Benefice of St Mary’s Chard, Combe St
Nicholas, Wambrook and Whitestaunton
28th
February 2021 Second Sunday of Lent
Dear All
On Monday,
we held the first session of our Zoom Lent course. The reading we looked at is from Exodus Chapter
3:
Now Moses
was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he
led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain
of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire
from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn
up. So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the
bush does not burn up.”
When
the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within
the bush, “Moses! Moses!”
And Moses
said, “Here I am.”
“Do not come
any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are
standing is holy ground.” Then he said, “I am the God of your
father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” At
this, Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God.
The Lord
said, “I have indeed seen the misery of my people in Egypt. I have heard them
crying out because of their slave drivers, and I am concerned about their
suffering. So I have come down to rescue them from the hand of the
Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land into a good and spacious land,
a land flowing with milk and honey—the home of the Canaanites, Hittites,
Amorites, Perizzites, Hivites and Jebusites. And now the cry of the
Israelites has reached me, and I have seen the way the Egyptians are oppressing
them. So now, go. I am sending you to Pharaoh to bring my people the
Israelites out of Egypt.”
But Moses
said to God, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out
of Egypt?”
And God
said, “I will be with you. And this will be the sign to you that it is I who
have sent you: When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you will
worship God on this mountain.”
This is one
of my favourite readings from the Old Testament. Here we learn a great deal about the nature
of God and his love for his people.
But we also
learn that when God called Moses he did not leave him to carry out His will on
his own. Firstly, God promises Moses that
he will never be on his own. Later, God
also sends Aaron to help Moses, to be his ‘voice’.
God calls us
to do His work here on earth, but He will never leave us unequipped. Firstly, he is always with us, through thick
and thin, when the going is easy and, most especially when the going gets
tough. However, he will also provide us
with what we need for the task, in the shape of others to support, care and
pray for us.
Whilst I was
training for ministry, my father and best friend both died. They had been two of my greatest supporters
and sources of encouragement. I wondered
if I would get through the rest of the training, but shortly after my father
died, we had a new associate minister arrive at my church from Texas. He was, and remains, a wonderful mentor and
friend and he came just as I was wavering and full of fear. God did not leave me alone but equipped me to
carry on.
Secondly,
God calls Moses while he is out tending his flock, something he did every
day. We may not see a burning bush, but
God most often calls us through the everyday, the commonplace and the
familiar. Some people are called, like
Moses, to completely change their lives, to take risks and put themselves in
challenging places. Others have quieter
callings, to be the light of Christ where they are, in their community, among
their friends and family.
Whatever our
own calling and response to God, one thing is sure. That we never know when we are standing on
holy ground. Even in the ordinariness of
our lives, we never know when we are going to encounter God and what he might
be calling us to do. I am always
reminded of one of the last lines of one of my favourite books by J D Salinger:
“Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece
of Holy Ground to the next”.
With this
letter is a newsletter from Tom Tame, our Youth Pioneer, working in Chard and
around the Deanery. Tom answered God’s
call to move to Somerset and take up this work, trusting that God would not
leave him on his own. He is already
equipping himself by building up a team of volunteers to go out and meet with
youngsters where they congregate. Tom is
supported by the Diocese and through networks of other pioneers. He is now asking for our support by asking us
to pray for him. I hope that you will
do this as he sets out on this exciting venture and pray that he will find holy
ground in many different places.
At the end
of our Lent course, we were asked to take the following prayer from the Book of
Numbers and say it quietly or silently for some of the people we talk to or
pass by, for homes of people we know and for schools, offices, shops and farms
we may pass on our walks. We might also
say it for people or situations that we see on our TVs or hear about on our
radios:
“The Lord
bless you and keep you;
the Lord
make his face shine on you and be gracious to you;
the Lord
turn his face towards you and give you peace.”
(Numbers 6: 24-26)
A simple
prayer, but if we were all to be silently saying this for others, think how
powerful that would be.
Every
blessing
Ann
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