April 2024
JESUS
It is widely thought that Mark’s target readership was followers of Jesus who lived in a society where they were never ‘the flavour of the month’ and vulnerable to significant levels of personal and institutionalised discrimination. So he saw it his responsibility to encourage those followers of Jesus.
Like many a preacher Marks tells a story that is full of drama, featuring one or more persons who had experienced an amazing transformation in life. We find such a story in ch 7 vv 31-37. It is about a man who having been deaf and dumb has through the actions of Jesus (putting his fingers in the man’s ears, spitting and touching the man’s tongue) and the words of Jesus (looking up to heaven, giving a deep groan and saying to the man ‘Ephphatha that is ‘open up’.) is enabled to immediately hear and speak.
Some might be quick to say that this event is far-fetched. It is beyond reasonable belief. Indeed it is easier for us to believe in a miracle’s having taken place if we know personally the person(s) involved. In company with that we believe God to be capable of the incredible incredible. Back in the 1970s & 80s when I was part of the Baptist Union’s Health & Healing Group, we had sometimes to ponder what we made of those personal stories of healing that we had told us. Some would claim that they themselves or the person they were talking or writing about had been healed thanks solely to prayer without any medical help. On occasions former Missionary Dr Stanley Thomas would say that, alongside the contribution of prayer, there was evidence that the person’s health change had a rational medical explanation. I knew too in the 1980s a most accomplished and much admired surgeon, who had been influenced by the charismatic movement, say that a person’s healing may be in accordance with medical understanding, but happen at an unusually faster rate than would normally be expected.
It would add to our appreciation of these incidents involving Jesus’ healing Ministry if the likes of Mark had supplied us with far more information about what actually happened!
HOLY SPIRIT
My intention was to continue with the thoughts of J C Philpot about how the Holy Spirit is like water but I divert because in Church we last sung the hymn / song that begins ‘Peace is flowing like a river’. Following verses highlight other what might be called as with peace, ‘fruits of the Spirit’. I might add that I was leading the worship and had picked it for us to sing! – a hymn for which there was significant affection amongst the people I knew in Chorleywood in the 1980s. It might be a worthwhile exercise in worship or discussion group for people to share together what rivers mean to them or do for them or affect them and see what insights this leads the group to gather about the functioning and character of the Holy Spirit.
As we sang the hymn from ‘Songs of Fellowship’ I notice that the following Song (no 459) continued the theme but also reminded us that there are a number of images of the Spirit. To be aware of a range of images would surely enhance our appreciation of the Spirit:
‘Peace like a river,
Love like a mountain,
The wind of Your Spirit
is blowing everywhere.
Joy like a fountain,
Healing spring of life;
Come, Holy Spirit,
Let Your fire fall.’ (author: John Watson)
PAUL
Paul begins his first letter to the Church at Corinth with paying tribute to their faith in Jesus Christ, but it is not that long before he is rounding on them for the divisive differences they have amongst themselves. As we read Paul’s words we can, I think, hear the passion that drove Paul to write what he did.
When he judged he needed to be Paul could be most forthright and extremely confrontational. Unless a person was noticeably insensitive, people knew where they were with Paul. He made himself crystal clear and did not chicken out of getting involved in argument. I guess he would say in his defence for being like that that he felt he owed it to God, to Jesus Christ, to the Spirit to speak out, confident that this was a part of his divine calling and vocation.
EASTER REFLECTION
GOD THE FATHER
Hymn 12 in the splendid Methodist hymn book ‘Singing The Faith’ is by 20th century Anglican Priest, an eminent academic but very much a traditionalist, W H Vanstone. It is a 7 verse hymn, 4 lines in each verse and from verse 3 til the end it has us fosus on the deply passionate love of God as seen in the life and death and passion of Jesus Christ but without ever mentioning Jesus by name. Jesus’ passion and Jesus’ self-giving are indeed God’s passion and God’s self-gving.
Many an early Church theologian contended that God was ‘above suffering’ and such a thinker could be harsh towards anyone who thought who talked and wrote of God as Himself suffering, accusing such a thinker of subscribing to the heresy of ‘patripassionism’ In Jesus’ sufferings and being crucified we see, Vanstone affirms, the “love of God”. Indeed, might we say that this is where God’s love truly peaks.
Talking like this about God is a similar to the way we might talk about someone, a fellow human. Someone who has loved for years or been a very close friend over a period of time, we migth say of him or her that it was when he or she did this (whatever ‘this’ might be) for us that we really saw for ourselves how much and what deep love they felt for us and showed to us. There are times when how we think about ourselves as people helps us, offers us insight in how we should think about God, but other times we must remember to balance this against the truth that God is different from ourselves, for God is greater than our minds can comprehend or our words can express.
Before we sing these verses about God’s passionate love for us in Jesus, Vanstone has us think first about creation and then secondly our own artistic and creative skills. Note that God has gifted us with minds and senses.
Morning glory, starlit sky, leaves in springtime, swallows’ flight,
autumn gales, tremendous seas,
sounds and scents of summer days.
Soaring music, towering words,
art’s perfection, scholar’s truth,
joy supreme of human love,
memory’s treasure, grace of youth.
We might quibble a bit here with Canon Vanstone not over what he has said but ovre what we has not said – no mention of the scientist, no mention of the medical expert who restored my health, for instance. It is all too easy when listing those for whom we are grateful, to overlook or to forget to mention someone who should have had a mention! These verses bring us, if we take them to heart. close to the God who enthuses and drools over everything that is and everyone who is good and worthy of praise.
Trust you have been having a beneficial Lent and wishing you a very Happy Easter!
February 2024
GOD THE FATHER
In a well-known hymn of 4 verses Bishop Heber (1783 – 1826) gets us to focus on the holiness of God. “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty! Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee;” He seeks to have us think of God as holy, not as an after-thought, but as our first thought of the day and not just on Sunday, I imagine but every day of every week. God’s being holy is not something we think about every now and again but through out life.
The word ‘holy’ is a word that expresses God’s being unique, being superior to ourselves. Call God ‘holy’ and really mean it shows that we are showing deference to God but, at the same time, we cherish it, that God is so wondrously greater than we are, to quote Anselm, one-time Archbishop of Canterbury, God is “that than which nothing greater can be conceived” or, could ever possibly exist.
God is “almighty”: God makes things happen: sometimes by evolutionary process, sometimes by instant unbelievable but true miraculous action God brings things about, achieves change. This may scare the living daylights out of us but God is also and always “merciful”.
When engaging with God, we must remember that God is “God is three Persons, Blessed Trinity.” The rise pf the Pentecostal / Charismatic was in part because some believed that in the Churches we undervalued and took too little notice of the Holy Spirit. But a member of that movement, Tom Smail wrote a book ‘The Forgotten Father’ because he claimed that some made so much of the Spirit that they overlooked the Father. I recall being there at a Churches Together in England meeting the late Archimandrite Ephrem Lash of the Orthodox Church (someone to whom I owe a great deal) say that in the thinking of the Orthodox each Christian festival though it might seem to be about one of the Holy Trinity, each one was about all Three of the Trinity.
We must beware, in our minds and hearts narrowing God down. We must beware when praying, talking to God like we are allowed to tell Him what He must think and what He must do. Heber’s hymn warns us off seeking to ‘control freak’ God.
Recently some said to me that it in Genesis 1 it is both make and female that who are made in the image of God. This suggests that we can see something of God in both men and women: God is not a man’s God more than a woman’s God, God is not more masculine than feminine. Dr Henton Davies, Principal of Regent’s Park College whilst I was a student there in ther late 60s and early 70s preached a sermon at Miadstone Baptist Church some 5 or 6 years before that. His topic was Genesis 1. He said “God is at the same time both masculine and feminine and neither of them.”
I hears Rowan Williams say in a sermon at the Cathedral, “God takes you seriously”. The word ‘holy’ conveys the thought that we should ourselves ‘take God seriously’. There are people who don’t go to Church but are disappointed, even feeling it to be wrong, if a local Church closes, It is a loss to the community of which it had been part. People may, in thought and practice, have little to do with God but not like the thought that there is no God and feel a touch deprived if the local Churches have no Minister, Vicar or Priest of their own One of the ways in which we progress in faith is that we get closer with God, something which wil quiet often cause us to change as people and what we do with ourselves in life.
Please pass on to others, if you feel so inclined. Wishing you many blessings.
December 2023
GOD THE FATHER
Nathan Fellingham’s song that I highlighted a while back has a second part to it:
Lift up his name with the sound of singing,
lift up his name in all the earth.
Lift up your voice and give him glory,
for he is worthy to be praised.
These are words that remind and assure us that our God is a musical God. A major way God engages and interacts with us is through music. Our Quaker comrades alert us to the truth that our being silent can be very important to God’s being able to get in touch with us, and in many a Church we have not allowed for sufficient times of quiet and stillness. However, to have no singing is to take away from God His chance to touch base with through music. In the last months of Ministry at Whitstable United Reformed Church I included in the worship that I lead a shortish piece about music and musicians in the Bible. The books of the Old Testament give us clear indication that indication that when the Israelites or Jews staged a Procession, the musicians and singers occupied a prestigious position in the line, being at or well towards the front of the Procession.
In 2021, during my Sabbatical, I visited the Cathedral of Montpellier in France. As I entered I caught sight of a ‘welcome board’ that told us that the real point of going into the Church was to engage with God and allow God to engage with us. But once inside visitors could hear a recording of singing by monks from Burgos in Spain. It was as if this background music and song was, strange to say, conducive to our being able to be silent with God.
Nathan’s words also remind us that our engaging with God is not something that we do in private, right away from the world and the society we live in, but as part of our being actively part of the world and society in which we live. Again on my Sabbatical, when in the Netherlands, I came across Calvin-inspired Churches that gave no indication as to when they met for worship or any times when the buildings might be open. Such realities suggest that there is no desire in the words of hymn writer J E Seddon to “Tell all the world of Jesus … ” and may even expose an absence of conviction that Jesus is “The Light of the world” and “The Saviour of all mankind”.
JESUS
Mark spends quite a time flagging up the disagreements between Jesus and the Jewish religious leaders, like it was one of the major issues for Jesus throughout His ministry. The clash was a head-on one and each, Jesus and the Jewish leaders knew that they possessed sharply contrasting mindsets. Jesus was also deeply and passionately concerned that many of the religious leaders refused to allow the Jewish people to think for themselves: they insisted on controlling the way people thought and lived. They did this by inventing a whole amount of rules and laws and were then rapid to have it in for those who, in their judgement, did not appear to be keeping them strictly. This creates an ethos where people are more than anything else anxious and perturbed and feel oppressed about keeping each and everyone of the regulations. Consequently they do not focus on what is of utmost importance to God, “What am I like deep down as a person?” (Mark 7 vv 24-33)
HOLY SPIRIT
There are times in our lives, during our faith journey when our faith is strong – God, Jesus, the Spirit are very real to us; we know that God loves us, that God forgives us our sins. Times come, however, when we are not so sure. We question how well in with God we are. Other people seem to have a deeper and more substantial faith than we have. These can be times when we wish and yearn for a greater faith. This yearning to recover the faith we once had or to come by a faith that we see to be so very real in others are indications, 19th Baptist Preacher J C Philpot says, that there is something positive going on between ourselves and the Holy Spirit. Sometimes the Spirit is ‘full in our face’; other times the Spirit is less so, somewhat incognito, behind the scenes. We may struggle to work it out why we have these contrasting times. We believe that God knows why and God may even think that it is healthy for the long time well-being of our souls that we have the ups and downs of faith in our faith’s journey in this life.
PAUL
We find Paul’s being very aggressively assertive on his behalf in what he writes to the Church in Galatia. He insists that he was talked or emotionally pressurised by other people into having the faith in Christ that he has. The only person who affected him was Jesus Christ Himself and as ‘proof’ of this he says how there was a three year gap between his Damascus Road experience and his meeting up with other Church and Christian leaders who were based in Jerusalem.
My observations here about Paul and Jesus remind me of study come devotional day I went to several years ago now in Canterbury at the now closed Catholic Franciscan Centre. An Anglican Franciscan was talking about Francis of Assisi and the Buddha and about how they said very similar things about themselves and matters of faith. Over lunch he sat next to me and it gave the opportunity for me to ask him if he thought Christianity had more in common with the Indian faiths than it did with the other two Abrahamic faiths, Judaism and Islam. He said he had not thought about that. However I did wonder at the time whether he was reluctant to have that conversation with me when there might happen to be within ear-shot those who might struggle to sympathise with what he was saying!
Please feel free to pass these thought son to others. I wish you a blessed and happy Christmas and hope that 2024 will be a good year for you,
Geoffrey
Late November 2023
These are seasonal Thoughts. Next Sunday is a very important Sunday, a Sunday for which, if I were leading Church worship, I would give it a ‘double-header’.
It is the last Sunday of the Churches’ Liturgical Year, meaning that we are on the cusp of the start of the next Liturgical Year on the First Sunday of Advent, which this year falls on December 3rd.
Many a Church now take up the originally Catholic rooted theme of ‘The Feast of Christ the King’. In readings, prayers, hymns, homilies and sermons we make a point of ‘talking up’ Jesus Christ, honouring and celebrating that He is decorated with the ‘Name that is above all names’. I enjoy hymns that praise the fullness of Jesus and offer us a range of ‘pictures’ of Him, hymns like “Crown Him with many crowns … “I danced in the morning .. ” “Christ triumphant, ever reigning ..”
We must face this: truth about ourselves: that we connect or engage with but parts of Jesus. Three Churches that I have visited that I especially warmed to, for the way they promoted Jesus so strikingly were the main Chapel at the Fatima Shrine in Portugal, Clervaux Abbey in Luxembourg and the Cathedral in the French city of Beziers. As I entered I noticed a board that said the real point of going into the Church was to meet up with Jesus.
I am indebted to Fr Aleksander, the Orthodox Priest who serves Canterbury for telling me about the Iconostasis that the individual saints depicted are each one of them facing towards the centre, the centre being the Icon of Jesus
The other theme for this coming Sunday is that it is ‘Stir-up Sunday’, getting this name from the prayer or collect for this particular Sunday: “Stir up, we beseech Thee, O Lord, the wills of Thy faithful people that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of Thee be plenteously rewarded.”
This prayer is like a pre-cursor to the season of Advent, a season that I am sorry to say, gets overlooked with the all the festival decorations appropriate for Christmas being put up, long before it is Christmas and then taken down so soon after Christmas Day, as if Christmas is over and done with when in truth it has only just begun for it continues until the Feast of Candlemas on February 2nd! I have been to a number of so named ‘Christmas Markets’ in December. The best for me were in Vienna and I am pleased to say that they were called ‘Advent Markets’.
Advent is a season of hope, expectation and anticipation but it is a season which has much in common with Lent, a time for reflection, penitence, taking stock, having a serious look at oneself. When began in the Ministry, one of my Anglican companions in Ministry openly disapproved of Christmas Carols being sung prior to Christmas Eve – he even wanted the local Junior School to hold their Christmas service in January rather than before term finished in December. I recall covering some of these things in my Christmas time BBC Radio Kent broadcasts.
November 2023
When I read the write-ups about Jesus’s conversations with people, especially with those people who sought to take Him on with what they thought were challenging questions, questions that they hoped would ‘knock him down’, Jesus comes across to be gifted with a brain that could work fast. He was quick thinking. He was not thrown. It was hard for anyone to ‘have the last word’ with Him.
So when He gets tackled by the religious leaders about the disciples non-compliance with rules about washing, He retorts strongly that they can be accused themselves of what they accuse His disciples of. He acts out the that “by what judgement you judge, you shall yourself be judged.” When circumstances in His life required it, Jesus could make Himself a force to be reckoned with. If He considered it right to be, he could be ‘in your face’. He was not a preacher or a talker or a conversationalist who only preached comfortable messages.
HOLY SPIRIT
The more I have been reading to myself the sermons of mid 19th century Baptist Pastor J C Philpot, I notice the many times he stresses the threefold impact the Holy Spirit has upon us. The Spirit blesses us with assuring us, making us to know it inwardly for ourselves that God in Jesus Christ is full of grace for us and forgiving of our sins. However this wondrous experience depends upon our seriously recognising ourselves as fools and sinners, our recognising that we are in no position to make good our relationship with God. It has to be God who saves us, we are incapable of saving ourselves. Attached to our knowing God’s mercy and pardon, the Spirit ministers to sanctify us: we do not improve ourselves or become saints by our own endeavours; we become saints when and because the Spirit makes us saints. However if the Spirit is to succeed, the Spirit requires our co-operation; we must have the desire and heart to become saints and be focused on becoming saints.
PAUL
In vv 8&9 of Ch 1 of Galatians, Paul becomes very passionate; he is very worked up, fuming, in a rage, verging on losing his self-control. Indeed, I ask myself if he isn’t in danger of doing God’s job for Him! Directing God, dictating to God as to who to send to hell! The Galatians had come under the influence, within the grip of at least one person who had got them back to thinking in Jewish ways that Paul had since his conversion to Christianity discarded. Because they had previously joined Paul on his journey of faith, Paul takes it very personally.
We hear Paul being forthright, by no means mincing his words, not holding back, showing no discretion or caution. I recall a fellow Minister saying years ago at a meeting of Ministers that Paul must have been one of those who, if he were at a gathering, you would know he was there! A number of eminent people can be at a gathering but choose to keep a low profile, so much so that one might be there and you and I don’t notice their presence. I don’t think Paul fells into that category of personality! If something was said that he took exception to, he would soon let everyone know what he thought!
Trust you are well. My God bless you with the blessing that is appropriate to your situation. Please feel free to pass on these thoughts to others,
October 2023
GOD THE FATHER
This is a wonderfully inspirational and thought stimulating hymn by Charles Wesley:
Hail! Holy, holy, holy Lord!
whom One in Three we know;
by all thy heavenly host adored,
by all the Church below.
One undivided Trinity
with triumph we proclaim;
thy universe is full of thee,
and speaks thy glorious name.
Thee, holy Father, we confess,
thee, holy Son, adore,
thee, Spirit of truth and holiness,
we worship, evermore.
Three Persons equally divine
we magnify and love;
and both the choirs ere long shall join
to sing thy praise:
Hail! Holy, holy, holy Lord!
our heavenly song shall be,
supreme essential One, adored
in co-eternal Three.
Amongst the things I notice:
when we worship God in Church we catching up with what is already and perpetually going on in heaven. We are indulging ourselves on earth in what is essentially a heavenly activity. Orthodox thinkers might say that the Church is a part of heaven on earth and it is because when worshipping we are doing in time and space what is without ceasing happening in heaven, that people can be free to come and go during the worship: it is acceptable to attend but some of the service. The point of the Iconostasis is that it depicts saints who have pre-dated us of today in becoming part of the Communion of Saints in the Kingdom of heaven and because we join with them when we worship, we are in the time of worship being, amazing to think and say, in something of a heavenly and eternal environment.
So, maybe, we do well to have knowledge of the history of our own Church and some awareness of the people who have been an integral part of it from its day 1. I recall a sermon preached something like 70 years ago in Maidstone Baptist Church by the then Deputy Principal of the London Bible College Dermot MacDonald in which he called on us to give time and energy to focusing on ‘those things that are eternal’. Spiritual counsellors encourage us to make time to pray in a way that takes us away from our everyday lives and we dwell on the God who is in heaven. We can neglect this aspect of our spiritual life by dwelling on and insisting on God’s being relevant to this time and place we are in as we live our lives.
Worship is about talking up God and this should arouse our passions: we are not polite to God but minded to “adore” God. We indulge in a heartfelt engagement with God.
Though the hymn endeavours to gift us a feel for the realms of heaven, the hymn reminds us that we can and do sense God with creation and this should come as no surprise because we believe because creation belongs to God.
Adoration of God is entirely appropriate because of the incredible depth of God’s love for us, except that Wesley writes here far more about God’s being holy. This conjures up in our minds images of God’s purity, the point made about God is that God is always true to his own best Self. He is superiorly different to anything or anyone else. His integrity is for ever intact. When we use the word, we recognise and confess that vast difference in quality between ourselves and God.
The middle verse gives us brief time in turn to focus individually on God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. But the hymn asserts very positively that God we worship is Trinitarian. In my view the habit of not calling the Sundays “Trinity … ” after Pentecost “Trinity ..” is a wrong step. Something that sticks in my mind is something said by the late Archimandrite Ephrem Lash (who I knew from when we both members of Churches Together in England’s Enabling Group) that for him as an Orthodox all the major Christian Festivals involve the active participation of God the father, Jesus the Son of God and the Holy Spirit. Even when we appear to be dealing with One Person of the Trinity, we are in truth dealing with every Three of them. Something else I cannot get my ahead around is how a Sunday could be described as an “Ordinary” Sunday.
September 2023
GOD THE FATHER
I was sad to read that hymn-writer Alan Gaunt dies recently at the age of 88. Having written of God being “through the ages, wronged, affronted .. still crucified” he has us face up to our own less than saintly selves: “convict us, forgive us;” As we complain about the way the world is and how other people are, we must not lose sight of the truth, the fact that it is our own selves “who are standin’ in the need of prayer”. God reacts to us when we think ourselves superior or above criticism. The day when we can cease ot need the forgiveness and corrective influence of God will never come in this life.
We may enjoy it, get a kick out of it, finding fault and being critical and judgemental. Not so God for what motivates God to “destroy all that hinders peace and justice” is his “holy love”. So God’s love precedes His anger. He is not an essentially angry ‘person’ but a loving one. His anger only arises when and because he ‘sees’ the absence or the rejection of love. We close the hymn by praying that God “fill this aching world with joy” I wonder how many people have ditched or been put off seeking God because Church people have given the impression that God is so serious that he is as good as joyless and almost would not know what to do with himself if we ceased to be fools and sinners. God knows the strength of evil and is minded to thwart forces of evil but God is the God who enjoys “all things (and all people) bright and beautiful, all things (and all people) wise and wonderful.”
JESUS
Staying with the argument between Jesus and the Jewish religious leaders, it is clear to me that Jesus was a very strong personality, completely capable of standing His ground, of talking straight, of being forthright, of speaking His mind and of being provocative an outspoken. He was prepared to live with the consequences of what He said and did.
HOLY SPIRIT
In the 1980s through going regularly to the Philosophy lectures arranged by The Royal Institute of Philosophy I got to know Godfrey Vesey Professor of Philosophy at The Open University. His father had been a Bishop in the Church in Ireland and, as a young man, as he told us, Godfrey often heard his father preach. Because this was in many a Church he often a sermon more than once! On one occasion he was so familiar with it that he discarded listening to it, instead he started looking through The Prayer Book. He read something that shook him to the core: it was that something a Christian is, is that he or she has had a personal experience of the Holy Spirit. It shook him because he said he hadn’t known such an experience; it pinpointed something that hadn’t come his way.
In his many sermons J C Philpot makes mention in a large way of the Holy Spirit, largely I think because he himself knew for himself ‘experiencing the Holy Spirit coming into him”. However, in one of his sermons I recently read. he says that with some people the Spirit is with them though the Spirit stays (in my words) somewhat incognito and this may be not because of us but because of the Spirit’s choosing, the Spirit’s being wise in how best to engage with us.
PAUL
A feature of the letters that Paul was in toto or in part responsible for writing is how the recipients of the letters are thanked by Paul for their faith and quality of Christian living. There is one letter where no word of ‘thank you’ is written and that is the one to the Church in Galatia. There is a ‘thank you’ for the Church folk in Corinth even though Paul has some big criticisms to make of them.
Paul is hurting deeply because of how the people in Galatia have lost their Christian plot. I think Paul is wondering whether or not they haven’t as good as ceased to be Christian and having become again very Jewish in their outlook. They had, under Paul’s guidance, been journeying like Paul from being Jewish to being Christian but now they have regressed and ceased being on this journey. Paul feels abandoned by them. He feels it for himself, for Christ, for the Holy Spirit.
I wish you Happy Michaelmas and hope you are in good heart and good spirits. Please pass these Thoughts to others. Trust you find them helpful.
Geoffrey
August 2023
GOD THE FATHER
Staying with the same hymn as in recent Thoughts Alan Gaunt says of God that “through the ages wronged, affronted, in your poor, still crucified”.
Implied here is that the Cross of Jesus was not an isolated incident in the life of God but is typical of so much that God is on the receiving end of and being put through because people are minded to reject God. Dietrich Bonhoeffer the German Lutheran theologian and martyr of Hitler said of the world that it is constantly seeking to push God out of it. The Old Testament has many an accusation against the so-called People of God that they think and behave like they are not the People of God. A key point made in the story of Adam and Eve is that they yearn to re-place God with themselves, to take Eden away from God and make it and the world their place.
We might well understand it why some people say they don’t believe in God. However I would suggest that someone who is an aggressive non-believer wearing his or her atheism on their sleeve has within them a sense that God is for real and, for some reason, is passionately determined to run away from that being the truth. They know that to engage with God and have God engage with them could well make a traumatic difference to them and to they live.
JESUS
Ch 7 of Mark’s Gospel begins with Jesus being challenged by the Jewish religious leaders about the fact that His disciples, when it comes to eating, disregard obeying the rules laid down for Jews about the washing of their hands and the cleaning of the utensils and crockery used at meal times. We might feel that Pharisees and Scribes had a point. These rules did seem to make sense if hygiene is something of real importance. From what Mark says Jesus makes no concession to them but grabs the opportunity to be extremely forthright to their faces in His criticism of them. He damns them as “hypocrites”.
He can see that they made so much of this and all the other laws that the people were required to follow because they enjoyed the power and control they had over individuals, people in general and society through their enforcement of each and everyone of those laws. Power in society can so often fall into the hands of those who enjoy being authoritarian and dictatorial. When in positions of leadership within the Church we must beware making the Church or the section of it we lead into our personal Empire.
I recall the time I spent in 2011 at a Convent ‘The Sisters of the Love of God’ in Oxford. Though basically a silent order place, I had conversations with one of the Sisters who explained to me how the role of Mother Superior rotated, any Sister only having that responsibility for two years, this so that the Community did not become dominated by one Sister. They were part of the Anglican Carmelites. The late Fr Wilf McGreal, a frequent contributor to BBC Radio Kent, himself a (Catholic) Carmelite said to me that the role of the Head of a Carmelite House was to be more like a Co-ordinator than a Ruler.
HOLY SPIRIT
I find that the 19th century Baptist Pastor J C Philpot says a lot about he Holy Spirit in his sermons. One is based on the very warmingly positive words of Paul in Romans 8 vv 16-17:
“The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are children of God: And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified together.”
He preached on this in North Street Chapel, Stamford on Sunday morning April 4th 1858. His motive for doing so seems to have been his ‘observation’ that many who went to Church hadn’t reached this point in their faith journey where they confidently thought of themselves as children of God, that some have not a healthy but an unhealthy fear of God. From a fairly lengthy opening section of a characteristically lengthy sermon (but not quite as long as some!), I sense that he was currently aware at the time of people whose faith was going through a low ebb. His hope and prayer was that he would say things that would re-energise their faith and lift their inner spirits.
PAUL
Paul wrote his letter to the Church in Galatia because he was sorely disappointed with them, ow they had lost their way in the journey of faith and he is seeking to retrieve for them the faith in Christ as Saviour that they once enjoyed. So he begins with an affirmation about himself, that his “call to be an apostle did not come from man or by means of man, but from Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from death.”
I heard in a sermon John Taylor. when Bishop of St Albans say that, when interviewing someone who had aspiration to be ordained or to be a preacher. he was focused on this more than anything else: the person had this aspiration as a gift from God: it had to be His will for them; they must have received or had a ‘call’ from God.
Late July 2023
THE HOLY SPIRIT
Quotation from mid 19th century Baptist Pastor J C Philpot. Based on Romans 1 v 16 “For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believeth.”
The Gospel in its power is not a mere proclamation of mercy; not a mere declaration of good news; but it brings the mercy which it proclaims, and communicates the salvation it reveals …… the gospel is good news, glad tidings; but if the gospel do not reach the heart; if it do not speak peace to the conscience; do not reveal pardon and peace to the soul as a manifested blessing; do not set the prisoner free, or bring the captive out of the low dungeon; however blessed the declaration may be in itself, it falls utterly short if it leave the prisoner still in the prison house. We see then that something more is needed than a mere proclamation of mercy; and that the same God of all grace, who has sent forth the glad tidings of pardon and peace in the gospel, must himself apply it with a divine power to the soul; for I am sure that without this, it falls utterly short of the deliverance from the cures of the law, the accusation of Satan, and the condemnation of a guilty conscience. Now God will not let the gospel fall short to any vessel of mercy. It shall do as well as speak; it shall act as well as preach; it shall liberate the prisoner as well as tell him that there is liberty for him.
Preached Sunday morning December 9th 1860 at North Street Chapel, Stamford. The full sermon occupies in small print 24 & a bit A5 pages of paper!
I have 12 volumes of his sermons brought together under the heading ‘The Gospel Pulpit’, the books previously owned by Baptist Minister Grandfather (the Revd Frank Fells) who died in 1953.
May blessings be in abundance for yourself!
Geoffrey
July 2023
GOD THE FATHER
The words of hymns often merit being given more thought than it is possible for us to give them when singing them, because of the speed that are sung. A verse may highlight a multitude of thoughts. Thus retired URC Minister Alan Gaunt’s hymn when he has sing to the Holy Spirit:
“God with us: Unwearied Spirit,
from the birth of time and space,
surging through unconscious being,
joyful, Life-Creating Grace:
through he centuries you find us;
you, as God, inspire our prayer;
Life and Power at work within us,
Love for ever, everywhere!”
“Unwearied” is one of those ‘negative positive’ words where we say what something isn’t in order to say what it is. We may say of God that God never gives up hope, never loses faith, always expects and anticipates that He (or, should I also say ‘She’?) will achieve what He intends to achieve. God will never throw in the towel. God sees Himself as a winner. The Spirit is active in the inanimate. The word ‘surging’ suggests that God is a force to be reckoned with, is committed to dynamic action, is minded to make things happen. We can become caught up in what God is about without our realising it that we are caught up in it. Even the person who has no faith may be, unwittingly, ‘doing God’s thing’. However the Spirit is focused very much so on gifting us with faith in God. If we find God that is because God wants us to find Him. This is God’s hope, God’s own prayer, that one day everyone will find Him.
JESUS
Mark reports Jesus as being able to help people whatever health or personal problem they had. By the grace of God and the inspiration of the Spirit, He is at one and the same time like both a health Consultant and a multi-capable GP. He is both a specialist and an all-rounder. Picture Jesus in testing, demanding, challenging situations and we see His being, to His credit and distinction, being totally ‘unfazed’.
HOLY SPIRIT
The late Archbishop George Appleton highlights 3 ‘things’ that happen to us when God’s Spirit and our spirit get their act together:
“O Eternal God, wit thy life within me I am transformed, with quiet trust, with growing love, seeing life as a joyful adventure. I look out on the world with new eyes, seeing wonder and beauty in every created thing. I see my fellow-men no longer as rivals for the tings I want or obstacles to my own advancement but as friends and brothers. I see death as my final birth into the sphere of the eternal, which I have already glimpsed and tasted through my touch with thee, O Blessed and Beloved One.”
PAUL
Read the two Letters that Paul sent to the Church in Thessalonica, it is clear that Paul thinks the world of them, thus largely because it was because of Paul himself that they had come to faith in Christ and were people who were such an enormous credit to Christ and themselves. Paul felt an abiding responsibility for them, but he also tells them that he looks to them to “to pray for” him, because he is finding that he must keep his faith in situations where it is tested. However strong we might think our faith to be, there might come a day when it is challenged to the point where we might lose it. However robust we might reckon our faith to be and others tells u that it is, there could come a situation where we could fall from grace. We never come to that day when we can give up “fighting the good fight”.
June 2023
GOD THE FATHER
Retired URC Minister begins one of his hymns with 3 (out of 4) verses with the phrase “God with us”. I suggest he might have alternatively written “God for us”. In v 2 he\ says of God that He is “for ever at our side”.
Justification for asserting this is that He “walked among us”. He is of course talking of Jesus whose life culminated in, our of love “Perfect love”, His taking up His cross, dying as someone who experienced being despised and rejected, ” … who shared our shame, streaming from the cross, your judgement, full of mercy, clears our name”.
His choice of words invites, calls upon us, counsels us to picture ourselves physically, mentally, spiritually, personally at the foot of Jesus’ cross, God’s cross. Throughout the verse he is getting us to address Jesus, God personally. We sing not about them but to them.
I recall hearing the late Revd David Watson say he liked better this practice for it means we are engaging personally, ‘face-to-face’ with God, with Jesus, with the Holy Spirit. We find Charles Wesley seeking to get us to do this in his tremendous hymn “And can it be …?”
Likewise Isaac Watts in “When I survey the wondrous cross … ” God’s forgiving us is more than something that it is satisfying to wonder about, it is a massive truth and reality to experience. We don’t wait to be forgiven, for we know it for ourselves that we are forgiven.
JESUS
Having told the stories of Jesus ‘Feeding the 5000″ and walking on water, stories which make us feel the immense awesomeness of Jesus and so stunning us into sensing the difference between Jesus and ourselves, Mark now takes us to a place called Gennesaret and to the scene of Jesus’ healing the sick. People are there in abundance, expectant of Jesus’ being able to heal them of whatever it was they were suffering with. There was widespread feeling that Jesus was approachable, that peoples’ health issues, their health issues were important to Him. There was faith in Him, belief that He could make something happen for them.
A feature of Church worship is our praying God’s blessings for those who are sick and those who mourn. When a student in Cardiff I lived at Cardiff Baptist College, where, on Saturday mornings I was able to go to Sermon Class. Each Saturday a student training for the Ministry would lead worship in the Chapel and then be assessed. I recall one student being criticised by Principal Ithel Jones for not including any prayer for people who were unwell or grieving – a seriously wrong omission.
Whenever we touch base with God, we engage with the God who, as Jesus demonstrated most strikingly, cares deeply for us when we are distressed.
HOLY SPIRIT
Mid 19th century Strict Baptist Pastor J.C. Philpott sometimes throws in something autobiographical. As a one-time Fellow of Worcester College Oxford, he had been an Anglican and had been actively involved in ‘Churchy’ things, including preaching, but became disillusioned. It comes over from what he says that he had a faith awakening, where in he sensed the Holy Spirit coming into him, which affected a large change in His awareness of God and so in how he thought. He says that it wasn’t until he had had this experience that he both really took seriously his need for God’s forgiveness, to engage with God because he was well short of being the person God willed and required him to be and thus deserving of God’s judgement and came by a passion for God, knowing the amazing depth of God’s love for him inspiring him to know within himself a love for God that her had never known or experienced before.
PAUL
Sometimes in life we lose touch with people, with people who mean a lot to us. We wonder how they are and how things are for them: it distresses us that we don’t know. Paul had been through such a period regards the Church folk in Thessalonica and writes to them relieved and thankful that friend and colleague has been able to visit them and has come back with very good news about them.
Paul mentions that he had been making plans to visit them himself but these plans had been scuppered. He doesn’t go into detail about this, except to say that he blames satan for it. This is a very serious accusation to make. I recall a University of Kent Philosopher’s saying that we can be rather too quick to label people as individuals or groups as ‘evil’ or so to describe their actions. When we do so we are putting pressure, emotive pressure on those around us to agree with us in our criticisms and condemnation. When tempted to tarnish someone or their action as evil, we should take careful stock of whether or not we\ are right to go that far, that intensely in our criticism If indeed, we are going OTT tne we are being unfair and unjust.
Paul’s comment opens up a question as to whether it is when God is at His most actively influential, that the forces of evil also step up their efforts?
Late April 2023
GOD THE FATHER
URC Minister Alan Gaunt begins the first 3 verses of a 4 verse hymn with the words “God with us … ” The opening verse reminds us of how God can be described in a variety of ways:
” … Creator, Father,
bringing everything to birth;
Mother of the whole creation,
fire of stars and life of earth … “
He then writes that God has never stopped being creative, is perpetually making life happen.
“down the countless years composing,
from the earth’s evolving night .. “
Here it seems he is alluding to the thought that everything that exists is in a state of process and flux, which obviously involves change. This is God’s decision: God as both Father and Mother is party to it and both the instigator and sustainer of it.
The verse concludes with assuring us of God’s being a God of love; God wills that we all and each of us have with God a warm-hearted engagement. God’s ambition was and is and ever will be that everyone of us wants the best of relationships with God:
“love’s response to love, and forming
mind and soul to seek your light.”
JESUS
Mark indicates to us in his telling of the stories of the Feeding of the 5000 and His walking on water that Jesus is someone different from us, He is not just in this world but also from another world. It is from this other world that He brings things to this world. He comes from heaven to make a difference to the world we live in and to the lives we live and sometimes He shows us an awesomeness that shakes us. We sometimes say of someone that they are brilliant, indeed “frighteningly brilliant”.
In the walking on water story the disciples are struggling against and are in danger because of the forces of nature. They discover that Jesus is even more wondrous than they had already thought He was. It is so often that when we are powerless that Jesus proves His saving power to us. “I am weak, but Thou art mighty” Something that places Jesus well above us is that whilst we can – at times quite easily – find ourselves our of our depth, Jesus always copes. At the foundation and at the core of our Christian faith is the conviction that Jesus is exceptional: He is one like no other.
HOLY SPIRIT
In his sermons Strict Baptist preacher of the 19th century J C Philpott often says that signs of the Spirit’s impacting upon us is that we are conscious of our being fools and sinners and that we know for ourselves within ourselves that God is a God of grace and love.
The wondrousness of God’s mercy and pardon doesn’t truly hit us until after we have recognised the importance of confession. For, as Paul says in Romans 5 v 6, “This is how we love God loves us: it was whilst we were still sinners that Christ died for us.” So, Philpott preaches that the Spirit first convicts us of and brings us face to face with our need for forgiveness before blessing us with knowing that God forgivers and loves us. So a sign that we are troubled about our being unworthy before God is in itself a sign that things are going on within us between us and the Holy Spirit precursor to our becoming aware of the merciful love of God for us.
PAUL
A few days before Rowan Williams’ instalment as Archbishop of Canterbury I heard a lecture where the point was made that in the performance of a play the members of the audience are part of the performance. If the audience is enthusiastically into the play this inspires the performers on the stage. Just the other day I heard snooker star and now TV pundit say how a player’s performance can influence for good how a player plays; also how runners in an event like The London Marathon can find adrenalin to complete the challenge they have given themselves from the crowds cheering them on.
The lecture said the same phenomenon applied to preaching. A sermon is more telling, has more life to it if there are people in the congregation clearly minded and focused on listening to it, so much so that speaker and listeners are both actively making the sermon happen and come alive. I think there was this high, exuberant and intense level of engagement between Paul and the Church people at Thessalonica and this explains why Paul had such strong feelings of warmth and affection for them, for they mutually inspired each other.
April 2023
GOD THE FATHER
Hymn writer and retired URC Minister Alan Gaunt has a hymn that begins
“Eternal God, your love’s tremendous glory
cascades through life in overflowing grace ..”
These are words easier to sing when we are surrounded by things and people “bright and beautiful” “wise and wonderful”, when life as it is is something we gladly embrace and the world look like it is shot through with the love of God. I recall the late David Saville, when Vicar of Christ Church Chorleywood, saying at one of our local Ministers’ Meetings that if we as worship leaders begin worship like we are completely full of it, the joys of life, we are vulnerable to being insensitive (to our discredit) to those who have come to Church full of the woes of life and wondering whether or not God truly cares for them.
Rightly we are encouraged to count our blessings, which means noticing all the greater and little things that are worthy of thanks and praise. Sometimes we discover the love of God for us when we are in bad place, a place that we are in either because life or someone has put us in it or because we have got ourselves into it. Someone makes a point of being good to us. God may find a way of re-assuring us in our minds and hearts that, despite appearances to the contrary, He does indeed care for us. As my time on BBC Radio Kent was coming towards its close yesterday morning, our Presenter Phil Harrison points out to us that quite a few of the people who had contributed to the Programme had said about how they had come to faith or found a renewed faith through having some sort of crisis in their life.
JESUS
Like many a preacher, Gospel writer Mark seems somewhat fond of telling the dramatic or sensational story about Jesus. He does not hold back from writing about the disappointments Jesus faced, people opposing Him, frustrating Him and wanting to silence Him and do away with Him. With these negative stories in mind Mark writes of Jesus feeding 5000 people with but five loaves and two fish and of Jesus’ walking on water.
It is thought that Mark’s target readership were followers of Jesus who suffered for their faith. I sense he was seeking and hoping to encourage them by saying that Jesus had been through what they had been through. Jesus did not enjoy an easy ride through life. Probably Mark was aware how active opposition or real indifference can wear us down and make us vulnerable to becoming lukewarm in our faith even if we don’t lose it altogether. I sense too, that Mark was wanting to keep before the people he was seeking to help a picture of how so exceptional, so wonderfully different Jesus was. So, do not give up on Him, stay with Him!
HOLY SPIRIT
I have been reading sermons by mid 19th century Baptist Preacher J C Philpott. I have 12 volumes of them, inherited from my maternal grandfather, himself a Minister. Philpott had been a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, but had left having become disillusioned with the Anglican Church as he found it. Most of the very lengthy (!)sermons were preached at a Baptist Chapel in Stamford. More than once he says that a sign of our spirit being in touch with the Holy Spirit is our being alert to and accepting our need for forgiveness, forgiveness which is God’s gift after our penitence and confession. The Spirit makes us aware of our failings not just in general terms but in detail.
PAUL
Something that pleases Paul about the people in the Church at Thessalonica is the way they became “imitators” of him and those who had come with him to see them. One thing this seems to mean is that they continued in the faith and were openly believers in Jesus despite the opposition they encountered. Do we pray enough for followers of Jesus today who are given a hard time because they are followers of Jesus. When I have been to the Thursday morning Oasis worship at the Harbour (Street) Church in Whitstable I have often heard Brian of that Fellowship pray for Christians called to live their faith in places where it is not easy, tough-going to be a practising Christian.
March 2023
GOD THE FATHER
Thanks to the most excellent of hymn books the Methodists’ ‘Singing The Faith’, I am able to ponder a hymn penned by Keith and Kristyn Getty. It has 3 verses one to God “the Father of life”, the second to Jesus “the Saviour of life”, the third to “the Spirit of life”.
Following each verse is the chorus:
“To our God, who is able
to strengthen us in grace
beyond all we imagine,
be all glory and praise,
be all praise.”
So when we worship, we respond to what God does for us as a God of grace, to the truth about God that He is able to do far more for us than we are able to imagine. But sing the opening verse and we are reminded that the God who so blesses us is the God who is the source of all creation:
” … whose light fills the earth like the sun.
Come, tell of the wonders he has done.
Great is the world he has made,
are the myst’ries untold,
in his measureless power;
come, come let us sing to our God.”
Each verse begins with “Come, let us sing to the One … “
This repeated theme of “Come, let us …” suggests that we who say we have been gifted with faith can forget, overlook or lose the desire to praise God, to talk Him up: we should have a zest, a passion, a desire to worship that springs from both what God is and what God does for us. True worship can not be low-key, half-hearted, a matter of going through the motions. It should arouse us, what God is and all that God does for and gives to us.
JESUS
When the 5000 settles down to be given their food, they didn’t gather higgledy-piggledy but in organised rows, as if they were forming a military line-up. Were they hoping, were they about to demand of Jesus, to appeal to Him, to pressurise Him into setting Himself up as a military and political leader, as someone who would lead them in revolt against their Roman overlords? They want this occasion to be their occasion, when they set the agenda. They discover, however, that it will be Jesus who determines the agenda. He will be Himself, not what the people want Him to be. The people are “to dance to beat of Jesus’ heart”: it is not for Jesus to dance to the beat of their heart. That Jesus sorts out and organises the feeding arrangements gave a clear message that He is in charge and means to be in charge.
How often have you or I as individuals or Churches sought to get Jesus to dance to the beat of our hearts? How often have we disappointed Jesus because we wilfully or unwittingly not danced to the beat of His heart?
HOLY SPIRIT
Those of us who prepare and lead worship are sometimes more inspired than we realise. We say something in a talk or sermon, we pray a prayer, we pick a hymn and it is only after worship is over and maybe quite some time after it is over that someone thanks for a hymn, a prayer we offered, a thought we shared. This realising the helpfulness of what we have said, prayed or chosen for readings and hymns can happen as we are leading the worship. Thus, whilst preaching, we can sense from a listener’s posture, facial expression or body language that they are engaging with and appreciating what we are saying.
PAUL
After his conversion from Judaism to Christianity Paul discovered he had a call from God to become a missionary for Jesus Christ, to, very much so, go public with his faith in Him as Lord and Saviour He pursued this call with great passion and undying commitment.
One large reason why he has enormous affection for the people of the Church in Thessalonica is that they “became an example to all believers in Macedonia and Achaia .. ” News about “their faith in God has gone everywhere.” Theirs was not a quiet, passive, low-key faith Theirs was a big faith. They inspired others to come to faith. They may have remained in their home city but because known for their faith, they shared in the missionary endeavours of Paul.
It seems that Paul always got a lift personally and a boost to his faith and an encouragement to his ministry when he thought of them in the Church of Thessalonica. I recall the late John Hawthorne of Whitstable URC saying to me that one can be tempted to think that well-known Church leaders, who clearly have a large faith, are self-sufficient when it comes to believing. But hear them open up about themselves and we discover how much they feel indebted to people who would say of themselves that they are but humble and ordinary believers.
February 2023
GOD THE FATHER
Two other important things we do with words are, says Philosopher Peter Donovan, exhorting and inspiring people to get thinking and to get involved with an activity. We will have sought to do this ourselves in formal speeches (such as sermons), informal group chit-chat and face-to-face conversation. We will have experienced it happening to us. These are further ways in which God uses language with the aim and intention of impacting upon us and making a difference to us as people, the way we think, the way we live.
There are times when someone says something to us that has a telling, maybe a profound, even a life-changing impact on us and, if sensitive to God, then the words of the person who spoke seem to have been inspired by God. God talks to affect our thoughts and our behaviour.
JESUS
In the opening part of Mark’s write-up of Jesus’ feeding of the 5,000, we sense a certain amount of tension between Jesus and His disciples. Jesus had sought to get away from the crowds, hence with the disciples they took to the lake only to find that when they came ashore the crowds had guessed to where they were heading and had hurried there on foot. Jesus feels for the people, for their being “like sheep without a shepherd”. The disciples can tell that Jesus sees this as an opportunity to talk to them, perhaps at considerable length. The disciples are getting vibes that the people are getting hungry and tell Jesus in as many words like they think that He hasn’t noticed this Himself and even question whether this bothers Him. I picture the disciples becoming a bit ratty and somewhat irritated with Jesus. For a while they are more in mood with the crowd than they are with Jesus.
This scenario brings back to mind a sermon I heard preached at a companion student’s Ordination and Induction to a Pastorate, by our Theological College Principal, Dr Henton Davies. He said about Ministers that there are times when we face the Congregation on behalf of God and that there are times when Ministers face God on behalf of the Congregation.
A feature of Mark’s Gospel is that he is quite frank about how there were times when the Disciples were not on the same wavelength as Jesus.
HOLY SPIRIT
The other day I was on a local bus when a elderly lady with shopping trolley came on. Given combined sizes of trolley and lady who was dressed up for its being a cold day, she need that area of the bus where there is space for passengers with buggy and the like. I noticed a much younger traveller (also a female) dropped down the tip-up seat for her and she said with a smile “thank you”.
I know nothing of the two but it struck me immediately that the Spirit is party to our doing helpful little touches that make the world seem it is and could be even more so a pleasant place. It is the small kind things that people do that refresh our faith in human nature. We must guard against the thought that the Spirit is only involved in making large and sensational and conspicuously spectacular things happen.
PAUL
Paul with Silas and Timothy tells the people of the Church in Thessalonica “We always thank God for you all and always mention you in our prayers”. It does him a power of good when he thinks of them. It has a positive effect on him. on how he is and the condition of his own faith for they put their faith into practice, their love made them work so hard and their hope in our Lord Jesus Christ is firm.
How important to us are those people whose own faith and character stimulate our faith, those people who because they believe, we believe.
Like to think that you are well but if not, are getting the help that you need. Please feel free to pass these thoughts on to others.
In the words of the now late Methodist Minister Ted Bishop, “May blessings abound!”
