We worship you as God and put our trust in you
Show us who is our neighbour and help us to love them

We prayed this prayer, written and spoken by Nick Taylor, in church on Sunday, 22 August 2010. Silence between sentences gave us time to sense the weight of the words and to go along with them. Even so, these words call for rather more praying than they could get in a few minutes in church. We can pray them any day, anywhere. here they are:

Unfairness

Lord God we live in an unfair and unjust world.

We worship you as God and wonder why it goes on.

Through our news and media we are brought face to face with human suffering and despair, of inequality and injustice.

We worship you as God and wonder why it goes on.

We see natural disasters, hurricanes and floods wrecking people’s lives – destroying homes, land and crops and spreading disease. We remember those affected by rain and floods in northern Pakistan, in southern China, in Central America and the ongoing food crisis in Niger.

We worship you as God and wonder why it goes on.

We see war, hatred, corrupt states and institutions working against fairness and unity, denying people basic human needs. We remember those living amongst war and conflict: Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, Somalia, Burma, Columbia, and north-east India. And we pray also for the unreported world. For those in suffering who have no voice and whose plight is unknown.

We worship you as God and wonder why it goes on.

But you Lord are the God of hope. You are the God of peace and of restoration. God speak your word, and help us to listen: save us from our distractions, speak your word, your life changing, life-giving, life-saving word. So fill your church with that word, that injustice is challenged, that unfairness is exposed, that hungry people are fed, that enemies are reconciled, that forgiveness is real, that your life is known in our lives, in our church, in our world. We pray for the world’s response: For integrity in strong leadership in governments, United Nations, World Bank, IMF and aid agencies.

We worship you as God and put our trust in you.

Love Your Neighbour

Loving God, we thank you for this Church and the place you have given us, the breath in our lungs and the time entrusted to us. We thank you for the friendships that define us, for the enemies who define us no less, for all our neighbours.

We pray for our neighbours here, those near to us, whose lives somehow interweave with ours. Those we know only by their car, their front door, their routines – we pray that you will help us to be good neighbours, agents of your kingdom in the places where we live. We pray for those living on the doorstep of the church, those who are hungry and homeless, and those who are busy or lonely or empty. Bless them with a taste of your loving presence. Use us as ministers of your kingdom, representing your love to our neighbours. We pray for our church, for a deeper and fuller love for our neighbours, which grows day by day. Show us who is our neighbour and help us to love them.

All these we offer to you as our prayer. AMEN.

Communion with Wilfred, speaking on Timothy.

Morning service with Graham and Jan, involving highlights of the Holiday Bible Club event

We have been running an annual Holiday Bible Club for more than thirty years at Moortown Baptist Church, Leeds. This year, MBC Children’s Pastoral Worker Jan Fennell and her team of thirty five volunteers found themselves in charge of just over one hundred five-to-eleven year olds. The club was based on Scripture Union’s Rocky’s Plaice programme which through three days of music and drama, craft, DVDs, testimony and teaching tells the story of how besides serving up the best fish and chips in town Rocky’s chip shop church helps spreads the gospel.

A special treat on the final day was the arrival in the MBC car park of a mobile fish and chip shop which provided the youngsters, their families and friends and of course the team with a highly appropriate lunch.

Pictures show: Some of the 106 children who attended MBC’s Holiday Bible Club singing along to the Rocky’s Plaice theme song, the queue outside for the club on day one and some of the kids picking up their lunch from the mobile fish and chip shop.

God the Trinity
Who is the God who comes to us and with us, who brings heaven with God?
The full Bible answer is that God is not just a Being who sits above the heavens – or the sole creator of all things. God is the Father of the Son with the Holy Spirit. God lives, in and as community, and makes a story through God’s kind of time. God is not remote, not the mere origin, as the creator Father, but the one who as Father shares in the history on earth lived by the Son in fellowship with the Father. God, the whole one God, comes here and now, in the Son, who is God’s eternal Word become a real particular human being. In Jesus we see God, because God here translates God into the basic human language, (which, surprise! surprise! is not English) but is flesh and blood, one person with others, talking and doing, loving and suffering, living, dying and rising again, living in the world of human beings, with God the Father, without God. Jesus is God coming to us still, bringing God’s heaven to us, in God’s way. That may not fit our conventional pictures of heaven, but in the storms of life, Jesus comes, as Thompson saw: And lo! Christ walking on the waters, not of Gennesareth but Thames. Or the Aire.

With and from Father and Son comes Holy Spirit, the living outgoingness of God himself, who gets through to us, even in our blindness and deafness, who sets up the ladder from where we are to heaven, and sets the angels, the messengers going up and down. The question about God is not just who is God, but how God is with people and how can people be with God. That is why it is good that in the unity of God is the Holy Spirit, the unending, unwearying outgoing of God into all the world. This is God who does not leave us to figure out, as best we can, something in this murky world about heaven and how we get there. This is God goes on working with us on how we can live with God.

This God is not a God we can get to possess: we cannot go into any shop and buy it and say it is ours. Any religion which offers you God like this, is selling idols. This God takes time, time to live and work in our time, so we have to give God the time of our lives. God walks with us, so we walk with him. We have a lot to learn, to experiment and discover about how to walk with God, if we are to do something more significant than produce a bit more religion in the world. We are seeking above all the kingdom of heaven, in our way on earth now.

On the way, in one way and another, God gives signs of his heaven, the light and the fire break out. God is here so heaven breaks out. Sometimes this is alarming, sometimes transforming, sometimes cheering, but never boring. And it is mostly practical.

God is love
It is practical when we remember and keep in mind a key clue about what ‘God’ means. God is love, said John (I John 4.8). This is not to say, God is an emotion, or God is a timeless quality, or God is a simple rule of conduct. In this is love, says John, that God loved us and gave his Son for us (I John 4.9-10). Love is action, useful action relevant to those who need to be loved not just to those who are loving.

God’s love is not like a little good deed, now and again, though every good deed is a little note in God’s great music. God’s love is the massive eternal action, the foundation of all creation, its culmination and the repairing and joyful presence at the heart of it. God’s love is foundational and commanding action for us all and through all time. So John says, simply, If God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.

So heaven comes down to earth, and from the future into the present. Heaven is what God brings wherever God comes, and heaven is what we share wherever we love as God loves.

Heaven in the present is not all there is to heaven. We have not tasted half of it yet. And we are clearly far from perfect in appreciating and valuing, treasuring and sharing heaven when God brings it close to us in this world, blesses us with its light and joy and thus gives us a chance to share it with others. We are chary in sharing, and even when we pass on God’s love to others, we often mess it up with so much of ourselves it does not come across as the genuine article. This is true of all Christian mission, whether on big or small scale: the good news of the love of God, Father, Son and Spirit, does get shared and passed on in this world, but often other things get passed on as well.

So the wait for heaven, there is still more to come, to be given. But this is not waiting in a vacuum, a great absence; it is like waiting for the main course, by enjoying the starter which makes us think, This is a good restaurant and a good chef, so the evening is going to get even better.

Love divine, all loves excelling,
joy of heaven, to earth come down;
fix in us thy humble dwelling;
all thy faithful mercies crown!
Jesus thou art all compassion,
pure, unbounded love thou art;
visit us with thy salvation;
enter every trembling heart.

Breathe, O breathe thy loving Spirit
into every troubled breast!
Let us all in thee inherit;
let us find that second rest.
Take away our bent to sinning;
Alpha and Omega be;
end of faith, as its beginning,
set our hearts at liberty.

Come, Almighty to deliver,
let us all thy life receive;
suddenly return and never,
nevermore thy temples leave.
Thee we would be always blessing,
serve thee as thy hosts above,
pray and praise thee without ceasing,
glory in thy perfect love.

Finish, then, thy new creation;
pure and spotless let us be.
Let us see thy great salvation
perfectly restored in thee;
changed from glory into glory,
till in heaven we take our place,
till we cast our crowns before thee,
lost in wonder, love, and praise.

God is the key to a workable idea of heaven.
We are not looking for a place in the universe, for some special planet somewhere. We cannot place God in that way. And heaven is the place where God is, because heaven is the place God makes around God wherever God is. It is not that heaven is a place, and then God comes and lives in it. Heaven is not like a hutch, which you build, and then put the rabbit in it. Nor is it like a great house, which God comes along and buys, or takes over as a squatter. No: heaven as place is nowhere and anywhere. It is wherever God is or comes, because God makes heaven around him as he goes and comes.

Heaven is not located somewhere out of this world, out of our reach. It is also not simply future, out of reach while we live in this present. There is much about heaven we do not know – so we can think of coming to know it in the future. There is much about heaven we do not enjoy and are not fit for – so we can hope that we will come to the full joy one day and be fit to enjoy and not spoil the beauty of heaven by our being in it. Heaven is future in significant ways, and so it is hidden from us, as the future always is.

But it is not just future, because it is wherever and whenever God is. God makes and brings and shares heaven wherever God is. And God is not locked in the future alone.

God comes. Into the present. Into our present. And brings heaven. But does pointing us to God like that help us? Is it not answering a question about one mystery – heaven – by pointing us to another mystery – God? There is no doubt a great deal of mystery here, but it is not all obscurity. God comes and shows God. Not that God lets us know everything about God – could we take it in if God did? But God gives us plenty to go on and to hold on to about God.

Talking of God in the Bible way
We talk of God as though it is obvious what ‘God’ means, as though we know just by growing up in our mixed up society or in the repetitions of our religion. But do we? The Bible, this collection of texts we listen to to hear God, is the abiding outcome of God’s speaking to people in various ways over a long time, in Israel and in early Christianity. The Bible’s way of letting us hear and get to know God rests on some strange assumptions.

First, the Bible assumes that we human beings do not know God well enough to be able to talk confidently of God. We do well to keep silence a lot of the time, keep our eyes open, and to practise speaking tentatively as children do.
So, secondly, it assumes that it is essential to our knowing God truly that we always respect the secrets God keeps to God-self – we are on the path of knowing God truly when we are humble about how little we know.
Thirdly, it sees that human beings, in their energetic ignorance and desperate desire for God, tend to make gods for themselves, idols and religions in some form. So the Bible aims to expose our mistakes about God, get us to confess and turn from this tendency to false gods, and be open to God’s showing us true God in God’s own chosen way.
Fourthly, God’s own way of showing God to us is not short and simple and clear cut, but long and bewildering and not yet finished. God chose Abraham and his descendants and set about living and working with them through many generations, wandering towards a promise which is open-ended (it may be that heaven symbolises God’s open-ended promise of life and love). God does not show God in a moment, a twinkling of an eye. We see God by living in and learning from the long history of God with God’s people. Lessons with God take longer than 35 minutes. God works with people by choosing and affirming them, by calling and disciplining them, by renewing and challenging them. All this happens to people as they live with God, and slowly, with many mistakes down dead ends, and detours, come to see
• who the God is who is with them,
• how God is with them,
• how therefore they can be with God.
And coming to see something of all this is to be with God in the heaven God brings wherever he is.

We use the name God very glibly but the story the Bible gives it more substance and mystery.

Please forgive the slightly self-indulgent nature of this blog, but there is so much to tell you about from my expedition to Morocco to climb Mount Toubkal as part of a team raising money for the fantastic charity XLP.
It really was an amazing experience, and before I share some of my thoughts from the mountain, I would like to say a massive thank you to everyone who sponsored me to help raise £2000 for XLP.

To climb Mount Toubkal it was a 5 day trek and 4 nights camping. Over this time we saw a few glimpes of the way of life of those who lived in the heights of the High Atlas Mountains. To say that this is a simple life in contrast to the huge over complicated way many of us live in Britain is a massive understatement. To live and work together in a community, sharing natural resources and having a body clock that is primarily determined by the sun, had a real appeal that is difficult to put into words. Obviously there are downsides to living hours away from the secondary school and days away from the hospital, but there seemed to be a real air of contentment that perhaps you would not experience on a average day walking around Leeds city centre. The hospitality and welcome we recieved was made all the more significant by the fact that we were not expected, but were welcomed and not considered an interruption. On several occasions I couldn’t help but question myself about how I personally could lean towards a more simple life.

It is without hesitation that I say the highlight of the trip was reaching the summit. On a glorious day at 4167m above sea level, (to give you a perspective on this Britains heighest mountain Ben Nevis, is 1344m) after the joy and emotion of reaching the top it is difficult to have any other reaction than praising the God who created the magnificent sight before you. It was with awe and wonder that I was reminded that if God ever had a point to prove or a battle to win with me, than one look at His creation from this perspective put me right in my place, that God indeed is almighty and it is a privilage to know of His love for me & all that He has for us to do. In these moments in a very real and physical way it seemed as if there was nothing in between God and me. With nothing to look up at other than open space, I was forced to ponder on all those things that get in between me and God; emotional, physically and spiritually. As beautiful as it sounds, clearly I am not designed to live at the top of a mountain, and thoughts of the real world set in, but started my descent with a fresh resolve to not let that uncluttered space between God and me be filled so quickly again.

One of the other highlights of the week was the way our team looked out for, and supported one another. It was great to know that every step of the way there were other people who were aware of where you were and who were genuinely interested in how you were doing. It was without hesitation that we shared what we had between us, and served and received from each other at different times over the days. We laughed and cried together, and gave each other support and space when it was needed. 8 people where no-one knew everybody at the start showed to me a great model of how Church could and should be.

This week of annual leave was a great springboard into my sabbatical and I look forward to all the next couple of months brings. I hope that sharing just a few thoughts of the mountain with you helps you to reflect on your own life today, and I will save any stories of the less pleasant moments of smells, river crossings and storms for another time!

(If you would still like to sponsor me, or any of the team, you can still do so here.Thank you!)

Glenda