Week 36 – Harvest

We plough the fields with tractors,
With drills we sow the land;
But growth is still dependent
On God’s almighty hand.
Organic fertilizers
Will help the growing grain,
But for its full fruition
It needs God’s sun and rain.

All good gifts around us
Are sent from heaven above;
Then thank the Lord, O thank the Lord
For all his love.

 

To gather in the harvest
Machines now lead the way.
We reap the the fields with combines,
We bale the new mown hay;
But it is God who gives us
Inventive skills and drive;
Which lighten daily labour
And give us fuller lives!

Then why are people starving
When we have life so good?
And some in crowded cities
Search dustbins for their food;
And even some go hungry
Who farm in distant lands;
Lord, help us learn more swiftly
To share with open hands.

I do not have a Harvest Festival service to lead this year & I am quite sad about it. It is an odd feeling to be honest because until this point in my ministry I have had multiple harvest services every year, in Churches & in the community in different schools & residential homes. Next year I will have to make sure that the plan takes me back into this highlight of the Christian year!

If I did have one I would use the hymn above, an alternative version of the classic harvest hymn ‘We plough the fields & scatter’. I like it because it brings us up to date with the real world & the reality of life of so many of our neighbours who work in the field & with livestock. I like it too because it throws down a challenge to each one of us – if God has blessed us like this, what about those who are struggling?

There has been much rubbish written & spoken about the poor recently, & especially that ugly & divisive phrase the deserving poor. No one chooses to be poor & to struggle to afford the necessities of life or to live hand to mouth. At various points in my life since we entered the Ministry as a family we have struggled & had to rely on charity to help us clothe the children, send them on school trips & even buy food. Asking for help has always been humiliating & we have felt ashamed, & to this point I have never talked about it. I mention it now only because I think these attitudes to the poor need to be addressed.

The poorest in our nation are bearing the hardest burden by far in the austerity measures we now live under & things are set to get a lot worse especially if you are unfortunate enough to be at the bottom of the wealth & earnings ladder. Yet we still get lectured about the deserving & undeserving poor.

Were my family deserving or undeserving? Is the pensioner terrified of the winter fuel bill deserving or undeserving? Is the unemployed middle aged man who cannot find work & has run out of savings deserving or undeserving? Is the homeless teenager on the streets of our cities deserving or undeserving? Are the starving thousands in East Africa deserving or undeserving?

What gives us the right to stand in judgement?

I do wish the old phrase ‘there but for the grace of God’ would tumble from our lips more readily before we make comments about those at the bottom of our society.

Judgemental attitudes towards the less fortunate should not be found in the Christian especially if we are blessed by God to live in positions of comfort & security – they are attitudes that should be alien to any Disciples of Christ Jesus. Remember the warning to each one of us in the parable of the sheep & goats in Matthew 25? We need to make sure that this gospel warning is not ignored, God forbid that judgement would fall on us & our nation & that we would hear this kind of message from Jesus (Matthew 25:41-45):

 ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,  I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’

“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’ “He will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’

This Autumn spare a thought, a prayer & if you can some cash for those who are worst off. Write to your councillor & MP, & be one of those voices raised in warning that fairness & justice should not be lost as we cut budgets, & please let’s stop talking about the underserving poor.

God bless you

Neil Adams

Week 35 – Are you a couch potato?

I had some doubts as to whether there would be a blog this week; not because of my inability to use a diary and thus to mistakenly submit my contribution sometime next year, but because I am imminently expecting to be leaving the Stafford area and moving to Hollywood, California.

Ladies & gentlemen, it is only a matter of time before Daniel Craig is quietly pensioned-off and your Bishops Offley correspondent is filmed unravelling tricky tales of espionage and leaping from the fifth floor of a burning building in order to preserve the ‘Great’ in Great Britain.  (Well, maybe jumping five times from a ground floor window as I’m not too keen on heights, but you get the picture).  I have even bought a pair of light blue speedos and have practiced emerging from the shallow end at Market Drayton baths bathed in sunshine with water droplets glistening on my six pack.  (Or at least I used to before I got banned for bringing beer into the pool).

But I digress, and I hear you asking yourself what has triggered the movie moguls into plucking me from relative obscurity into the cauldron that is Hollywood. I will tell you; the simple reason is that I have recently become a poster boy across the London Underground system.  Hundreds, if not thousands of commuters have their daily lives enriched by the sight of me in a fine athletic pose as I pounded through the capital as I took part in the London Royal Parks Half-marathon 2010.  The poster advertises the race in 2011 and some have commented that the picture was taken at random or to show others that even a decrepit old fool like me could take part in a high-end, big-profile event; one or two have commented that I am wearing a pained expression and that the slightly blurred green flash around me is not a reflection on how fast I am moving in the parks, but is actually the St. John’s Ambulance team rushing to my assistance.  And as a finely honed athlete I should point out that I am focussing – ‘in the zone’ – rather than grimacing.

Of course, you don’t get to this peak of fitness without intensive training and many days I get myself out of bed on my own.  I have also been running hard through all weathers – but not without incident, being stopped by the police, falling over a badger and having a local landowner setting his dogs on me, being three that I remember most.

But it’s all worth it – the feeling of trying to outpace any passing tortoises or to catch someone dressed in a squirrel costume is amazing; my only frustration is that I didn’t return to running much earlier.  I used to be a keen cross-country competitor at school but gave up my running for the delights of football and rugby – both trying to avoid having my leg broken by some psychopath playing for a team in the Sutton Coldfield pub football division 5, and in being put in the unfortunate position of proving the inaccuracy of the old Rugby adage that the ‘bigger they are, the harder they’ll fall’.

But I always felt that I was only one light run from returning to full athletic fitness, so it was a shock when I returned back to running to find how unfit I had become.  My daughter bought me a t-shirt with the slogan ‘I love Pies’ written on the front.  I had to admit that I had become a couch potato of sorts – kidding myself that I was ok and that my former self was lurking just below the surface.

This realisation has parallels in our lives of faith.  At a recent service a minister remarked that a passage was to be read that we would all feel to be familiar and that we should guard against just switching-off, and he urged us to listen to the words.

It struck me that my spiritual being could be like my running self.  That I was fooling myself into thinking that I didn’t need to bother, I knew all the stories, I knew how to behave and that it was just a matter of dusting off my Bible, just as I dug out my running shoes from the back of the wardrobe.

Of course, the reality is that I was out of breath getting my socks on and tying my laces; and I have to ask myself whether I have become a spiritual ‘couch potato’ who has fooled himself into thinking that all is ok with my faith journey.  Whereas the reality is that I need to exercise spiritually – I need to read my Bible more, I need to listen to the stories about Jesus, I need to tune in to the ‘still, small voice of God’ and train hard to ‘get fit’ enough to be called an active, engaged, living Christian, rather than one who just sits and watches.

Ask yourself – what are you?  Spiritual couch potato or spiritual marathon runner?  I urge you to ‘get fit’ now.

David Hemingway

Week 34 – Memorials

There is something deeply disturbing about memorials for they often stand as signs of how poorly we remember, not how well we do.  Remembering is an essential part of being human and humanity has found many ways to remember those who have died, especially in tragic circumstances.  In the last month or so the media has offered us memorial after memorial for the events of the 11th September 2001. Television, radio, printed media and, of course, the Internet, have reminded us in great detail of the pain and tragedy that human beings can bring upon one another. On the 7th July 2005 I remember beginning my day with a short bus ride to Aldgate to gather with other faith leaders of Tower Hamlets to stand in silence as a witness to the overwhelming majority of people of all faiths and none who wanted to stand up against those who bombed our buses and our tube trains.  The community was shattered by those acts as surely as those in New York, Arlington and Shanksville.  It doesn’t matter that ‘only’ 56 people died in London on 7/7 and 2,995 people died on 9/11.  Being there made it very personal and I understand much better the need for memorial than ever before.  There are now memorial plaques and other works of art in different places across London and the world to those who have died. The seemingly bottomless pools surrounded by trees at the site of the twin towers in New York is a startling reminder of the depths of sorrow human beings can bring upon one another, as if the tears will always flow and never cease. There is another set of memorials that has always fascinated me in Tower Hamlets, a cemetery for the Jewish community active from 1733 until 1922.  I began by walking past it as I went about my work in the Borough.  Perhaps inevitably I began to stop and discovered that the gates were locked and no-one could go in.  I started to stop and strained to see the gravestones – all of them were pitted with age and the damage wrought by years of pollution. I also noticed that many were smashed and realised that others had come long after the graves had been the sites of mourning relatives and friends – those ‘others’ had smashed the stones and desecrated the graves because they were fascists and hated the Jewish community. When we went on a journey around Eastern Europe in 2004 we visited a memorial site on the western outskirts of a town called Oświęcim. The town may be better known to you as Auschwitz. You see this is not about how many people had their breath stolen from them, more than a million people died at Auschwitz and the true number will never be known it is about the fact that humanity does not learn from its mistakes. So we bury our dead and our heads in the sand. We erect our memorials to be forgotten in time.  We do not listen to our elders.  We make the same mistakes again and again. We are left only with our prayers and our hope that one day things will be different.

“and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; for the old order of things has passed away.” Revelation 21.4

We pray for all those who died leaving loved ones to grieve.

We pray for those who died trying to rescue others.

We pray for those who watched and waited.

We pray for those who will never truly recover.

We pray for the cities of New York, Arlington Virginia and Shanksville  Pennsylvania where the planes crashed and for London and for all places of memorial.

We pray for those who perpetrate such acts in the misguided belief that they are doing God’s will.

We pray for ourselves that in all our doings we may always try to heed the words of Jesus who said “Love your neighbour as yourself, do this and you will live.”

Amen

Peter Powers

Week 33 – Hurricanes, Earthquakes and the International House of Pancakes

I’ve just returned from my sabbatical and back into the hurly burly of work again. Having three months away from the Sunday job is, at first, odd and strange but later on becomes thoroughly enjoyable. In fact, so enjoyable that it is quite hard to sit at the computer and write this piece and to anticipate the week/month ahead which will be full of “church” stuff both the good and the not so good!

The first two thirds of my sabbatical revolved around reading the sunday newspapers at 9am on a sunday rather than 9pm. The last month or so involved me crossing the “pond” to spend time working with a church community in Burlington, North Carolina in the vast land mass that is the US of A.

Although we may share a common language, there are many differences within our separate cultures. The concept of recycling has not quite hit our North American cousins yet and the words “portion control” have not made it into their consciousness! My visit to the wonderfully named International House of Pancakes is testament to that. It’s fair to say that if you visit for a late breakfast, you will probably be leaving at lunchtime vowing never to eat again.

The people in the church were so welcoming in every way and sought to make sure I had everything I needed being a stranger in a strange land. This, obviously, included making sure that I had enough to eat – suffice to say, I did!

There was even an earthquake of 5.7 magnitude that affected the place where I was living, soon followed by the wonderfully named Hurricane Irene which wrought havoc down the east coast and although I was on the tail end of the carnage, the 50mph winds and heavy storms that hit Alamance County are not my idea of fun. So I thanked the church folk for giving me the full American experience in my short time with them.

The differences in the way the church operates were many and varied, including the use of a robed choir and the general formality of each act of worship. There is much for me to ponder on in the coming weeks and I’m sure my thoughts and comments on the differences will become the subject of much sermon material in the future.

But, ultimately, even though I’ve travelled over three thousand miles to another country, I found a group of Christian people seeking to find the best ways of living out their faith and making a relevant impact upon the community in which they were set. This was where the differences ended because as we begin a new church year that is exactly where we are. Geographically, we are miles away from North Carolina but spiritually we share the same goals, hopes, fears, joys and concerns and there is something oddly comforting about that fact.

Jeff Reynolds