13/3/22
News from the Benwell & Scotswood Team
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Dame Elizabeth Frink, Untitled, 1970
Etching on paper
Dates for your diary
Wed 16, 23, 30 Mar & 6 Apr - Living in Love & Faith, evening Lent course
7pm at St James
Fri 18, 25 Mar & 1, 8 Apr - Living in Love & Faith, morning Lent course
11am at St Margaret
Sun 27 Mar - Mothering Sunday celebration service
11am at Venerable Bede
Holy week 10 - 16 April
Palm Sunday, 10 Apr - 11am at Venerable Bede
Maundy Thursday, 14 Apr - 7.30pm at St John's
Good Friday, 15 Apr - 2pm at St Margaret's
The Easter vigil, Sat 16 Apr - 8.30pm at St James'
Sun 1 May - Hub service moves to St James
11am at St James'
News
Sunday school has returned!
Between now and Easter we will have Sunday school sessions at the Venerable Bede on the following dates:
13 March
3 April
If you have primary school-age children then drop them off in the hall for the first part of the service, and we will return to the church in time for communion. We will have fun activities to help kids engage with the Bible and worship. We will have several DBS checked volunteers at each session. For more info speak to Dominic or Claire.
Quiet day at Alnmouth
Thank you to everyone who joined us on the quiet day at Alnmouth. We had a wonderful welcome from the brothers at Alnmouth Friary and explored the beautiful village on the Northumberland coast.
Living in Love and Faith - Lent course 2022
How do questions about identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage fit within the bigger picture of the good news of Jesus Christ? What does it mean to live in love and faith together as a Church?
For 5 weeks during Lent we will follow the Church of England's Living in Love and Faith course.
Group 1:
Wednesdays, 7pm at St James
(16, 23, 30 Mar & 6 Apr)
Group 2:
Fridays, 11am at St Margaret's
(18, 25 Mar & 1, 8 Apr)
Altar Server training/taster session this Sunday
We hope to have return soon to having servers in Sunday services. This is a great way to help us all in worship.
We will hold a taster session on Sunday 6th March after the morning service. Please join whether you have been a server in our services before, if you are interested in learning, or are just curious.
Ask Chris if you have any questions!
Worship Texts
The Collect
Almighty God,
you show to those who are in error the light of your truth,
that they may return to the way of righteousness:
grant to all those who are admitted
into the fellowship of Christ’s religion,
that they may reject those things
that are contrary to their profession,
and follow all such things as are agreeable to the same;
through our Lord Jesus Christ,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
First Reading
Philippians 3.17 – 4.1 Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us. For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears. Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ. He will transform the body of our humiliation so that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself. Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.
Gospel
Luke 13.31–35 At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, ‘Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.’ He said to them, ‘Go and tell that fox for me, “Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem.” Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you. And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” ’
Sermon
James Bartle, ordinand
As we meet Jesus in today’s Gospel my immediate reaction is one of confusion. Maybe it’s just me but this reading feels totally out of place in the chronology of our Lenten journey.
We are just beginning to settle into this Lenten season. We heard the story last week of Jesus’ temptation in the desert. The craving for chocolate is just beginning to loom. We are starting to feel duly penitent, and sin now weighs heavily on our mind.
Yet we are already being asked to cast our minds forward through to the end of Lent.
We meet Jesus as he already begins to foretell his death and his resurrection. We hear in Jesus’ Lament over Jerusalem, that lament over a brood which has wandered far from its mother’s tender care. It’s his lament over our wandering. But we also hear very clearly that Jesus offers a remedy for our fall from grace. I can’t help but feel that this is a gospel reading which places our gaze firmly on Good Friday and beyond that to Easter.
In next week’s gospel, we will return to a message of repent or perish – the proper stuff of Lent surely not? So why then, with so many more weeks of Lent to go, are our eyes already turning towards the next chapter in this story?
I don’t think it’s an accident that those who write our lectionary (that’s the pattern of readings we hear in our services) have punctured the solemnity of Lent with a reminder that the story doesn’t always need to be about sin. It’s not a coincidence that today we hear the promise that God has the power to transform, to forgive and to love and he does that unceasingly.
And it is therefore also a reminder that Lent, like life, isn’t one, continuous, linear journey.
The journey through Lent isn’t one which starts here and ends there. Where here is sin and there is forgiveness. Or here is us and there is God.
The journey through Lent is a lot more complicated and a lot less straight forward.
I don’t how good you are at art, but if someone asked me to draw a perfectly straight line of any significant length, I think they’d be very disappointed by what I produced. My lines would definitely fall into the wonky category.
The dictionary says of the word wonky – ‘informal – not straight, crooked or askew’.
And I think that’s probably a good way of summing up me, my journey through Lent, my life and my relationship with God. It’s all a bit wonky.
Too much of how we talk about our relationship with God comes to focus on a single conversion moment or on an end goal. We try to make it nice and neat.
But our relationship with God is one that evolves and develops. It requires time and patience. It involves dealing with an awful lot of wonkiness. As a very wise priest once wrote: ‘discovering how to become intimate with God, how to come close to him, and how to surrender to him are part of a lifetime’s journey.’
And on that journey, just as we will continue to get it wrong, God will continue to transform, continue to forgive and continue to love.
That happens because this promise of perpetual transformation is not a passing benefit of our faith or an incidental addition to the journey of following Christ. It is an intentional and intrinsic expression of God’s love for humanity. This is a promise, or a covenant as scripture often calls it, that God made with man at the beginning of time and repeats throughout the course of human history. Starting with Noah in the aftermath of the flood, God sealed the covenant with the promise that ‘never again shall flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood’.
In today’s Old Testament reading, God makes that covenant again with Abraham. He speaks into Abraham’s doubt, his frustration, and his lack of trust in God, and seals the promise of salvation for all Abraham’s descendants. And God goes on making and renewing that covenant. As humankind falls back and our foot slips from the Way, God keeps on transforming, forgiving and loving. With Moses on Mount Sinai. With David when he establishes his Kingdom over Israel. And ultimately with the crucified Christ on the Cross.
Even now, he renews that covenant with us each time we receive the Holy Eucharist. As we enter that sacred mystery, the covenant sealed in the blood of Christ offers us the chance to be renewed every time we share in broken bread and wine outpoured.
Act after act of transformation. Act after act of forgiveness. Act after act of love.
The journey through Lent isn’t a unique experience started afresh each spring and then forgotten about until we do it again next year. It is a reflection of the whole journey of a human life and indeed the whole journey of humanity itself. It isn’t an express voyage from ash to glory, it is a long, slow, stop start excursion with many bumps and detours along the way.
Today we are invited to reflect on how we will use this Lenten season to respond to that promise which God continues to make with us. Lent gives us the space to discern how we put our relationship with God right, how we respond to his pattern of transformation, forgiveness and love.
I don’t think the pulpit is the place for instruction about how to do Lent or life for that matter. We all must discern individually what are our own sins, where it is we feel far from God’s love and what it is we need to do to put that right. But there is an important place where I think that needs to start, and that is prayer.
Any relationship with God starts with and is anchored in prayer.
There can be a temptation to think that a good Lenten discipline means giving up a whole series of things or indeed taking up so many new, worthy tasks. But I think it’s actually a lot simpler than that. Pray, just pray.
It’s not something that takes a huge amount of will power, it’s not expensive, it doesn’t need skill and it doesn’t even need to be done well. To return to an earlier theme, our prayer life can be wonky too. But it is the place of intimacy, where the fire and the love of our relationship with God is kindled.
As the poet George Herbert puts it, it’s the place where heaven meets ordinary.
It’s no surprise that in the tragedy and despair of war in Ukraine in these last few weeks, when man’s displacement from God’s offer of love appears in such evidence, so many in that country and around the world have turned to prayer. What can we do to help, so many have asked? Pray, pray unceasingly.
When we turn our eyes and our hearts to prayer, we see that the promise of Easter isn’t far off in the distance at the end of a long and testing forty days. Lent is not about spending a whole month arduously trying to put ourselves right with some hope of a reward at the end of it. God is ready to meet us now and it is in prayer we can come know him. Right now, we can come to feel and understand his pattern of transformation, forgiveness, and love, seeping into our hearts and punctuating our lives every step of that wonky way.
Intercessions
To add names to the prayer list please email church@benwellscotswood.com
Prayers for others:
Irene Foskett and family
George Irving
Alistair
John Nicholson
Alan Robson
Peter Wilson
Michelle Wilson
Liz Holliman
Joan Finley
James, Christina, Anastasia, and Xavier
Ali Zareie and family
The Riches Family
Jill Sorley
George Snowden
Claire Mozaffari
Herbert Agbeko
Baptisms
Finnley Lee
Rest in peace
Joyce Phillips
Leslie Foskett
Ray Beswick
Other intentions
Ukraine
Alnmouth Friary
Post Communion prayer
Almighty God,
you see that we have no power of ourselves to help ourselves:
keep us both outwardly in our bodies,
and inwardly in our souls;
that we may be defended from all adversities
which may happen to the body,
and from all evil thoughts which may assault and hurt the soul;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.