http://www.redpointclimbingcentre.co.uk/
Redpoint Climbing – At the end of last term FAITH, our young people’s group for school years 6-9, visited Redpoint Climbing Centre in Birmingham. 24 turned up and had a great time. It was our first visit to this particular centre and we enjoyed the personal touch demonstrated by the instructors. They made everyone feel very welcome – from beginners to experts! Read the rest of this entry »
Talent Show – Please start thinking about performing a piece for our Talent Show, which will be hosted by the young people of FAITH and FAITHFUL on Saturday 24th of April from 7.30pm. Everyone is invited to ‘do a turn’! Slots are limited to 5mins and you will need to reserve your place early. Application forms from Paul at the parish office, or email youth@stfranciscentre.co.uk. Read the rest of this entry »
During November last year Roger Wooldridge came to talk to FAITH, our youth group for school yrs 6-9 here at St Francis, about the Birmingham Christmas Shelter (formerly Open Christmas). He talked about his own experience with the project and how he had seen not only the devastation that homelessness can wreak at Christmas time, but also the positive effects that laying on a simple Christmas meal for those who most need it can have. Read the rest of this entry »
A Brand New Year! – A very Happy Christmas and New Year to all who are reading this. I hope that you will continue to find the Youth Roundup a good way to keep in touch with what’s happening with the youth work, and if you have any suggestions of how I could improve this bulletin then please do let me know. Read the rest of this entry »
Hebrews 1.1-4; John 1.1-14
“Something concrete…” – Sermon for Midnight Mass
My Godfather, Uncle Frank, is a retired vicar and now well into his 90s. Just three days ago it was the 70th anniversary of when he was ordained as a priest. My father was also a vicar and worked with Frank as part of a team serving several churches in Sheffield. When the team was talking together and the discussion was getting a bit abstract, Frank would say ‘What we need is something concrete to get our teeth into.’ My Dad would point out that the last thing you want to get you teeth into is some concrete! But even if it is something of a mixed metaphor, I think we all know what Frank was getting at. Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to the Outreach Youth Worker’s latest roundup for the month of November.
Group Mentoring at Bournville School – Over the past few weeks I have been meeting two groups of young people at the Hub at Bournville School. First and foremost they are working on improving their Maths and English, but my role is to help them to work as a group, giving them skills with which they can better interact with one another. Read the rest of this entry »
Don’t tell me you’ll miss me
(Liz Breuilly’s last sermon as curate, 15th November, 2009)
Numbers 11:16-17, 24-30
John 1:29-39
How do God’s people move on?
How are they led?
Who takes charge?
I’ve chosen to look at two very different stories, but in both of them, people discover something new about God, and the whole community moves forward.
I don’t often read the book of Numbers, but whenever I do, I am struck by its vivid descriptions of an all-too human community, under an all-too human leader, following a powerful and mysterious God into the unknown.
The passage before the one we read today is perhaps the first recorded instance of clergy burn-out. Moses has been leading the people single-handed, has been the only communication between the people and their God. Things aren’t going well. and he’s exhausted and fed-up. He’s having a real go at God. It’s actually quite funny, and you might like to read it sometime, at the beginning of Numbers chapter 11.
God’s response is to spread the load, to make more of the people responsible for the whole people. It’s risky, and it rapidly goes beyond the structure that Moses had set up. Two people, Eldad and Medad, receive God’s spirit without attending the requisite meeting!
It’s interesting that it is Joshua, who will eventually succeed Moses as leader, who objects to this. But Moses has understood what’s happening:
‘Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!’
Stop and think about that for a moment:
“Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and the Lord would put his spirit on them.” Wow. What would it be like?
Then we have the story of John’s disciples, at a word from their leader, going off and following someone else.
There are so many riches in that story of Jesus’s meeting with those two seekers, but I want to follow just one small aspect.
When Jesus came close in person, they only needed pointing in the right direction, and they followed. They didn’t wait for John to take them by the hand, to introduce them, to give them any instruction in what Jesus was saying or who he was – all they needed from John was implicit permission to go on with Jesus.
That’s the way it should be. Sometimes we need other people to point out where Jesus is standing at any given moment, but we don’t need anyone else to show us how to follow. We can see for ourselves. Jesus invites us to see for ourselves.
It has never struck me before how often the words ‘see’ and ‘look’ are used in this passage:
John saw Jesus coming towards him;
John testified, ‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove’
I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.’
The next day, John said ‘Look, here is the Lamb of God!’
Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, ‘What are you looking for?’
He said to them, ‘Come and see.’ They came and saw where he was staying,
‘Look, and you will see’ seems to be the message, “You do the looking. You must see with your own eyes”
Theres a painting that has symbolised for me that ptiestly function of pointing in the right direction, but standing back and allowing them to go forward.
The scene is the baptism of Jesus, and surrounding it are the merchant who paid for the painting, and his wife and daughters.
Triptych of Jan des Trompes
Look at the figure on the extreme left. I don’t know who it is meant to be, but ever since I first sensed a call to the priesthood, that figure has symbolised the kind of priest I want to be. One who says, “Go closer – go and see for yourself”.
That is why I am slightly uneasy when people say to me, “you’ll be missed”.
Please don’t get me wrong – and if you said it, don’t apologise – I am deeply thankful for the love and affirmation that phrase expresses.
But it’s not the right word.
I wish I could remember where it was I read recently this wonderful ‘put-down’:
“You think you’re important? Put your finger in a bowl of water, then pull it out and see how big a hole you leave.”
Tell me, if you like, that you will think of me with gratitude and affection. But if I am truly missed for more than a very short time, then God is not working in this church. And I believe that God is working, gently but powerfully, in this church.
If God is working, then there will be no Liz-shaped hole, not because someone else who is approximately Liz-shaped will come and fill it (heaven forbid!), but because the river of the Holy Spirit flows on, filling and changing and deepening.
So don’t tell me you’ll miss me. Tell me, if you can, something you have learnt from me, or something you will go on doing because you did it with me and the Lord was good to us, or something totally new that I will love to hear of you doing when I have moved on to new projects.
And let me tell you, briefly now, but perhaps at more length with individuals, the gratitude and good memories I will take with me from this church.
You welcomed me, and made me and John feel like part of a community from the moment we arrived in Bournville 13 years ago. You were patient and supportive with my first faltering steps in leadership in home groups. You were wonderfully affirming when I began to explore the possibility of training as a lay reader, and you shared my anger and frustration when that fell through for administrative reasons. You continued to be my church family all though the time when I could not take much active part because I was training for ordained ministry, and you rejoiced and celebrated with me when I took a new place as an ordained person here, and you wept with me and supported me through a time of personal crisis in 2008.
Because of what we have shared together here, I will look for opportunities for bread making and junk modelling as part of my new ministry. You have given me courage to challenge people to think and ask questions, and confidence that God works through me to help people through bad times.
I am going to the parish of St. Frideswide’s, Water Eaton, in Bletchley. I wanted to join them because I believe they are looking for the adventure of leading and guiding each other. What I hope and pray for is that I can sometimes be the one who points in the right direction:
“Look, here is the Lamb of God”
and to encourage people to make their own journey, to find their own ways to ‘go and see’ and to remain with Jesus for the rest of the day.
I pray that you, here, will continue to do that for each other. To point to what you have seen, and to encourage each other to go and look.
“I would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!”
Thank you so much to all who contributed to the very generous gift of a home communion set. It is beautiful, and packs so neatly into its little bag. It will be a blessing to house-bound people in Water Eaton, and to me as I remember you in my new ministry.
Liz
Commemoration of the Departed
6.30, 1 Nov 2009
Wisdom 3:1-9
John 6:37-40
On a Thursday evening, I sometimes go to a Folk dance evening up at St. Francis school, and as part of the evening, we sing a few songs. There’s one that has sparked off quite a discussion: some people love it and find it a serene and comforting thought, others think it is morbid and miserable.
Here’s part of it:
What’s the life of a man anymore than a leaf?
A man has his season, so why should he grieve?
Though all through this life we appear fine and gay,
Like the leaves we must wither and soon fade away
If you’d seen the leaves just a few days ago,
So beautiful and bright they all seemed to grow.
A frost came upon them and withered them all;
A storm came upon them and down they did fall.
If you look in the churchyard, there you will see
Those that have passed like the leaves from the trees;
When age and affliction upon us do fall
Like the leaves we must wither and down we must fall.
I rather like its serene acceptance that death is a part of life; that we, like all God’s created things, come and go, and it’s perfectly natural and nothing to make a big fuss about.
It’s very likely that this song grew out of a familiarity with the old service for the burial of the dead, which in times gone by was a regular experience for most people. The old service uses words from Psalm 90:
For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday: seeing that is past as a watch in the night.
As soon as thou scatterest them, they are even as a sleep: and fade away suddenly like the grass.
In the morning it is green, and groweth up: but in the evening it is cut down, dried up, and withered.
Some of us are more familiar with the words now used in the funeral service, part of Psalm 103:
As a father has compassion on his children,_
so is the Lord merciful towards those who fear him.
For he knows of what we are made;
he remembers that we are but dust.
Our days are but as grass;
we flourish as a flower of the field;
For as soon as the wind goes over it, it is gone,
and its place shall know it no more.
Our lives, and the lives of those we love, pass away in time and are gone from the earth.
None of us live for ever.
That’s as far as the song takes us.
But that very psalm, and the readings we heard this evening, tell us different. Not that it isn’t so – it is so.
BUT
There’s a big BUT.
BUT, says the psalm, the merciful goodness of the Lord is from of old and endures for ever on those who fear him, and his righteousness on children’s children;
BUT, says the book of Wisdom:
they are at peace.
For though in the sight of others they were punished,
their hope is full of immortality.
And Jesus, in the account in John’s Gospel, doesn’t even bother with the BUT:
‘And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day.
‘What’s the life of a man, or a woman, any more than a leaf?’, asks the song.
Infinitely more, says the bible. Infinitely more, says Jesus,
‘Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God. Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.’ (Luke 12:6-7)
Because although, like the leaves, like the sparrows, our bodies fade away and fall, God loves each one of us with an everlasting love. No one and nothing is lost, because they are in the hand of God, and God will raise us up, in ways we do not totally understand, perhaps cannot begin to imagine. We, and our loved ones, are in the hand of God.
Those who think that song is sad are right, because the death of someone we know is sad, and the death of someone we love can be devastating, can feel like the loss of our very selves. But those who find the song calming and comforting are also right, because the failing powers, the withering of strength, the fragility of life, the passing of good times, are part of life, but not the end of life.
In the time of their visitation they will shine forth,
and will run like sparks through the stubble.
They will govern nations and rule over peoples,
and the Lord will reign over them for ever.
Those who trust in him will understand truth,
and the faithful will abide with him in love,
because grace and mercy are upon his holy ones,
and he watches over his elect.
And so, in the midst of our sad memories, we must also keep the good memories, because they are what God keeps safe for us, they are the reason why we have hope.
We look backwards with sadness and with gratitude;
We look forwards with a firm hope in God’s promises.
Until we meet again, may God hold you in the hollow of his hand.
Bless the Lord, all you works of his, in all places of his dominion;
bless the Lord, O my soul.
Welcome to the Outreach Youth Worker’s latest roundup looking back over the month of October.
Breathe (A Contemporary Youth Retreat) – ‘Breathe’ is the new name for the holiday I help to run in Dovedale, Derbyshire. Some young people from FAITH attended last year’s holiday (then called Altitude) and reported back as having had a great time! (see parish blog for some pictures). But Breathe is more than just a name-change, it’s a ‘contemporary youth retreat that gives you the chance to experience God in a new but old way’. Faith is the focus and it offers practical ways for young people to explore and grow in their faith. Look out for more information. Read the rest of this entry »