26/6/22
Your weekly update from the Benwell & Scotswood Team
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Dates for your diary
Sunday 3rd July 2022
11am, St Aidan's Billy Mill, NE29 8BZ
Pam Ingham's 25th Anniversary of ordination
Sunday 10th July 2022
11am, St James
Confirmation service
Services this week
Sunday
9.45am at St John's - eucharist
11am at St James - hub service (eucharist with baptism)
4pm at St Margaret's - evening prayer and praise
News
Exhibition in Exile - Reception after Sunday Service
As Sunday is the last day of the exhibition, the organisers would like to say thank you with refreshments and a Turkish music performance after our Sunday morning hub service!
So after the service, grab a tea or coffee and enjoy the art!
The exhibition has been at St James for Refugee Week 2022. It consists of about 70 satirical cartoons about the refugee crisis. Originally part of a global competition, the artworks were taken to safety when the organiser had to flee Turkey and became a refugee himself.
New coffee morning at St James - Mondays 9.30am - 1pm
Join us from this Monday at St James for tea and coffee. Drop-in at any point and stay for a chat, meet your community, use our wifi, explore the church and our beautiful churchyard.
Speak to Chris Foskett if you would like any more info!
Revd Pam Ingham's 25th Anniversary of ordination - Sun 3rd July
11am at St Aidan's Billy Mill
Please join us as we celebrate the 25th Anniversary of Revd Pamela Ingham MBE at a service of Holy Communion on Sunday 3rd July 2022 at 11am.
St Aidan church, Billy Mill Lane, NE29 8BZ
Preacher Revd Canon Murray Haig
After the service refreshments will be served in the hall.
RSVP Shirley Irving.
Worship Texts
Slideshow
The Collect
Lord, you have taught us
that all our doings without love are nothing worth:
send your Holy Spirit
and pour into our hearts that most excellent gift of love,
the true bond of peace and of all virtues,
without which whoever lives is counted dead before you.
Grant this for your only Son Jesus Christ’s sake,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
Reading
Galatians 5.1,13–25 For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another. Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit.
Gospel
Luke 9.51–62 When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. And he sent messengers ahead of him. On their way they entered a village of the Samaritans to make ready for him; but they did not receive him, because his face was set towards Jerusalem. When his disciples James and John saw it, they said, ‘Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?’But he turned and rebuked them. Then they went on to another village. As they were going along the road, someone said to him, ‘I will follow you wherever you go.’ And Jesus said to him, ‘Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.’ To another he said, ‘Follow me.’ But he said, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ But Jesus said to him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead; but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ Another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord; but let me first say farewell to those at my home.’ Jesus said to him, ‘No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’
Sermon
By Revd Dominic
Our Gospel reading this morning finds Jesus on the road to Jerusalem, heading for the final week of his life and the cross As Luke puts it, Jesus has his face set towards Jerusalem. In other words, Jesus is decided and determined. He knows what lies ahead, he knows he is marching towards his death, but he’s going anyway. Jesus is absolutely single minded and he demands the same of his followers.
As they go along the road, they meet someone who says they are ready to follow Jesus but Jesus seems to rebuke them. ‘Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head’, he tells them. Even animals have homes and yet Jesus himself is forced on to the road, unable to rest anywhere. Again, people declare themselves ready to follow but Jesus demands their immediate response, not allowing them time to say goodbye or even bury their dead before joining him on the road.
Jesus’ responses here seem harsh yet his words here seem to reflect a reality that many people face. In the hall here at St James, we have hosted this week an exhibition of satirical cartoons about the world-wide refugee crisis. According to the UN there are 90 million people worldwide who have been forced to flee their homes and the exhibition (which you can see after the service) depicts many of the facts of life for those people: lives condensed into suitcases, futures in the hands of faceless and uncaring bureaucracies, the impossibility of caring for children and babies whilst living on the road. The art works in the hall bring these realities before us in striking and moving ways.
These experiences, of course, have also shaped the lives of some of us in this parish who are refugees and asylum seekers. Over the past few years, it has struck me more and more that Jesus himself was a refugee. Not only in the fact that his parents, Mary and Joseph, were forced to flee their own county with the infant Christ to save his life from the persecution of a despotic ruler, but also in his life as an adult. Jesus never had a home, he lived life on the road. His family were the people whom he gathered around him, he stayed wherever he was made welcome and he was constantly at risk from the authorities who were indifferent to him at best and, in the end, hunted, captured and killed him.
Jesus had no home, not even a hole like a fox. It is a fact so obvious and inherent in the gospel narratives that we perhaps overlook its significance. And Jesus tells us that we should be like him, on the road, nowhere to call home, displaced by the powers of this world who have no place for him and propelled by his mission, a mission that would take him to the cross.
Now this may not sound like the most attractive presentation of Christianity you’ve heard. Here at our hub service this morning, we are baptising little Wilson Stewart, just 4 months old. Today we welcome him, along with his parents Gemma and Tony, we baptise him into the fellowship of Christ’s Church and we set him on a path which, if he chooses to follow it, will lead him into a lifetime of following Jesus. But that lifetime of following Jesus might seem less attractive if it means giving up security and comfort, taking to the road with Jesus.
But then, I wonder how secure we really are? As many of you know, my second child Isaac is just six months old and although he is growing fast, that feeling of how utterly vulnerable he is, of the delicacy of his little life, has not yet faded. I wonder if Gemma and Tony feel this too? And any of you who are parents, if you think back? To hold a baby in your arms is to be connected, quite viscerally, to just how fragile human life is, how fragile we all are.
The truth is that life is full of unpredictability and uncertainty. Not all of us will be displaced from our homes but other calamities can befall us. We pray for Wilson today and ask that God will be with him and bless his life but we know that he will inevitably face hard times and troubles in his life, as well as, I’m sure, many good times.
Life will always be a mixture of good times and bad times. When we face bad times they can come upon us quite suddenly and take away the feelings of security that we might have had. Some of us know this because we have been forced to flee our homes and come to a different country, others of us might know about it because we’ve been at the mercy of unpredictable landlords or because challenges like the current cost of living crisis, others might know it because a serious illness or the loss of a loved one has shattered our equilibrium.
While Jesus appears to be asking his followers to give up a lot, I believe he is inviting us to reflect on our own sense of security and the reality of its fragility. I don’t believe Jesus wants us to abandon home and even family for no reason but he does want us to understand where true freedom lies. Not in the things that we imagine bring us security but in faithfulness to him.
This is what we are told in our reading from Galatians, that ‘for freedom that Christ set us free.’ Christ’s challenge to us is to embrace that freedom, and to understand that all that is good in our lives is a gift from God and our only real security is through faith in Christ.
Amen.
Intercessions
If you would like to add someone to the prayer list please email church@benwellscotswood.com
The name will stay on the list for 1 month unless requested to be long-term.
Prayers for others:
Alison Campbell
Val and Roy Macdonald
John Taylor
Helen Wright
Irene Foskett
John Nicholson
Alan Robson
Peter Wilson
Michelle Wilson
Liz Holliman
Joan Finley
The Riches Family
George Snowden
Claire Mozaffari
Herbert Agbeko
Baptisms
Wilson Stewart
Rest in Peace
Michael Wright
Post Communion prayer
Loving Father,
we thank you for feeding us at the supper of your Son:
sustain us with your Spirit,
that we may serve you here on earth
until our joy is complete in heaven,
and we share in the eternal banquet
with Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.