Hello everyone! I walked down to church this morning on a somewhat damp and gloomy day for communion. He asked us to think of how we imagined heaven, as was from Isaiah’s vision of the majesty of God, making him feel unclean and how he was cleansed by a burning coal to be a prophet. The reading from Luke was the call of the disciples and how they are to respond to his call to follow him. We sang one of my favourite songs, ‘I, the Lord of sea and sky’; I love the chorus, which is in response to God’s question of ‘Whom shall I send?’, as it is how I want to serve others and share Jesus with everyone.
‘Here I am Lord;
Is it I, Lord?
I have heard you calling through the night.
I will go, Lord,
If you lead me;
I will hold your people in my heart.’
During a service a young man joined us and sat next to me, so I showed him the books he needed for the hymns and the prayers, as we have our own ‘Songs for Worship’ book as well as hymns and psalms, and as it was communion Shaun, our minister was using some responsive prayers from the Worship Book. I was glad that we were singing another hymn from our ‘Songs for Worship’, especially I was struck by these 2 verses as they express the faith better than I could.
Jesus calls us to confess him
Word of life and Lord of all,
Sharer of our flesh and frailness
Saving all who fail or fall.
Tell his holy human story;
Tell his tales that all may hear;
Tell the world that Christ in glory
Came to earth to meet us here.
Jesus calls us to each other:
Found in him are no divides.
Race and class and sex and language-
Such are barriers he derides.
Join the hands of friend and stranger;
Join the faithful and the doubter
In their common search for truth.
He was grateful for my help and after the service he told me that he worshipped in a Methodist Church in Kenya, where he came from and he was just visiting Harrogate. I asked him about the problems in his country and he felt that churches seemed to be linked to the state, so nothing really was done to tackle social justice; there was still so much disparity between the rich and the poor there. The massive airport being built by Barak Obama would do nothing for the majority of Kenya’s citizens who were more concerned about surviving from day to day. My beloved had talked about that very issue this morning of how the more comfortably off are to be benevolent to the less fortunate, therefore they have a dependency on their always having to be the poor to enable them to be benevolent and therefore feel good about themselves. These thoughts had been stimulated by the great great granddaughter of Charles Dickens, whose 198th birthday it was today, as she quoted from a book, which he had written for his children, encouraging them to look after those less fortunate than themselves. Unfortunately that implies that the status quo must remain, rather than making any real changes to address the gap between the rich and the poor. Let us work for a world where justice and true equality exists; a world that Jesus would love to see! This is the day that the Lord has made and I rejoice and am glad in it.
BRIGHT LIGHT 