

My walk with God began in earnest when in November 2010 I fell to my knees and surrendered to God as I understood him; when I let him have control of my life – what bought me to this decision is not really important, what is of the upmost importance is that I got there.

When we admit that we are not in control, when we relinquish the illusion that we have control, then God can begin to work in our lives. 

He can take our lives, he can transform our minds, he can pour his grace and his life-giving Spirit into us and we can really start to live our lives to the fullest.

We don’t all have to speak the same earthly language to be able to communicate effectively – the language of God is encountered by his Spirit. 

The eleven apostles had surrendered to God’s will in their lives and were waiting on the day of Pentecost for something to happen. 

Through the Spirit all were united, all heard from God in their own native tongues – this was God given unity – not “man-made tower of Babel unity” but a cosmic event that would echo through history. Not just a one-time event for those present in the upper room but a gift available to all; then and now.

When we get to that point of surrender, when we realise and accept our need of God in our lives – when we stop saying ‘My do it’ or ‘I’ll do this’ then we really are on the journey of faith and the Spirit of God can work wonders in us, through us and with us.

Let us pray.

Father, forgive us our self will when it runs riot. Draw us back into your way – your way of self-sacrifice, your way of loving service, your way of self giving. Fill us with your Holy Spirit and help us surrender to your will in our lives.

In Jesus name we pray

Amen.

Kia

Sunday 29 May

This sermon was delivered by David Grundy at a Benefice Holy Communion service in Christ Church, marking the start of the week celebrating the Queen's Platinum Jubilee; a service with real content and wonderful music.

Over this coming week, as people celebrate the Platinum Jubilee, I’m sure there will be many references to the Queen’s dedication to service, her faith, her dignity, and her sense of humour – I gather she is a great mimic. But what I want to think of today, is another quality. One of the main roles of the monarch as Head of State is (and I quote the royal website) to be ‘a focus for national identity, unity and pride’. She is tasked with helping to strengthen national unity and stability. 

And she has done this over the years. In 2020, she addressed the nation during Covid’s peak: people wanted to hear from her. She voiced everyone’s appreciation of front-line workers, and thanked everyone for playing their part. She said Together we are tackling this disease, and I want to reassure you that if we remain united and resolute, then we will overcome it.  Queen Elizabeth regularly refers to the strength of people coming together

Over 70 years, she has shown quite incredible restraint in terms of staying politically neutral. I really don’t know how she’s done it. The temptation for a caring and intelligent person to speak out must have been so strong. But she refuses to do anything seen as divisive. 

Instead, while Brexit was dividing the nation, in her Christmas speech of 2018, she just said: Even with the most deeply held differences, treating the other person with respect and as a fellow human being is always a good first step towards greater understanding.

The Queen has been and remains a force for unity in a divided world and often fragmented nation. And for that, we should thank God and be grateful to her for having stuck to those principles.

Maybe her majesty has discovered the truth behind the surprising direction of Jesus’ prayer for us the night before he died. When he prayed for his followers of the future, Jesus prayed not that we would be happy, not even that we would be a force for good in the world, but simply that  ‘we would be one’. 

And his reason was 'that the world may believe'. Unity, real unity, is a powerful persuader. Let’s be clear: we do lots of things to make the church as attractive as possible. We aim for good music, good publicity, a host of other things. Jesus however, highlighted only one thing:  when our love for one another stands out, then the world will believe.

Unity is a great idea. We just love the idea. We preach it. 

But unity is not just about being nice people. Unity that is compelling and that draws people requires sacrifice: I give three examples.

Unity is when we go out of our way to show love to people with whom we profoundly disagree. 

On holiday, I read a story from one of my favourite writers, a Lutheran pastor of a church in America, whose church is a complete mix of people who don’t really fit in to normal society or mainstream churches. She has quite a high public profile, and once, people who normally were very supportive of her, took offence at something she had said in all conscience and there was a spate of social media criticism from, as she put it, ‘her own tribe’

During that, a man who had on many occasions publicly expressed his disapproval of many of her values and opinions, texted her and said ‘It’s looking pretty rough out there for you. How are you doing ?’  She answered ‘Not great’. He immediately phoned, they chatted for a whole hour. He too knew what it was like to have people turn on you. They chatted, he listened, and near the end, he said “I love you and I’ll be praying for you”. In the middle of a media onslaught, her ‘rival’ on many issues was the first to show real compassion. 

Unity is when we go out of our way to show love to people with whom we profoundly disagree. 
• Real unity also involves saying sorry and admitting we’re wrong. This week, Kia and I both apologised to each other. We’d both slightly blundered and miscommunicated. Did we respect each other less for apologising ? No, I think we respected each other more. 

Showing our fallibility is powerful. Because it also gives other people the permission to not be perfect, and yet be loved

And finally, unity involves helping people to know they really are not alone and that it isn’t every man for himself.  I heard of a man who was making good money for a firm in the city, but was being required to turn a blind eye to certain rather sharp practices. So, in spite of the fact that he had a young family, he chose – after asking for advice from church members - to stand down from his job, at a time when the employment market was not great. In the next six months, the support from his church was so strong, that he actually had slightly more money coming in from people supporting him than he would have made at the company. Sacrifice will go the extra mile and beyond to help people feel that they belong and that they are not alone.  

This world is painfully fragmented. The Queen has over the years done more for national unity than I suspect people appreciate. Her faith has played a massive role in sustaining her. 

True unity is remarkably attractive. Have you ever seen a couple having a bit of a hug and a child comes and wants to just stand right there in the middle. Not to grab attention, but to be part of the unity. The church is the same. When we really move to a sacrificial love that truly honours each other, then Jesus’ prayer that we may be brought to complete unity is starting to be answered.

Sunday 22 May

Readings: Ezekiel 37 verses 1-14; John 5 verses 1-9

This is Kia's sermon delivered at our 10.00am Holy Communion service, reflecting on the reading from Ezekiel

Our words, how we speak, what we speak, the tone of our voice, our body language have a profound effect on those around us.

I’m a prolific reader – I like nothing more than being challenged by a good read. My bookshelves are littered with, I have to confess, many spiritual authors – Richard Rohr, Pete Greig, C. S Lewis, Barbara Brown Taylor and Mark Oakley, to name but a few.

Reading and savouring the words of these men and women have given me life, have stretched my understanding and have increased and challenged my faith.

Words are powerful. The spoken word especially so.

In church we hear the bible being read out loud – perhaps unusual in our society, although until relatively recently in historical terms, this was the only way of encountering the bible. 

Unless you go regularly to ‘Spoken word’ performances or are into audio books, we don’t often hear books being read to us. When you read the bible do you read it out loud to yourself? Perhaps next time give it a go – the experience is so different to just hearing the words in your head. Sentences or phrases that may have washed over you can suddenly hit you full in the face!

In our passage from Ezekiel today we hear some very powerful words being spoken.

God has given Ezekiel a prophesy – words to be relayed to the people in exile – words of promise and hope – that one day they will be re-established back in their homeland.

God paints a vivid and disturbing picture for Ezekiel. A valley full of dry bones. These are old, decaying bones. Shocking because they are visible – the bones lay on the surface of the valley, like the remains of corpses denied a proper burial and left for scavenging buzzards. As an Israelite, and especially as a priest, Ezekiel knew how important was the proper treatment of human corpses.

The fact they were dry also had implications to the hearers – this was a metaphor for a downcast spirit. 

So, not only were they dead physically, but they were also dead spiritually. 

Why has God shown Ezekiel this picture? 

The exiles have lost all hope. They have lost their faith, their belief that they are the chosen people. They believe their God has forsaken them and that they are lost – physically and spiritually.

They need a new hope, they need a new life – they need resurrecting from their despair and their total sense of abandonment.

So God breathes new life.

God, through Ezekiel, speaks words of hope and transformation. Slowly he rebuilds the dry bones, the people of Israel.

Words are indeed powerful tools of rebirth.

And it starts with Ruah. The Hebrew word for breath, spirit, wind. Ruah.

This is the beginning for all of us. Do you notice the echoes of Genesis here?

All life is God breathed. And it happens in stages. We are transformed in stages, in steps, brick by brick we are re-built.

Verses 5 through 6 are book marked by Ruah. The first breath animates and enables the sinews, then the flesh, then the skin forms – stage by stage, step by step until there is a body – alive, yes, but not fully alive.

On reflection I think this is how I spent the first half of my life. A functioning human being, employing all the tools at my disposal to survive in the world. Sometimes effectively and at other times failing miserably. Alive, but not fully alive.

I hadn’t received and surrendered to verse 6. Verse 5 says ‘I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live’. But verse 6 adds on a rather crucial and life giving bit; after the body is formed God breathes again and says, ‘and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord’.

It is this acceptance of God, this surrender to the Father, this outpouring of his Spirit that once we recognise it and embrace it then enables us to become fully alive.

St Irenaeus of Lyons is reported to have famously said “The Glory of God is man fully alive”. When we live, move and have our being from within the love and grace of God and recognise and accept his Spirit within us, guiding, teaching and encouraging us in our lives – then we will be able to live our life to the fullest – to flourish and thrive – because we have our hope in the right place. Then we will see transformation in our lives and in the world around us. It starts with us.

Both passages this morning speak of resurrection and transformation – spoken into being by God, through Ezekiel and through Jesus.

Dry bones, and exiled people bought into life by the  words and power of God. A crippled man restored to fullness of life by the power of the spoken word through Jesus.

We too are offered a fullness of life through the word of God – through his Son – and in the power of the Holy Spirit. This is our hope and our purpose. And through us Gods glory can be made visible to all who we meet, all who we talk to and all who we love.

Let us pray.

Father, we thank you for your life-giving Spirit. We pray this morning that you would fill us afresh, breathe on us breath of God and renew our minds, our hearts and our lives so that as transformed people we can bring life to others.

For your glory we pray.

Amen.

Sunday 15 May

This is Kia's Reflection on Genesis  22 verses 1-18 and John 13 verses 31-35
Delivered at our 9.15am Communion service

These passages speak to me of trust, obedience, and love.

Abraham and Isaac had such trust – Abraham in God and Isaac in his father. God calls to Abraham – his response ‘Here I am’. Abraham calls to Isaac – his reply the same – ‘Here I am’. Here I am, to do your will. No questions asked, no plans shared of the outcome – no future mapping or planning.

This challenges me.

How often do I wish to know the end at the beginning? How much does this speak into my need of control?

Yes, we need to plan ahead but when God calls do I, do we, simply say ‘Here I am’? and then trust in him to guide our steps even though we may not know the destination?

For me this speaks into the plans and dreams I have for Coldharbour and Abinger.

My longing to see God’s kingdom come in these places.

What does this look like?

And I am reminded that God is already at work among us, already placing desire into our hearts. He has placed a love of this place into all our hearts, a love for each other, a desire to see our friends and family flourish.

Can we see exactly how he plans to use us in his plan to see his kingdom thrive here?

Probably not. But simply to have this desire, this love, this passion I think is enough. God will provide the rest. We have to be attentive, we have to listen to the still small voice and trust, then obey and then step out in faith.

Jesus says as much in John.

The disciples could not go where Jesus was going. They were left behind without a step-by-step plan of what to do next. All they were told – all we are told – is to love as he loved. The greatest and deceptively easiest commandment there is.

People will know God through our demonstration of love for one another.

This is the plan. God’s plan he left for us.
The beginning and the end – to love.
Trust, obedience and love.
God calls us – and dare we say – ‘Here I am’?
Amen.

Virginia Smith’s Homily for Sunday 8 May
Delivered at Christ Church
Text: Luke 24 verses 36-49

At a guess, most of us are familiar with the Scottish prayer ‘From Ghoulies and Ghosties and Long-Legged Beasties and Things that Go Bump in the Night, Good Lord, deliver us!’ but whether any of us believe in ghoulies and ghosties is another matter. Personally, I am sceptical but, that said, my Father absolutely swore that when, at the beginning of the Second World War, he was billeted in a very old manor house he witnessed a ghost passing through the wall of the room he was in. And I know there are countless others who would be only too ready to testify to such an experience. Interestingly, according to my concordance of the Bible, the only references to the word ‘ghost’ are in the sense of giving up the spirit at the time of death so, as an example, in the King James version we have ‘And when Jacob had made an end of commanding his sons, he gathered up his feet into the bed, and yielded up the ghost, and was gathered unto his people.’  Whereas, interestingly, that same translation renders the initial verses of today’s gospel reading as: ‘And as they thus spake, Jesus himself stood in the midst of them, and saith unto them, Peace be unto you.  But they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a spirit.’

So be it ghosts, ghoulies or spirits, I think most people would admit that they have an innate and primitive fear of meeting them although, of course, ghost stories to be read around a single candle provide another sort of tremulous thrill  to be replaced with a big sigh of relief when the lights are turned back on and we can laugh at our heightened fears aroused by a cleverly written spooky story.

So, with all this in mind, it is no wonder that the episode related by Luke relays with such clarity the intense fear of those disciples gathered together in that room in Jerusalem. The two disciples who had met Jesus on the Emmaus Road had just returned and were, I’m sure, relating with feverish excitement all that had happened on that, oh so eventful, journey and now here was Jesus again in the very same room as all of  them. Was it Jesus? Or was it just his ghost, his spirit? Whatever this apparition was it terrified the life out of them and no wonder. Who is the Jesus who can suddenly appear and disappear in their midst? Who is this Jesus whom they all knew, without a shadow of doubt, had died upon that cross just days before? Who is this Jesus who comes to them and shows them the reality of the marks, the terrible scars of the wounds inflicted upon him? Try to imagine just what it might have been like for those disciples; just what we would have felt if we were in their place. Do not let familiarity with the resurrection accounts dim the power of our imaginations to wonder with awe, with wonder and, indeed, with fear as Jesus whose lifeless body was taken down form that cross appears before us. Would we not have queried what we were seeing? Of course, we would. Would we have been filled with unanswerable questions as to just how this was possible? Of course, we would.  Would we have been profoundly disturbed by that life filled figure before us? Of course, we would. Would we have been rendered speechless and incapable of rational thought? Of course, we would.

But then, as those bewildered disciples stood, quite possibly open mouthed, experiencing a heady mixture of fear and growing joy at what they were seeing or thought they were seeing, the risen Christ asks them if they have something for him to eat. And being given a piece of broiled fish, calmly ate it in their presence. Now ghosts may walk through walls, they may even appear carrying their own heads or clanking chains  but what they certainly never do is calmly eat a piece of broiled fish or indeed any other sort of food. No, this was no ghost, no ghoulie but the living Christ, the risen Christ. 

This was the risen Christ whom those witnesses to the post resurrection appearances then began to proclaim to any who would listen. Nothing now would stop them as they faced ridicule, contempt and disbelief together with threats, imprisonment, torture and even death. This was the risen Christ that all God’s children must know about; the risen Christ whose life, death and glorious resurrection revealed all the inexpressible wonder and the unfathomable mystery that is God’s love for his children.

For me, it is this utter determination of those simple men and indeed women who bore witness to the truth of the risen Christ that entirely convinces me of the truth of the resurrection. And I hope and pray that it is the same for you; Christ has risen; he is not a ghost, a ghoulie or indeed a long- legged beastie but a living Christ who partakes of broiled fish with his beloved disciples.

And in that truth, I am also convinced that we, too, are called to look for the very real presence of Christ with us in our lives. The presence that may well be revealed through the love of another child of God being shown to us for the risen Christ can be encountered anywhere, everywhere and in anyone.

Whenever we celebrate Holy Communion we share not broiled fish but the bread and wine which are the symbols of the body and blood of Christ. We share them in the very presence of Christ and in unity, as the first disciples shared food with him. And, in that feeding, I pray that we will be strengthened and inspired, as those disciples were, to go and proclaim the gospel of the living Christ. The living Christ who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. The living Christ who calls us to do our very best to copy the radical nature of the gospel which preaches, mercy, justice and peace for all. In today’s tragically broken world that need is greater than ever. Will we like those first few simple men and women clothed with the power of the Holy Spirit do our utmost to proclaim that gospel as they did in the strength of the reality of the risen Christ, the living Christ? I pray that we will.