Author: reverendally

Human, parent, priest, (hymn)writer, painter, vegan, amateur. She/they. Chaplain @catz_Cambridge (views my own). Trying to do justly, love mercy & walk humbly.

Christian Unity – a fruitful approach?

children's ministry, church resources, sermons

This is something I’ve done in all age worship and in schools, to talk about what working together as churches can feel like. If you use it, you might have to find your own local examples of each kind of working together.  You can also act it out with real fruit – for number 3 you’ll need a hand-held food mixer thingy – the one with the whizzy blades that you would use for getting lumps out of soup.

1. When you go to a supermarket, each fruit has its own compartment – the oranges are with other oranges, the apples are with other apples, and so on. But when you buy some and take them home, you probably put them in a fruit bowl, all mixed together.  Sometimes working together as churches is like that. We collaborate, but we don’t have to sacrifice much.  But bear in mind that fruit ripens at different rates – and bananas are often ahead of the game and may make the rest of you change a little more quickly than you’re used to!

2. But sometimes working together feels more like a fruit salad, Everyone’s had to give a bit – we lose something of our shape, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and if you need to, you can probably still tell which bit each of us contributed – the banana still tastes like banana, the apple still tastes like apple.

3. But sometimes working together as churches feels more like a smoothie. Everyone has to sacrifice a lot – and there’s no way you can tell what all the original flavours were; what matters is the the combination is more wonderful than any of the individual flavours, and that it’s the variety that went in that produces something new and exciting.

So, the question is, what are we willing to give, what are we willing to forgo?  And how will the fruits of our togetherness quench the thirst of those around us?

 

The Baptism of Christ (Matthew 3.13-end)

church resources, sermons

Jesus doesn’t half get a good build-up in Matthew’s gospel.  Matthew 1 gives us Jesus’ family tree – tracing his lineage back to Abraham himself – and goes on to relate the events around his miraculous birth, complete with angelic messengers in dreams. Matthew 2 tells of the visit of the Magi, and the subsequent flight of the holy family to Egypt to avoid the wrath of Herod, and their eventual return  to the normality of Nazareth, where Jesus would spend the remainder of his childhood, about which Matthew’s gospel is silent.  But we have heard enough already, between the genealogy and the birth story, to know that Matthew is introducing Jesus as the real deal, the Messiah, the one that God’s people had been hoping and praying for for centuries.  We are simply left waiting for the rest of the story to unfold.

Chapter 3 jumps ahead somewhat, and the next thing we hear about is not Jesus himself, but his cousin John.  John the baptist’s job – his entire vocation – was to prepare people for Jesus’ arrival, to sow the seeds about baptism, about repentance, about the coming kingdom and about what it really means to belong to the household and family of God.  In the passage immediately before today’s gospel he is heralded by the gospel-writer as the one about whom Isaiah spoke his potent and portentous words, and then immediately sets about underlining his own humility in the light of Jesus, the One who is the come.  

So Jesus makes his first adult appearance in Matthew’s gospel.  It is clear that John is simply the warm-up act, but Jesus’ first action is to submit to John’s baptism – even John finds this hard to understand, and resists the idea at first. But Jesus insists: he wishes to be baptised not because he has sinned, but because it’s the right way to start his ministry.  All that pressure, all that expectation. All that taking on the identity of the Messiah, but knowing that he’s not going to be quite what everyone’s hoping for.  All that promise. All that that work to do. No wonder Jesus needs to be baptised before he starts doing it all.

And he would be glad that he did.  Because when Jesus left the water, he heard the most wonderful words:

“You are my son, my beloved, and with you I am well pleased.”

They’re the words that make audible the gift of the Holy Spirit that he receives at that moment, the words that make the Father’s love for him feel real.  If you’re the Messiah, if you’re confronted by all that pressure, all that expectation, all that promise, all that work to do, what you need most in the whole world is to know that you are loved, not because of what you have achieved, nor even because of what you will go on to achieve, but simply because you exist.

It’s what everyone needs to hear who has a challenge to face, or who approaches a metaphorical mountain to climb, or who simply has a life to live, which is often a challenge enough.  Every child needs to hear those words, again and again, as they grow in body, mind and spirit. And I tell every parent that as they bring their children for baptism: enabling a child to be surrounded by the knowledge that they are loved is the greatest and most essential gift that they can ever receive, and the greatest gift that any parent can give.

And Jesus needed those words, too – just as much as any of us. That’s part and parcel of his taking on our full humanity.

In the strength of those words, he faced temptation in the wilderness, beating the Devil hands down.

In the strength of those words, he emerged from his ordinary family to embrace Isaiah’s prophecy and announce the manifesto for his mission – to bring release to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and proclamation of the year of the Lord’s favour.

In the strength of those words, he went three years of ceaseless ministry, healing, teaching, embracing, arguing, challenging, and bringing life and love to those who needed it most and making some enemies along the way.

In the strength of those words he walked the Way of the Cross, and accepted the suffering that was God’s love for the world, written in blood.

If anyone needed to hear those words, it was Jesus.

You are my son, I love you, and I am pleased with you.

But those words were not just for him. They are for all of us. We are not the Messiah. We do not have to face the Devil in person, we do not have to work miracles, we do not have to bring the dead to life.  But whatever we do face today, this week, over these next months, we need a safe place to stand, something to hang on to that is utterly reliable.  Especially at those times when we are feeling the pressure, when we feel like we have a lot to live up to, when we are having to step up to the mark and ‘be the man’ or ‘be the woman’, when those around us are looking to us to make things right, to fix everything, to live up to all the expectation.

Today, we can put our own name on the front of God’s affirmation.  Because, like Jesus, although we’ve lived half a lifetime or more, but today is the first day of the rest of our life. And we have God’s affirmation, his great words of love and encouragement, not because of what we have done, nor because of what we will do, but as a free gift, because we need it.  And in the strength of that free gift we can face whatever life will bring us.

And more than that, these words and what is behind them are not only for parents to share with their children, they are for all of us to share with one another: what ways today will there be for you to show another human being, another child of God, by your words and actions, that they are beloved and valuable in the sight of God?

Epiphany

church resources, sermons

There have been interesting things in the night sky.

I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but Jupiter seems brighter every time I look at it (and if you’re not sure where to look, find Orion’s belt, and then look left and slightly up – Jupiter is the really bright one).

And then there’s the International Space Station, which you can track here.  The best viewing for us was Christmas Eve, around 6pm, when it would have been fairly easy to convince even my skeptical children that it was St Nicholas’ sleigh they were seeing moving across the night sky.   We still have a few more opportunities to see the ISS this month, so do follow the link above and see for yourself and give the astronauts a wave.

We don’t know what the wise men’s star actually was.

Halley’s comet was visible around 12BC, but in those days people were terrified of comets – they were seen as bringers of doom, and would never have been understood as a portent of good news.

It might have been Jupiter and Venus in conjunction, possibly also with a bright star such as Regulus just behind them, all merging together to appear, to the naked eye, as one massive, bright star. 

Or, it could have been a star in our neighbouring Andromeda galaxy exploding into a supernova – that would have appeared as a sudden, new bright star int he sky.

Or perhaps God laid on something special, just for those wise men, because he wanted to make sure they knew about the birth of Jesus, and he knew that the stars were where they looked for wisdom and meaning.  God has a long and honourable history of not hiding – in fact 0f revealing himself in precisely those ways that will ensure that we can find him if we have a will to do so.  Athanasius’ great work ‘Contra Gentiles’ is a long and enthusiastic account of what essentially amounts to a divine ambush – wherever we focus our gaze, that it where God will find a way to become recognisable.

The wonderful thing is that God chooses to do so.  He lit the touchpaper for the big bang and set the universe into motion, and yet still cared enough to make sure that when Jesus was born, three random stargazers from a faraway land got to hear about it.

And that’s the whole point with the incarnation, isn’t it?  The miracle that God, the creator of everything, would come and be part of his creation. It’s been described as trying to put the whole national grid through one light bulb, and it’s OK if we can’t quite get our head around that, because that’s also the point.

We don’t have to be able to grasp the whole thing – the massive, indescribable, all-consuming power and love of God. Because in Jesus God showed us everything we need to know in a way that we can relate to.

When we look at the night sky we see the tiny pinpricks of light and we know they are giant balls of flaming gas, some of them many times more powerful than our own sun – and we can’t even look on our own sun without damaging our eyes.  We look on Jesus and we see God is a way that we can handle – his love is God’s love, but shown to us in a way that lets us look on it, touch it, feel it.

When we look up into the night sky (and it’s a wonderful thing to do in these long nights and dark days) may we see both the majesty of God and his infinite creation and the wonderful way in which he reaches out to meet us where we are.

From Psalm 8:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your hands, the moon and the stars that you have set in their place; what are human beings that you even notice them, that you care for them?  Yet you have made them a little lower than the angels, and crowned them with glory and honour. 

The book is out!

Other cool stuff

It’s out!  It must be, because I just ordered 30 copies, to give to this year’s wedding couples….

So, hot off the press, it’s Making the most of your church wedding, a 32-page full colour booklet, for couples preparing for marriage in church. It uses the liturgy (words and actions) of the service to explore issues of live, faith, love, commitment, family, God and more.

Lots of lovely pictures and ideas about things to do, as well as things to read and think about.  And you can get it in packs of ten…

2013 in review – lots of only vaguely interesting statistics, but only about this blog, not about the world generally or anything.

Other cool stuff

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 13,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.