The Third Sunday after Epiphany
24 January 2021
The seventh Sunday after Trinity
26 July 2020
Which choice should we make?
Our decision to try to find somewhere to live in Kent led us to Charing, not so many miles from places where we had lived some years ago. What we did not know was how amazingly varied the walks are here. The lockdown with its permitted daily exercise provided such an opportunity to explore.
With our trusty Ordnance survey map we have been able to explore the local footpaths, going a little further each week. Which way shall we go today, we would ask ourselves. We have climbed up to the top of the North Downs along the path through the barley crop and found our way back down either via the Chalk Pits or by the Windmill. We have walked along the Pilgrim’s Way to Westwell and up around the Gliding Field and back down through the ancient wooded track near the quarry. We have walked to Warren Street of an evening and on one occasion seen an owl flit silently under the trees before returning to Charing along the Pilgrim’s Way. We have even walked to Stalisfield Green and to Stalisfield church. Over these months we have walked through the woods, through carpets of, firstly, wood anemones, then bluebells and now bracken and brambles as we wait to find out where the best blackberries are to be found.
It may be that, by the time you read this, lockdown will have been eased further. Most of us will be faced with an ever-widening array of choices, although some of us may still be unable to venture far. Our choices may relate to work, to the worrying situation of whether our job will still be there after furloughing ceases, and whether we can afford to continue to live in the same place as before. The choice may relate to health, to family, to travel or to when it is possible to get together again for whatever reason. Which choice should we make?
The closure of our churches has been a great sadness for many of us. Wondering whether to watch a service of worship on the television, on Youtube, locally through Zoom or simply reading our bible alone has been a dilemma.
Jesus says, “Follow me!”. But which way? How do we know if it is God’s way or our own way? A challenge for our prayers is to have an honest conversation with God to explore our own deepest longings and needs and to discover God’s desires for us as well. A little while ago, I found a wonderful book by John Ortberg, entitled “All the places to go; how will you know?” He describes how God frequently opens doors and invites us to walk through into the unknown. We may hesitate, we may make excuses but so often we find that, even over a long period of waiting, we still sense an overwhelming urge to follow the way that God is calling us. Few people have ever regretted going through a door which God has opened for them.
Revd. Marian Bond
The Fifteenth Sunday after Trinity
20 September 2020
Readings for July Sundays
5th July Trinity 4
Genesis 24. 34 – 38, 42 – 49, 58 - end Romans 7. 15 – 25a Matt. 11. 16 – 19, 25 - end
12th July Trinity 5
Genesis 25. 19 – end Romans 8. 1 - 11 Matt. 13. 1 – 9, 18 - 23
19th July Trinity 6
Genesis 28. 10 – 19a Romans 8. 12 - 25 Matt. 13. 24 – 30, 36 - 43
26th July Trinity 7
Genesis 29. 15 - 28 Romans 8. 26 – end Matt. 13. 31 – 33, 44 - 52
'Loving God, Serving Christ,
Growing the Church'
Archive of Services
Watch Night
How many pass the guilty night
In revellings and frantic mirth!
The creature is their sole delight,
Their happiness the things of Earth:
For us suffice the season past;
We choose the better part at last.
We will not close our wakeful eyes,
We will not let our eyelids sleep,
But humbly lift them to the skies,
And all a solemn vigil keep;
So many years on sin bestowed,
Can we not watch one night with God?
I was brought up a Methodist. For that matter, I still am a Methodist; only now I’m an Anglican Methodist, just like John Wesley, who said at the end of his life that he lived and died a member of the Church of England, and trusted that all who followed him would do the same. The Methodist Church, alas, is inclined to be narrow in its demands, while the Church of England is notoriously broad, so here I am.
There are, nevertheless, a few things I miss; chorus hymns (though I did on one memorable occasion inflict What a Friend we have in Jesus on a notoriously stuffy city centre congregation, who seemed quite to enjoy the experience), I miss those; and constant social events revolving round the ingestion of gallons of thick brown tea; and most of all, the Watch Night Service.
We never had a midnight service at Christmas when I were a lad; we Methodists are logical people and couldn’t understand why Jesus should have been born precisely on the stroke of midnight; but we knew for certain that the old year ended and the new one began at 0.00 on January 1st. And we considered that the best place to start the New Year was God’s place. For myself, though naturally averse to symbolism, I have always found the new year a symbolic moment, and prefer to start it the way I mean to go on.
Why, I hear someone at the back ask, is it called a watch night service? Well, that’s Charles Wesley’s contribution. He wrote a number of hymns for the occasion, including the verses at the top of this page.
There are other ways, though, in which midnight is a special moment. More, perhaps, than any other time, it represents the moment we call NOW; neither past nor future, but immediate. It’s all very well for philosophers to say that the present doesn’t exist; that NOW represents the tiniest imaginable fraction of a second, as against the infinity of past and future; the fact is that we live, for the time being, in a physical world; and from that world’s point of view, only the present exists; the past is over, the future has yet to be; any action we take, any decision we come to has to be now, there is no other time in which we can act.
Perhaps it is symptomatic of the troubles of our age that the present is so frequently neglected in favour of past or future. Rarely, for example, does the News, in theory dedicated to reporting the present, actually do its job in this regard. When an important event is expected, the news media spend up to a fortnight speculating on what will happen, what will be announced, how the politicians will react to it, what effect all the possibilities might have. Then the moment comes, and if you don’t catch the exact news bulletin that announces it, you may never know what it was, as the next three days will be spent on people’s comments, reactions and opinions of the event. The event itself is swamped.
This can’t be right. If I turn on the wireless for News, I want to know what’s happening in the world, not what somebody thinks is going to happen tomorrow or his opinion of what happened yesterday. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. When Jesus told us to take no thought for the morrow, perhaps this was the very phenomenon he foresaw; there are better ways to spend our time than in idle speculation; and all speculation is idle, it serves only to while away the time until the event. Perhaps the fashionable dissatisfaction with Christmas reflects the same problem; we spend months preparing for a day which, when it comes, passes swiftly and is gone. If we were to live in our proper place, which is the now, perhaps our anxieties and our disappointments might be lessened.
Omar Khayyam, not always the soundest of philosophers, got this one right:
Come, my beloved, fill the cup that clears
Today of past regrets and future fears;
Tomorrow? Why, tomorrow I may be
Myself with yesterday’s seven thousand years.
Speculation is pointless; we all know it’s always the unexpected that happens, anyway. But what of the past? Living in the past can be comfortable like a pair of old slippers; is there harm in that? Alas, yes; because the past can poison both present and future. Past pleasures are good to remember; but remembering past hurts, past pains, past resentments leads only to grief. People describe some horror, or they talk of Myra Hindley's obscene crimes and say, how can there be forgiveness for that? But the only alternative to forgiveness is eternal bitterness. If we all took an eye for an eye, said Gandhi, we would all be blind. Without forgiveness there can be no progress; not to forgive is to deny yourself both a present and a future, and to live wholly in the past. There is no happiness, no fulfilment that way. Not for such purposes did God make Time.
New Year is a good moment to work on forgiveness, to balance the accounts of the past year and close the books. How many times in the year have we asked God to forgive our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us? Time to keep our part of the bargain!
In the Old Testament, of course, a bargain is a Covenant; and Methodists follow the Watch Night service with a Covenant Service on the first Sunday of the New Year, when God’s people renew their promises to a God whose promises are always new. We Anglicans don’t have the service; but perhaps in our hearts we could do the same.
HGB