Ministerial Meandering. 9 – 15  August, 2021

Amazingly, thanks to the sense of fun and generosity of you all, we made $250 for the ‘Vicar’s Auction Haircut’ - which means that with my share, it came to $500 for the church.  That must be almost $1 per hair!  But the fur round my neck is no more, and no less than three ladies had a hand in the end result.

I have been touched by the number of you who have asked about Sheila, and most of you will know by now that her Mum, Betty, died last Friday, 6th, peacefully in her sleep.  Sheila is staying on in the UK to do a lot of sorting out of her mother’s things and is arranging her funeral and cremation, for which she will stay.  Since she, her sister (Christine), and both our daughters will be there, and because this is likely to occur at almost exactly the same time as our 125th anniversary, she has asked that I stay here and look after our parish.  She has asked also that I send a passage of scripture to be read, and a short eulogy.  She is likely to be away for another 3 weeks, as the demand for funeral services is high, and there is a waiting list.  

I hope she will be back for our service of celebration on the 29th, but at this moment, I can’t be certain of this.

One of the things that has come out of this enforced time on my own is the realization of how much I need you.  Some of you may recall a sermon I called, ‘Feed on Him’ (27th June - on website), in which I stressed the need for each of us to respond to Jesus’ invocation to ‘feed on Him’ as the Bread of Life; it was there again in this morning’s gospel (8th August).  In many ways I feel it is my task to ‘feed’ you with the words of Jesus, and to show Him to you in ways that you may not have thought of.

But the other side of that is that I need to find the Jesus in you for me to feed off.  We cannot manage on our own - I know I can’t, and have found increasing reliance on Gracie and Niko to stabilize my empty moments when Churchill’s ‘black dog’ - to which I’m prone - is following me rather too closely.

This makes me acutely aware of how much I need your love and care - as much as I need to give you mine.

Make no mistake here - we are talking of the power of Love that comes from our God, our Creator - the Great Spirit that joins and binds all things together as one. 

Consider the polarity of the universe; whether you want to simply say that opposites attract, or that where there is dark, it can only be recognized by its juxtaposition to light.  There are two ends to a magnet, two poles to the earth, two wolves inside each of us (the good and the bad) and so two sides to our natures.

How we interact with each other is therefore a choice of which side we let get the upper hand in our personalities and our souls - which wolf we feed.  It is in our nature to love; we have to be taught to hate.  Hatred and bitterness go together because they only destroy and make us feel bad.  To love is to know that we are doing God’s will, because all Jesus could do was to love - because He was Love.

That is what some of you do for me - because you are Jesus’ hands and hearts on this earth now.  And that is why I need also to feed on you.  Thank you for showing me Jesus too.

 

Philip+

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