24/10/21
News from the Benwell & Scotswood Team
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Fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls (11Q19), 2nd Century BC
Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Dates for your diary
Sunday 24th Oct
4 churches 4 services:
St James 9.30am
St Margaret's 9.30am
Venerable Bede 10.30am
St John's 11am
Sunday 31st Oct
10.30am, All Saints Sunday (Experimental Service)
Venerable Bede, NE4 8AP
Tuesday 2nd Nov
All Souls' - day of prayer at St James
Sunday 14th Nov
Remembrance Sunday
Sunday 21st Nov
10.30am, Confirmation service
Venerable Bede, NE4 8AP
Sunday 14th Nov
Advent Sunday
News
Don't forget - services in all 4 churches this Sunday
We now have services in all four churches once a month! Support your local church and join us this Sunday.
(The Venerable Bede service will still be at 10.30am in case anyone gets confused!)
St James 9.30am
St Margaret's 9.30am
Venerable Bede 10.30am
St John's 11am
All Saints' next Sunday - 10.30am, 31st Oct
Venerable Bede
On Sunday 31st Oct we will celebrate All Saints day and the stories of all those who have gone before us.
We will make this service especially welcoming to anyone of any age or background and there will be songs, and activities. So why not invite someone who might be interested?
All Souls' Day - remembering those we have lost
St James, Tues 2nd Nov, 12-4pm
All Souls' day is when we remember and pray for those who have died. This year St James' will be open during the day for you to come and pray for those people and light a candle for them.
You will be able to add names to the remembrance list, at the end of the day we will hold a service to read their names aloud and especially pray for all those who we have lost during the pandemic. The clergy will also be available if you want to talk to someone.
Confirmations
Sunday 21st Nov, 10.30am, Venerable Bede
Confirmation is the next big step in faith, it's the chance to say ‘Yes’ to the promises we made at baptism, and declare our faith in Christ publicly.
To find out more about confirmation have a look here >
Bishop Mark Bryant, former Bishop of Jarrow, will be joining us for the service of baptism and confirmation.
If you would like to be confirmed (or baptised!) then come join our group over the coming weeks for confirmation preparation, either on Sunday after the service, or Tuesday at St James at 4.30pm.
Thank you letter from Cornerstone
Amy Proud, the centre co-ordinator at Cornerstone sent us a wonderful thank you letter for our harvest donations. Here is an excerpt:
"We were blown away by your generosity. We received a huge amount of food which will go so far in the community.
"Our Project, Benwell Bridge, is used as a bridge to help people who have become reliant on food banks move to a more sustainable, fairer food system, where everyone can afford and access good food with dignity.
"From all the team at Cornerstone Benwell I would like to thank you again. We are hopeful for safer times ahead and look forward to welcoming you to our cafe in the not so distant future."
Worship Texts
Collect prayer
Blessed Lord,
who caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning:
help us so to hear them,
to read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them
that, through patience, and the comfort of your holy word,
we may embrace and for ever hold fast
the hope of everlasting life,
which you have given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Reading
Hebrews 7.23–28
Furthermore, the former priests were many in number, because they were prevented by death from continuing in office; but he holds his priesthood permanently, because he continues for ever. Consequently he is able for all time to save those who approach God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them. For it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, blameless, undefiled, separated from sinners, and exalted above the heavens. Unlike the other high priests, he has no need to offer sacrifices day after day, first for his own sins, and then for those of the people; this he did once for all when he offered himself. For the law appoints as high priests those who are subject to weakness, but the word of the oath, which came later than the law, appoints a Son who has been made perfect for ever.
Gospel
Mark 10.46–52 They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!’ Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, ‘Son of David, have mercy on me!’ Jesus stood still and said, ‘Call him here.’ And they called the blind man, saying to him, ‘Take heart; get up, he is calling you.’ So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. Then Jesus said to him, ‘What do you want me to do for you?’ The blind man said to him, ‘My teacher, let me see again.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go; your faith has made you well.’ Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.
Sermon
James Bartle, Ordinand, Cranmer Hall, Durham
Good morning, it is a pleasure to be with you this morning. For those I haven’t had the chance to meet yet, my name is James, and I am a student at Cranmer Hall in Durham where I am training for ordination to the priesthood. I hope that over the next few months, I’ll have a chance to share with you some of the journey that has brought me here all the way from Heaton.
When I am not busy training for ministry, one of the things I enjoy doing most is hiking in the Cheviot Hills in North Northumberland. I may be biased, but I do think the Cheviots offer some of the most amazing walks and views of any hill range in the UK.
Occasionally, after a long, hard slog, walking up a hill. Out of breath. Pouring with sweat. Often battered by wind and rain (this is the North East of England). You finally reach the summit of a hill and are met with the most spectacular view. It makes all the hard work worthwhile.
It’s a view you’ve seen before. Everything in sight you’ve seen from ground level. But with a different perspective, a different view, we see the same things very differently.
I think today’s gospel invites us to think about the view from which we look upon the world. The story of Jesus healing the blind man, invites us to consider what we see and perhaps more importantly, the things to which we choose to be blind.
Blindness is something which affects us all. Not necessarily physical blindness, but a blindness which causes us to ignore all matter of things we’d rather forget about or pretend didn’t exist at all.
I want to stress I do not in any way seek to understate the challenges that visually impaired people experience and the gift they are to society.
But few of us can honestly say that we are not in some way blind to those things we want to push out of the limelight or those things in our society we simply choose not to see?
We can be blind to the great injustices of the world – poverty, malnutrition, oppression and homelessness. Even when these happen right in front of us.
We can be blind to suffering and prejudice experienced by other people, simply because we have never experienced their way of living.
We can even be blind to those hurtful things done in the name of our faith, which draw people away from God rather than bringing us closer to him.
This is the blindness of our hearts.
More often than not, the blindness of our heart is unconscious. Few of us deliberately set out to neglect other people or to ignore their suffering. Equally, our blindness in not always individual - collectively we are often blind to those things which don’t impact us a group.
Let me illustrate this with an example.
When Sarah Everard was murdered by a policeman in London in March this year, we saw a great outpouring of grief, lament and anger at that terrible crime. People who had never before been activists attended vigils and made a protest, quite rightly, against this awful crime and against violence towards women more generally. The media covered the murder and the subsequent vigils intently. Our politicians were outraged and spoke out.
A few months later in June, in the same city, in the space of a week, four young black boys were murdered in knife attacks, probably related to gang violence. The fourth of those young men became the seventeenth person to die of a knife wound in London since the beginning of the year. Almost all those seventeen victims were black, working-class boys.
If you asked someone on the street how many of those seventeen people they could name, I wonder what their response would be? Equally, how many national vigils have been held to demand an end to the epidemic of knife crime on the streets of our capital city?
Let me be clear that I am not trying to pit one crime against another or create a hierarchy of victims. But does it not speak volumes to the blindness I’ve just described, that the murder of one woman who looked like, spoke like and came from a similar background to those who run the media, to our politicians and to a majority of people in this country, received so much attention. Yet the many victims of knife crime, from a marginalised community, received so little.
Our vision may be perfect, but that doesn’t mean to say our view of the world isn’t blind.
But just as we hear about Bartimeaus being healed of his blindness by Jesus in Jericho, we too can be healed.
And I think the clue to who heals us, and from where our healing comes from, is in today’s Gospel.
Jesus says to Bartimeaus: ‘Go, your faith has made you well’. ‘Your faith has made you well.’
Our faith in Jesus Christ is what will heal us. Our faith in:
an all-loving God,
a God who loves each of us equally
and for whom nobody sits in the shadows,
is the balm that will open our eyes more fully to the world and more fully to God.
In some Churches, today is kept as Bible Sunday - a day to celebrate the scriptures. And what a better day then, to remember that the Bible is the testimony of our faith. The testimony to God’s abundant, gracious and merciful love. A love which cherishes us all, just as we are, as a child of God and which is given unconditionally.
It is a message which is so often eclipsed by the use of the Bible to degrade others and to harden our blindness to the needs of people that some, would like to see pushed back to the margins. However, the message of our faith, the message of love given to us in Scripture, is one which will triumph over any misuse of that scripture, because the message of love is the message of the true essence of God.
But we can’t fall into the same trap and just start quoting scripture, and saying we believe in the power of God’s love and saying this is our faith, if we seek healing of our spiritual blindness.
If we are to be made well, if we are truly to have faith, we must see the world as God sees it. We must adopt God’s gaze on the world.
It is the gaze of a lover which looks upon the cherished things he sees and says “Yes, I love you”.
A gaze which sees the diversity of the world and doesn’t look for the things we have in common but celebrates that difference as part of the beautiful design of creation. That looks on every human encounter as a chance to share with another. A gaze that doesn’t look longingly down from heaven but looks at us eye to eye, as and where we are, because God as Christ Incarnate, walks with us through life.
Perhaps the place to start is with ourselves. I think it is one of the hardest questions we can ask ourselves, spiritually speaking – when God looks on me, what does he see? I suspect we can all fall into the temptation of thinking God looks on us and sees only our faults and the things we do wrong, someone unworthy of God’s love – rather than recognising that when God looks on us, he looks on something he loves most deeply.
None of us can hope to adopt God’s loving gaze on the world if we cannot first adopt God’s loving gaze on ourselves.
‘Your faith has made you well.’
Shortly, we will receive the healing gift of the Eucharist. In the taking of Jesus’ body, we will be healed and strengthened as our Saviour nourishes us and washes away our sins. So, as we will know Jesus in that moment, let us pray that we will also know his view of the world. That God will grant us the grace to see as he sees and then we too will be made well.
Intercessions
Prayers for others:
Moira Taylor
Mehri Karami
Edith Hutchinson
Regine Hemminger
Grace Thomson
Peter Wilson
Liz Holliman
Joan Finley
James, Christina, Anastasia, and Xavier
Ali Zareie and his family
The Riches Family
Jill Sorley
Joyce Phillips
George Snowden
Claire Mozaffari
Herbert Agbeko
Edward Fraser
All those who are struggling at home or in hospital with Covid-19
Rest In Peace:
John MacIntyre
All who lost their lives from Covid 19
Other intentions:
COP26 and the protection and restoration of our planet
Post Communion prayer
God of all grace,
your Son Jesus Christ fed the hungry
with the bread of his life
and the word of his kingdom:
renew your people with your heavenly grace,
and in all our weakness
sustain us by your true and living bread;
who is alive and reigns, now and for ever.
Amen.