Momentous LIFE or Death

                I wonder which you think is more powerful life or death. Your answer to that question probably reveals a lot about your personality; optimist or pessimist, jar half full or half empty!  Before you tie yourselves in knots thinking there maybe a definitive answer, we can all agree that both life and its absence are powerful and mysterious.

                The Easter story is precisely about these mysteries and is certainly powerful.  It is fitting that we celebrate in spring when life seems to burst forth from barren ground. At this time of year life seems to conquer death and Easter is no exception. Few would doubt that a man known as Jesus was crucified, dead and buried. The fact that many believe he conquered death and arose to life seems incredulous. Death is death, by ‘nature’ it is the end, we may argue. However when we look a little closer at nature it is not so unreasonable for most endings are really simply new beginnings. The end of a sunset is the beginning of the night, a flower that falls to the ground, is the beginning of the nutrients that are needed to give new life to another flower. 

                Death itself has been fairly well understood for centuries. The people who watched Jesus crucified were no more likely than you or I to expect that he would arise. If you are aware of Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch you must understand that 1^st Century Palestinians would also have known a dead parrot when they saw one!  I however am among those who believe that in this particular death, death itself was mortally wounded. Paul expresses this when he writes:

 ‘Death is swallowed up in victory.
                O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?

If Paul is correct the answer to the conundrum with which we begun is simple. Life must be more powerful, for the greater swallows the lesser. So life is more powerful than death….. In Jesus at very least!

                I think the meaning of Easter must come down to this question. If the resurrection of Jesus is real then the power of life, particularly life connected to Jesus Christ is unstoppable.  Again as Paul wrote, ‘nothing not even death can separate us.’ Of course death still remains powerful; all sorts of separations that we experience are real, and especially so if we practically keep ourselves away from God. The ‘glass’ maybe more than half full, it may actually be overflowing and can never run dry. However you and I will remain thirsty if we do not drink it! Easter states that Life is stronger than death, hallelujah, God has done this. It is still though for us to grasp this life, each and every day and to live it and to enjoy it to the full.

Happy Easter everyday

Stephen

Thought for Lent: THE GLORIOUS INEFFICIENCY OF REST

When I hear the words ‘efficiency savings’, I have to admit that my hackles rise. I do not believe that life is meant to be ‘efficient’, it’s meant to be lived. Now you might wonder what this has to do with a ‘thought for Lent.’ I would say a great deal. Lent is a 40 day preparation (excluding Sundays!) for Easter. It’s a time of waiting before in effect the new life of spring and Easter arrives. Waiting is something that we English are very good at: we queue, we sit in traffic jams and we wait for someone human to finally answer the telephone! We are good at it, but by and large we don’t enjoy it. We think that waiting is a waste of time, we become impatient; it’s inefficient we cry.

One problem we have with waiting is that we live in a culture of demands. We expect fast food, superfast internet and instant information from the beloved (if tax avoiding) google! In a perfect mechanised world there would be no waiting… it’d be all arrival. But when life is all about arriving, without any ‘inefficient’ waiting and preparation, few of us seem to realise or indeed appreciate where we actually are.

Nature on the other hand ‘naturally’ makes us wait. One can plant a carrot instantly, but there is little point picking it until it’s grown. One can make a baby fairly quickly but it takes 9 months or indeed a lifetime to become a parent.

There are so many areas of life that this principle applies to. I recently visited Southmead hospital on a Sunday evening. The place was asleep. Oh yes there were staff quietly going about their business of caring for others, but it felt to me as if the whole place was having a rest, taking a breath before the frenetic activity of healthcare resumed on Monday morning. Is this inefficient, or is this a necessary breather for everyone. It reminded me that the God of the Hebrews in his ‘wisdom’ spoke of the need for land, animals and people to have a weekly day of rest. How inefficient: how absolutely delightfully wonderful!

(Ref inefficiency in healthcare… it is salutary to note that according to most doctors I know, the greatest inefficiency is down to not enough beds left for people after treatment. A problem caused by shrinking bed numbers, because this was more ‘efficient!’)

So back to Lent and waiting or preparing for the reminder of new life at Easter. The Christian stream that I now most closely associate with is Celtic. It came to these Islands along the sea channels around 350AD. It didn’t bring Christianity as a religion; it brought a way of life, of love. One idea that I treasure is taken from the tides, the ebb and flow: as the sea rushes in there is great activity, as it ebbs there is a time for rest. This natural rhythm is mirrored each day and each night. I believe it’s there too in the seasonal waiting of lent, which ends of course with a further ‘inefficient’ paradox: the death, the lying ‘resting’ in a tomb of the one I believe is Saviour of the world. In this case just as rest is a prelude to work, so death is a prelude to life: a bursting forth of love that not even ‘inefficient’ death can defeat. So my advice this March is to take some ‘inefficient’ rest, so that you will discover how to truly find a life that is a joy in the living.

This March we celebrate Easter on the 25^th and 27^th. Your local churches would love to welcome you.

Stephen Newell

Fruitfulness on the Frontline

 

                Have you ever noticed how growth and change don’t happen evenly? Often things seem to be plodding along with the status quo and then wallop, everything changes. Culture changes a bit like this, like a growing teenager it creaks, and then bang something new emerges. Hence the 60’s brought pop culture and now I think more cultural change is being birthed around us. Certainly this is the case for the church. In reality not much changed in churches for a few generations… we sing slightly different songs perhaps but the basics were much the same.  We were also a Christian country with good albeit sometimes suspicious, relations between different denominations. Most people knew the Christian story and were at worst polite towards us. Then suddenly we are surrounded by militant atheists, the government is talking about regulating our “radical” Sunday schools and no one seems to have the first clue about what Christianity really means. In effect I am saying to you that Christendom, where the church had a cosy and well understood relationship with the society around us has died, or at very least is dying! There is no longer a sense that because you are a Christian and I am a fully accredited church minister we should be afforded any particular respect or status. The title Reverend almost never appears on any forms anymore!

                Personally I am delighted that the change has finally come. I prefer the honesty of where we are now to the cynicism of a society that for all my life time at least has been pretending to be Christian. The question for us is how we should respond? Loads of Christians have responded very simply.  They have decided that they will at best hibernate their faith and just get on with the world. One key reason for this that I have heard is summed up in the phrase: ‘the church doesn’t make sense to me anymore.’ Funny thing is, I agree. Much of the church that I encounter simply makes no sense. The reason for this is that we have been tricked into becoming indistinct from the world. By which I don’t mean all of our front rooms are now stocked with pews and slightly dampening heating systems. I mean we have created church for consumers. You go to the shops (or online!) to buy things to be served. You come to church to be told what to believe to be served up, often with certainty. Church is where you sit and watch the minister or some other ‘wise’ person tell you how or what you should believe, or worse still tell you that you are alright while the rest of the world is all wrong! In effect our whole understanding of church is pointing in the wrong direction. We talk about going to church or think about somehow doing the church things. When in reality we need a big wakeup call to remind us that we are the church. God wants our lives to be the living, outward expression of his love in the world. The only thing that will make church relevant again is when we realise God’s love is relevant to us and all the things we are part of.

I am hoping that the new course, Fruitfulness on the Frontline, that we are starting this year will help us in this transformation.  My job, indeed the place of the church as a whole body is not to encourage you to come and watch some show, but to constantly think of ways that we can equip one another and form one another as living expressions of God’s love wherever we find ourselves. Our ‘frontlines’, are the places and the people that we spend time with: our families our friends, our work colleagues and our fellow volunteers or neighbours. I am not suggesting that our task is to somehow ram some truth about God down these poor unsuspecting folk’s throats. Rather that we should realise that God cares about everything that we do, and wants to bring his love and his joy and his healing into every part of life.  His chosen method is to be alive in the world, his chosen instrument is very often us! GULP!

Please don’t misunderstand me I am not suggesting that God’s brilliant idea of forming a church in his image is irrelevant. We need one another now more than ever. But not so that we can rejoice that we are part of a big church! Rather so that we can really help one another to become more distinctively like Jesus in everything we are. I suggest by way of illustration, that it is vital to me that I worship God with all my heart. Not because God somehow needs me to worship, although he does delight in our friendship and relationship. Rather as I worship and love God his love refreshes my innermost being and helps me to carry that love back out to the frontline. To refresh, I need to be refreshed!

The Oh so very REVEREND Stephen Newell!! J

Refuge and Belonging

Belonging and Refuge:

                Sometimes there is a feeling that the Bible is old fashioned and out of date. However, occasionally world events remind us that this is simply not the case. Last evening we grappled within our elders (leaders) meeting how as a church we might respond to the human tragedy which is the present refugee crisis, primarily from war torn Syria. One elder simply said, ‘this is the biggest Exodus of people since the Biblical exodus.’ Now he is probably wrong, over history there have been many tragic events which have displaced huge numbers, but it does remind us that present events have many parallels in the Bible. In fact if we take a who’s who of the bible… most of them were in some way refugees: Adam and Eve, Cain and Able, Abraham and Sarah, Ruth and Naomi, Daniel, Moses, in fact all of the 12 tribes of Israel, Elijah, Ezekiel and Jeremiah. That’s not a bad list to start, but it continues in the New Testament, Mary and Joseph and of course Jesus took refuge in Egypt, most of the early church was forced to flee persecution and if you take Paul’s letter to the Ephesians seriously all of us begin as refugees: ‘remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth…. You were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship with God’s people and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world.’ (Eph 2:11-13) Of course the letter goes on to remind the Ephesians and indeed us, that we are no longer ‘foreigners’ we have been welcomed in, by the costly love of Christ. We are invited and welcomed, given a place at table.  There is no doubt that the Bible with its many stories of refugees is relevant. It is also deeply challenging.

                Of course for many of us our options to help refugees are limited. We don’t all have a property which we can offer to the local council, or indeed the capacity to foster a child or young person. We can of course all pray, we can cry out for an end to this senseless human suffering. We can also petition government and most of us can give towards agencies and groups who are seeking to bring relief either here in Europe or indeed around the area of Syria. [On 27^th Sept we will open a donations box at Zion… towards this relief.] Even were we able to offer a house, foster a child, pray, petition and give generously, the depth of the suffering means that this could never be enough.  Although this particular tragedy is very much ‘man-made’ we need to pray for a real sea change to bring it to an end. Tragedies like this must eventually open the eyes of leaders and assailants to search for new ways to live, pursuing peace, reconciliation, acknowledging our common humanity.  I believe this realisation is also an opportunity. We may not be ‘great leaders’ but we can in our own small ways begin this process.  It is a chastening fact that some or indeed many of those who have travelled to Syria or Iraq to wage war have done so in part because here in the UK they did not have their common humanity affirmed nor did those who were different to them seek reconciliation.  I have experienced this alienation and separation even in little Frampton Cotterell over the last few days.  We have skateboarders ‘colonising’ Zion’s car park! It is very easy to alienate them, to see them as different to us, indeed to feel threatened. We might want to affirm that they are in “OUR” car park. I have sought a gentler path. In my view Zion’s land is God’s land. I am not exactly welcoming them with open arms… there are issues, bad language, litter and indeed the matter of safety. However these young people are, like me made in God’s image. If I wish them to respect me and our property, I have to respect them.  I must also remember that they are capable of great goodness. One of them, Harry, came upon an elderly member of our congregation who had fallen at the roadside. Like a regular Good Samaritan, he helped him up and back to his car: (another example of the bible being relevant today.)  I met Harry later that afternoon in our car park whilst I was chastising another boy for making a mess. I was able to thank him and give him some fair trade chocolates.  We are able to be the beginning of the end of this refugee crisis. We begin this ending of fear, and separation and alienation when we learn to treat those around us, whether alike us or very different, as our sisters and brothers, made in the image of God.  Let’s spur one another on to do just this, to treat others as we would love to be treated.

Stephen

A video which inspired some of my thoughts this month can be found at:

http://www.stewardship.org.uk/blog/blog/post/384-krish-kandiah

Endings and New Beginnings

                               I can’t help thinking that Sepp Blatter is probably now regretting that he didn’t ‘quit while he was ahead as such. Lots of people were telling him ‘enough’ but he didn’t listen. I see this all the time in churches, something starts really well, but we’re not so good at ending things. We get muddled up with duty, the show must go on!  The very first Christians on these Islands, the Celts had a really good way of dealing with this. Because by and large they were based on Islands and around the coast they had watched the tides, they understood the ebb and the flow: the reality that everything has a natural rhythm a starting and an ending. I’m hopeless at this; I’m a night owl and I seem to like, ‘raging against the dying of the light.’ I won’t let the day go. But this is nonsense since it goes anyway and I wake up bleary eyed each day, unprepared for a new beginning.

                So there’s my thought for the day, let it go. If you are facing an ending, embrace it, accept it. Nothing new will come until we learn to daily let go of the old. For me personally there is a bit of an ending here, I need to give up on thought for the day for a while at least, there are new adventures that I need to embrace.  May God bless you and yours until we meet again. Or as the ancient Celts used to say, God be wi ye. (For those reading the blog... I guess I will continue blogging, just not my thoughts for the day!)

POST ELECTION HOPE? or Hard work!

Victory in Europe Day!

Below is a copy of my thought for the day, for the day after the election... VE day! 

                Surprising as it may seem I am too young to remember victory in Europe day. My parents though have often spoken about it, the euphoria and the celebration following on of course from years of suffering. In terms of elections I am of the age when one day sticks in my memory: Tony Blair’s landslide election: euphoria again, for some at least! I can even remember the song: Things can only get better!

                This morning I doubt the country awakes to any real sense of euphoria, I imagine rather a dull relief that it’s all over, at one level at least.  Politics may not be our hope today, nor even memories of a major war in Europe, so what can stir us?

                As a church minister I regularly remember another historic day. I celebrate communion, I am in effect remembering ‘Good’ Friday: a day when a remarkable carpenter was murdered by nailing him to a cross! I realise just as with politics so our taste for religion and faith differ. Nevertheless, when an unjust execution is remembered 2000 years later as ‘good’, clearly something has been transformed. A sign of hope offered, that neither politics or death, nor even war has extinguished. The day after VE day there was still a hell of a lot of work to do. Today it’s the same; politics rarely offers a magic bullet for all our needs.  Hope for today and tomorrow has to begin in our hearts, in our attitudes, in our willingness to work together for a society where bad things get transformed into good. So that’s my thought for today. Yesterday was the day to vote, today is a day to get on with it, and sow some hope into the world by the way we smile and deal with whatever issues that we face.

AGM state of the Union report!

             I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.¹³ I can do all this through him who gives me strength. Phil 4: 12-13

             Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervour, serving the Lord Rom 12:11

            In one sense this last year has been a consolidation of the changes that made it possible for us at Zion United Church to build and now utilize the Beacon. On the other hand although I believe contentment, especially with godliness (1 Tim 6:6), is great gain I would be disappointed if we feel that the right thing for us as church is to sit on our laurels, happy with what we’ve achieved. There is no question that the work of building the beacon has been good. People seem to love the building; certainly I suspect that our finances for rentals will show that people have been using the building. I am delighted to see the many ways that people are creatively using the spaces we have available: Crash, Knit and Knatter, Ladies Fellowship, Girls Allowed, Forgetmenot sing along, to name but a few. However the church in this country has long since had some wonderful buildings, but as we are aware the decline in the life of faith has continued unabated. Building a building, even using a building will not change that.

I remember well the moment that an elder shared the thought that we must become beacons in order to build the beacon. This is the aspect of our life that truly excites me: the dimension of faith and spiritual zeal for the kingdom of God. I know I bang on about it all the time, but I really want to be involved as a Pastor in a church where the many blessings we receive are as water off a duck’s back… ie they are being poured out and lived out in the world. Jesus himself was a radical and beautiful announcement of good news. I want to be part of that. My role is to help cajole and coax you into co-operating with God’s Holy Spirit so that you too are a living announcement that God is good and God’s love is present and alive.

            The trouble is I can’t do it. Much as I love you and pray for you, and indeed pray for my own witness, we are as the Psalmist said ‘a stubborn and rebellious generation’ (Ps 78) and we think we can work out how to live our lives on our own: we can’t. I can’t make you slow down and give time to God in prayer and quietness; I can’t make you open your eyes to see what God is doing around you, in your family and workplace. I can’t make you become aware that God’s kingdom is all around us, if only we’d learn to turn the other cheek and go the extra mile in generosity. I barely seem able to persuade myself of these things. Herding people must feel to God an awful lot like herding cats: we are independent to the bone…. Oh miaow…please will you give me my water and my food exactly when I want it!  In order for us to grow and become as beacons, lights shining in the world, a daily decision is needed: the decision of covenant and commitment. We must confess our need for God; indeed if we are to develop as disciples I honestly believe we need one another. This is the reason that I am so passionate about the work that goes on in our fellowship groups, and also why the dissertation for the Master’s Degree that I am undertaking will seek to assess whether the Inspire Bands among us (small groups of three or four who meet to encourage and challenge our walk with God) are really helping us to grow in this ‘accountable’ and beautiful discipleship. We could not have built the Beacon alone, we needed to work as a body as a church. I am also of the belief that we need one another to nurture and inspire us as disciples. This next year one of our core themes will be Shelter, with the catch phrase: ‘It is in the shelter of each other that people live.’ -Irish Proverb. Still that is for next year. For this year, thank you again for the privilege of sharing with you the sometimes bumpy journey of faith.  

Stephen