Tuesday 27 October 2020
Sunday Letter
Benefice of St Mary’s Chard, Combe St Nicholas, Wambrook and Whitestaunton
25th October 2020
Dear Friends,
This is the last Sunday of the period we call ‘Ordinary Time’ or Trinity. It is traditionally Bible Sunday when we celebrate the gift of the Holy Scriptures.
The Bible is at the heart of our Christian faith and yet it has been misused as much as it has been used, and even today it causes controversy and heated argument.
I must say straight away that I am not a fundamentalist when it comes to the Bible. I do not believe it to be literal truth and I think taking it as that misses much of the wonderful complexity of what the Bible is.
First and foremost, the Bible is a record of humanity’s encounter and relationship with God. It tells us how those living centuries ago, and in other lands, saw God and how their relationship with God changed and developed over time. It is rich with history, with geography, poetry, songs, prophecies, parables and stories. The hundreds of voices that we hear speak to us across the centuries, telling us about their encounters with God and their faith, can still enrich our lives now and help us to understand our own faith.
For me, the more I learn about the Bible, its history, its language. and its theology, the more I find it fascinating and the more I find it enriches my life.
Reading and understanding the Bible takes time and it takes work. If we are to encounter God through it then we must take it seriously and try and understand why and by whom its many parts were written. It isn’t a story book, it isn’t a blueprint, or a guidebook. It isn’t purely history or literature. It is a testament to God and humanity bound together through time and God’s great work of salvation through Jesus Christ.
In this way the Bible is the word of God, for most importantly, that word became flesh. The opening of John’s gospel, ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God’ is John’s lovely explanation of who Jesus is. Jesus is the fulfilment of the Scriptures, the word of God incarnate. The New Testament is a fulfilment of all that went before in the Old Testament and it opens up God’s word not just to Israel but to all of us.
However you encounter the Bible, whether it be on a daily basis, through Bible notes or a Bible study group or hearing it read and preached upon in church, I hope that it opens your heart and mind to wanting to know more, both about the Bible itself and about God.
I encourage you to keep reading it, even when it doesn’t make sense, or it seems too hard or too harsh. Keep at it and you will be richly rewarded.
Blessings Ann
Sunday 18 October 2020
Sunday Letter
Benefice of St Mary’s Chard, Combe St Nicholas,
Wambrook and Whitestaunton
18th October 2020
Dear Friends
This Sunday we
celebrate the Feast of St Luke the Evangelist – author of Luke’s gospel and the
Acts of the Apostles.
Luke was
thought to have been a physician and because of this it is traditional to have
a service based around healing on his festival.
This is what we shall be doing at St Mary’s, Chard and at Combe St
Nicholas.
It is difficult
to be talking about healing during a global pandemic, but it is also crucial
that we do. It is a shame that the word
has been used by some to refer solely to physical cure and not looked at in its
wider sense.
There are of
course miracles, when people have been cured of physical illness and disability
and we should not discount these. We
should never discount the miraculous, even if we don’t experience it ourselves
or know others who have experienced it.
However, in a
Christian sense, healing is not about cure.
They are two different things.
Healing is more to do with wholeness, with being made whole by God in a
spiritual and emotional way. Healing is
about returning to God and putting right our relationship with God so that his
love, mercy and grace can fill our lives and help us to be the people he longs
for us to be.
So much pain
and hurt in our lives is caused by the gap between what we long to be and who
we actually are. The healing process, it seems to me, begins with accepting who
we are and our situation and then recognising that God loves us just as we are
and is always with us. From this comes a
facing up to our own failings and weaknesses but also a sense of peace. From here we can learn to hold up everything
to God and ask for his guidance, his help and his healing.
Allowing God
into every part of our lives, however dark and painful, is how we begin to heal
and that always begins with prayer.
Healing can also come through loving and being loved, through fellowship
and connecting with the natural world.
For me, most
especially, healing means being released from fear and learning to live life to
the full, wherever we find ourselves and whatever happens to us. This can only be done with God’s help.
During this
time of uncertainty and change, it would be easy to succumb to fear. But God is calling us to a fuller life. We need to trust in him, place our burdens on
to him and ask for his strength and grace to accept where we are and who we
are.
The process of
healing is not easy and might well be painful as we have to face up to some
truths about ourselves and our situations.
However, God wants us to be healed, to be released from fear and walk
with him into a new day. He will never
let us go.
Blessings
Ann
NB
Our weekly
Wednesday 9.45 am Communion services are now restarting at St Mary’s and the
monthly (third Wednesday) BCP Communion service at Combe is also
restarting. If you would like to attend
either of these, but are unsure, please talk to myself or Georgina.
Saturday 10 October 2020
Sunday Letter
The quince jelly is potted up and the apple jelly
will be finished today, the bringing in of the Harvest continues. I love this
time of year with the leaves turning such rich colours, deep reds, oranges, and
yellow. Glossy conkers are just so inviting to pick up and pass on to my
daughter for her window sill, (they are supposed to stop spiders coming in) and
some very beautiful fungi suddenly popping up in unexpected places. Can it
really be almost time for the clocks to go back?
Wambrook and Whitestaunton have their Harvest
Festival this weekend and probably outside as well, very different, and
actually quite exciting too.
In our reading from Exodus today there is trouble in
the ranks, the people have become restless and anxious because Moses is not
there, he has been gone for quite a while talking to God, they may believe he
has died even. But he is being given the 10 commandments and the Book of the
Covenant that will give them all the blueprint of life to follow, indeed for us
to follow too.
They fail in the test of faith spectacularly and
persuade Aaron to help them create a calf. This annoys God, his relationship
with Moses has become a more personal one in their time together and God offers
him the chance to be the beginning of a great nation, which Moses turns down.
Moses has remained faithful to God in his refusal and God remains faithful to
Moses in changing his mind about the disaster he planned to bring against the
people. Bear in mind here that God hears our prayers change is not impossible.
Eventually Moses will bring down the tablets, the structure
the corner stone of our way of life, and living in faith this is that which
keeps us stable, focused, a place which reminds me of the starting line on the
racing track, here are the rules, this is how we shape our moral and ethical
structure for life. The covering we wear is the love of God and the command to
love others, shaping our outline in the way each of us understand for ourselves
the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for us. We are each unique.
The commandments can seem as if they are full of “Thou
shalt not”. Apart from the 4th and 5th commandments they
can seem prohibitive of life and living, when actually conversely, they are the
tools for allowing freedom for each of us to be living in an acceptable way in
community. A point which Paul expounds on in his letter to the Romans, we live
in the Grace and Love of God whilst being held within the law as well. It can
be summed up as, Love God and do as you please within the boundaries of our
rules for safe living.
We are called to produce fruit which can come through
a life of examination of who we are in the light of God’s love for us, and his
provision and it changes through the seasons there is a time for Autumn,
Winter, Spring and Summer. Be Blessed as we move through this unusual Autumn.
Rev Georgina.
On Thursday 15th October we have the
Service of Lasting Light for babies lost, everyone is welcome to come and light
a candle we are there from 6.30 for the lighting of candles at 7.00pm. There
will be safety restrictions, only 30. No matter how old you are or how long ago
you lost your little one, before or after birth, you are welcome. If you would
prefer for us to name your little one for you, then please let us know before
the day.
Rev Georgina and Rev Ann.
Sunday 4 October 2020
Sunday Letter
October 4th
Chard and Combe are celebrating their Harvest
Festival this week and Wambrook and Whitestaunton will have theirs next week. Harvest
is here very quickly, everything seems to be going at breakneck speed, unless
it is just me that thinks that. Harvest, the celebration of what we have and
that which has been gathered into the store, one of the first festival’s to be
celebrated by our Jewish forebears, and in all cultures.
Do you remember when you were young what a Harvest
Festival looked like? All of our memories will be different won’t they
depending on where in the country or indeed the world you were brought up. In Starcross because we had the hospital for
those with learning disabilities, Harvests were grand affairs, great mounds of
produce that had been grown by staff and residents were brought into Church and
arranged on a specially made wooden display stand that would be absolutely
laden, windows were loaded too, such a wonderous display that I am sure many of
you will be able to see in your mind’s eye. It was mostly fresh vegetables and
fruits that were distributed in the village afterwards, today our focus has
changed often tins and long-lasting goodies that will be given to those in our
areas in hard ship, sharing what we have received.
Whoever sows sparingly will reap sparingly and
whoever sows generously will reap generously.
Give what you have decided in your heart it says in
2 Corinthians ch 9
I suppose it actually makes sense doesn’t it that
when we give away others will return our generosity in kind and we will be
richly rewarded, maybe with gifts that we can appreciate and savour or with
gifts that are only seen in our hearts.
It is only a small thing but I have been thinking
about the apples on my tree that featured in one of the services back in the
spring, the blossom was glourious and totally covered the tree subsequently we
have been blessed with a huge number of apples, we are still trying to give
them away if anyone wants some!! But when we first arrived in Chard six years
ago now there was one apple on the tree and three the year after, a drastic
prune happened the year after and from that moment on the tree was kind of
shocked into action. So, for two years we tried to store the apples for eating
over the winter, but they don’t keep, the skins went waxy and wrinkly, and yes,
we wrapped them in newspaper. The answer is not to keep them, but put them out
for anyone who wants to take them. Storing them up is a waste and has deprived
others, it took a while and some of you learnt the lesson a long time ago.
God looks after our needs, let’s help look after
others needs, the amazing circle of love
Just a little note that there are a few different DVLA
notice looking fraudulent emails out there at the moment, I have spoken to them
as received a strange one and they verified that there are two or three doing
the rounds. Also telephone calls from Amazon, again they don’t phone you ever,
unless you ask them to. Stay safe it isn’t easy, if in doubt about a call no
matter who they say they are, put the phone down and leave it for at least five
minutes before checking there is a normal dialling tone and ringing the
company/person to check out the story.
I am just about to order the Church Lectionary booklets
for 2020/2021, if you would like a copy at £5.00 then please let me know. They
contain the references to look up the Bible readings for every day of the year.
Reverend Georgina 66159
Friday 2 October 2020
Dear Friends,
I have wanted
to share Ronald Blythe’s wonderful writing with you for some time. He is a Reader in the Church of England but
also an author who has been writing about rural life in his native Suffolk for
nearly sixty years.
He wrote his
articles ‘Word from Wormingford’, the village where he lives, for the
Church Times for over twenty years.
Here is one that he wrote for the Thirteenth Sunday after Trinity in
1992, it is a wonderful description of rural church life:
“Late summer on the calendar, early autumn on the ground and in the
air. The harvest is in and its aftermath
begins to flourish on the stubble. The
cracked fields look as though they haven’t been rained on for a year. Their dust films our shoes as we set out on
the annual church farm walk. The King’s
Farm cows shake their heads as the congregation threads its way across their
pasture and a great meadow to Vicky’s, where lemonade awaits us. Some of the congregation are acres ahead and
the carrying talk reminds me of the calling conversations held by farmworkers
many years ago, or by fishermen in their boats.
Little Horkesley, on a Sunday afternoon is equally calm and yet full of
chatter.
We are full of Sunday dinner and footpath maps, as we walk through
Vicky’s tall wood where every tree reaches for the skies, over the stripped pea
fields, past the reservoir and then across the lane to Knight’s Farm. We are met with an astonished chorus by
calves, guinea fowl, cockerels and other creatures at this invasion. Is there to be no rest, they ask? The walk has taken us through ancient growing
landscapes, Crabb’s, Knowle’s, Breewood Hall and Hay Farm.
We stop for tea and Mr Knighton brings me two letters to his
great-grandfather from John Wesley and I sit and read them by the barn. At six we move to a lawn set out with straw
bales and we sing Evensong. Vicky reads
from the Book of Ruth, Chapter 2, and I do a makeshift sermon. We sing the evening hymns and the animals
join in. There are forty of us. Unless you are acquainted with fields, woods
and farm, why would you live in the countryside? How could you worship in a village church,
unless you know something of the seasons?”
Blessings
Ann
Sunday Letter
Dear Friends,
I was listening
to an interview with a psychologist on Radio 4 recently. He was asked who he would most like to
interview, and he replied, ‘Jesus Christ, I would like to speak with him about
the meaning of life’. A very brave man
indeed!
Jesus would no
doubt have turned him inside out and confounded all his questions, and probably
end up telling him to sell everything he owns, give all his money to the poor
and follow him. It would not have ended
well for the psychologist!
As the chief
priests and elders found out in our gospel reading this week, conversations
with Jesus can be dangerous. The
challenges can come so fast that it will leave our heads spinning and our lives
on the line.
It would be
easy for us to judge the priests and elders, but what if we looked at ourselves
first and our tendency to want to keep things the same and maintain the status
quo? What if we ask ourselves about our
own resistance to change and allowing ourselves to be transformed?
The chief
priests and elders are trying to trap Jesus with a question about the source of
his authority, but Jesus turns the tables on them and asks a question of his
own and places the question back on them.
Not only does he outwit them, but he unmasks their own deepest
priorities and concerns. They are not really interested in Jesus’ identity, but
only concerned with their own privilege and power, and Jesus’ question leaves
them speechless.
Would we too be
left speechless if we were asked about Jesus’ identity?
But Jesus does
not let up. He tells a parable, asks
another question, scolds the priests and elders for their lack of belief and
tells them that faithful tax collectors and prostitutes will enter heaven
before them.
I can imagine
how stunned and angry the chief priests and elders must have felt. They started out thinking to get the better
of Jesus and found themselves being told that they will follow tax collectors
and prostitutes into heaven. How did
that happen?
This is the
consequence of engaging with Jesus. He
is not interested in discussions about the meaning of life, as the psychologist
would have found out. Instead he wants
to challenge us to faith. Faith in his
identity as the Son of God and faith to follow him.
Are we ready to
make this declaration about our faith? To declare Jesus as the Son of God, and
to follow him. That is what he asks of us.
Will we rise to his challenge?
Blessings
Ann
Dates for October and November Services at WHitestaunton Church
October 11 6.30pm Harvest Festival
October 18 9.15am Holy Communion
November 8 6pm Evensong
November 15 9.15 am Holy Communion
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