Well it is now September 29th and I really think that I am still called to lead worship. I keep coming across St Paul's words 'keep on until the race is won' and Charles Wesley's hymn 'preach him to all and cry in death behold behold the lamb.....and other pulls onto me.Worshippers at Lane Head on 16th May
2010
Back Again 13th May 2010
Well it has been a long time since I have blogged ... forgotten how to use this blog. My present situation hasn't really changed except for several more falls and stays in hospital. On Sunday 16th May 2010 I am to preside and preach at a Eucharistic service at Lane Head Methodist Church which I am sad to say will be their penultimate service and my last service ever. I no longer feel well enough to prepare ( I haven't anywhere in my house to use what books I have left) as I get anxious and then even more anxious the nearer the time to lead the service. Then there is my disability.... apart from other things I can no longer distribute the bread and wine.
I am doing a great deal of keep fit .... Mon, Wed, Fri. at the gym having undergone a GP referral scheme and then Thursday afternoon sit down aerobics.
19th May 2010
Final service now presided at!! It was very emotional and I just cannot understand why Lane Head Methodist Church has to close. It only has a small number of elderly worshippers who have no energy to do the jobs. Their worship is really good and there is a certain spirituality about the place which cannot be reproduced in many other places. Lane Head was one of my smaller but more supportive churches when I was Superintendent of the Makerfield Circuit (Methodist Speak). Anyway it is due to close on Sunday 23rd May at 4.30pm. That will be a very sad service.
This is the sermon I preached at that service.... it was the Sunday after Ascension Day:
Sunday after Ascension
55 But filled with the Holy Spirit, he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.
56 "Look," he said, "I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!" Acts 7: 55-56
So died Stephen, the first recorded Christian martyr. He was one of seven elected by the entire body of the first church in Jerusalem, and ordained by the apostles to the ministry, probably to what later was called the diaconate. He is named first, and described as a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit. These seven deacons were elected in the first place to take charge of the distribution of funds to the needy widows in the Christian community. But Stephen was too convinced and passionate a Xian to confine himself to the office of administration and was soon notorious throughout Jerusalem as an eloquent preacher of the Christian Gospel and a charismatic personality in the original meaning of that debased word.
So often we disable our workers by slapping them down with administration, we cripple our mission by being too churchified thinking more of bricks and mortar than spreading the good news of Jesus Christ.
In a short time Stephen followed his Lord into conflict with the religious authorities and to a fearful death. He was accused of blasphemy. His enemies stirred up the mob, and he met a hideous death by stoning, whether as a judicial action or in a kind of lynching is difficult to decide. What is made clear is the manner in which he met his death. The account reminds us of Calvary. He looked beyond the scene of violence and hatred and gazed into heaven in which he deeply believed . "Look," he said, "I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!". Then as the stones rained in on him he dropped to his knew and cried aloud: ‘ Lord do not hold this sin against them.
Pause
On this Sunday after Ascension day I give you the story of Stephen because it sums up this time of the year with the resurrection, ascension, Pentecost and Trinity Sunday. I suppose I could have bored you by talking at length about the Ascension and referring to the Apostles creed which says that Jesus ascended into heaven ... but I don’t think you need to be told that ascended is a figure of speech such as we use everyday when we talk about the sun ‘rising’ which is doesn’t or refer to someone in business as being on the way up. Whatever language the Bible uses, it is not too hard to realise what we are being told ...... that Jesus, having shown himself alive after his crucifixion, disappeared from mortal sight and entered the dimension of heaven ... not just as one more good man to be so translated, but united forever with the power and the glory of God himself.
This is what Stephen saw through the opening in the sky ... a vision of Jesus, the humiliated, crucified, endlessly loving Son of God, at the very centre of the universe. So this morning we are not talking about some theological conundrum, but about a human being like us facing the kind of ugly mob scene of fanaticism, hatred and violence that is familiar to us ...at least at second hand... about a man meeting his death which is something that we each have to do.
When it comes home to us that Stephen was only the first in an enormous list of men and women who deliberately accepted death rather than renounce their faith don’t we want to know what gave them that courage, what inspired them to meet their end unshaken, what kept them believing that the last word on this mortal scene is spoken by a God of love.
Flossenburg 1945, he knew he was being summoned to die. ‘It is the end’ he said ‘and for me the beginning of life’ I believe that as he was hanged he too was ‘gazing into heaven’ seeing through the rift in those terrible skies the Lord he had served with all his heart and all his mind and all his strength.
Pause
In Ecuador a few years ago three missionaries were killed in a remote village in the Andes. to the astonishment of all who knew the area the widows of these men went back to continue the work of these martyrs and the neighbourhood is totally changed. In every century and in every country the story goes on.
But you don’t have to die a martyrs death to give this witness to the power of this vision of the ascended Christ at the right hand of God. A well known writer once told the story of being at the deathbed of his father, who was a simple and secure believer ... ‘I would give anything’ he said, ‘To have that kind of certainty of heaven.’
When we say ...He ascended into heaven, we are not trying to conjure up a picture of the levitation of Jesus but are declaring that the ultimate ruler of all things in whose hands we are, has the mind and heart of Christ ... Through the rift in the sky I am seeing Christ ...The Christ whose glorified scars speak of his intimate knowledge of the worst this world can do, and whose love is now triumphant.
Jesus is Lord and if we keep that vision of the ascended Lord ever before us we shall emerge with a new perspective on our troubled world, a new confidence in a God who cares and a new desire to reflect this love of Christ to others and continued courage as you move to another church.
Lane Head 16th May 2010
This is the sermon I preached at that service.... it was the Sunday after Ascension Day:
Sunday after Ascension
55 But filled with the Holy Spirit, he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.
56 "Look," he said, "I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!" Acts 7: 55-56
So died Stephen, the first recorded Christian martyr. He was one of seven elected by the entire body of the first church in Jerusalem, and ordained by the apostles to the ministry, probably to what later was called the diaconate. He is named first, and described as a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit. These seven deacons were elected in the first place to take charge of the distribution of funds to the needy widows in the Christian community. But Stephen was too convinced and passionate a Xian to confine himself to the office of administration and was soon notorious throughout Jerusalem as an eloquent preacher of the Christian Gospel and a charismatic personality in the original meaning of that debased word.
So often we disable our workers by slapping them down with administration, we cripple our mission by being too churchified thinking more of bricks and mortar than spreading the good news of Jesus Christ.
In a short time Stephen followed his Lord into conflict with the religious authorities and to a fearful death. He was accused of blasphemy. His enemies stirred up the mob, and he met a hideous death by stoning, whether as a judicial action or in a kind of lynching is difficult to decide. What is made clear is the manner in which he met his death. The account reminds us of Calvary. He looked beyond the scene of violence and hatred and gazed into heaven in which he deeply believed . "Look," he said, "I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!". Then as the stones rained in on him he dropped to his knew and cried aloud: ‘ Lord do not hold this sin against them.
Pause
On this Sunday after Ascension day I give you the story of Stephen because it sums up this time of the year with the resurrection, ascension, Pentecost and Trinity Sunday. I suppose I could have bored you by talking at length about the Ascension and referring to the Apostles creed which says that Jesus ascended into heaven ... but I don’t think you need to be told that ascended is a figure of speech such as we use everyday when we talk about the sun ‘rising’ which is doesn’t or refer to someone in business as being on the way up. Whatever language the Bible uses, it is not too hard to realise what we are being told ...... that Jesus, having shown himself alive after his crucifixion, disappeared from mortal sight and entered the dimension of heaven ... not just as one more good man to be so translated, but united forever with the power and the glory of God himself.
This is what Stephen saw through the opening in the sky ... a vision of Jesus, the humiliated, crucified, endlessly loving Son of God, at the very centre of the universe. So this morning we are not talking about some theological conundrum, but about a human being like us facing the kind of ugly mob scene of fanaticism, hatred and violence that is familiar to us ...at least at second hand... about a man meeting his death which is something that we each have to do.
When it comes home to us that Stephen was only the first in an enormous list of men and women who deliberately accepted death rather than renounce their faith don’t we want to know what gave them that courage, what inspired them to meet their end unshaken, what kept them believing that the last word on this mortal scene is spoken by a God of love.
Flossenburg 1945, he knew he was being summoned to die. ‘It is the end’ he said ‘and for me the beginning of life’ I believe that as he was hanged he too was ‘gazing into heaven’ seeing through the rift in those terrible skies the Lord he had served with all his heart and all his mind and all his strength.
Pause
In Ecuador a few years ago three missionaries were killed in a remote village in the Andes. to the astonishment of all who knew the area the widows of these men went back to continue the work of these martyrs and the neighbourhood is totally changed. In every century and in every country the story goes on.
But you don’t have to die a martyrs death to give this witness to the power of this vision of the ascended Christ at the right hand of God. A well known writer once told the story of being at the deathbed of his father, who was a simple and secure believer ... ‘I would give anything’ he said, ‘To have that kind of certainty of heaven.’
When we say ...He ascended into heaven, we are not trying to conjure up a picture of the levitation of Jesus but are declaring that the ultimate ruler of all things in whose hands we are, has the mind and heart of Christ ... Through the rift in the sky I am seeing Christ ...The Christ whose glorified scars speak of his intimate knowledge of the worst this world can do, and whose love is now triumphant.
Jesus is Lord and if we keep that vision of the ascended Lord ever before us we shall emerge with a new perspective on our troubled world, a new confidence in a God who cares and a new desire to reflect this love of Christ to others and continued courage as you move to another church.
Lane Head 16th May 2010
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