Coronavirus – COVID 19   –  23 March 2020

Following Government advice, the Archbishops of Canterbury and York have suspended all public worship. This means that no normal Sunday services, or midweek Eucharists can take place and the forthcoming Feast of Easter will not be celebrated in the normal way.

This is a difficult situation for many of us, but the seriousness of the threat to public health, and especially to some of the more vulnerable members of our community, mean that drastic measures are right and necessary.

To help us to maintain a sense of unity, as well as to assist our private devotions, a number of resources are being made available on line: initially there are links on the church’s Facebook page (Wilton Parish Church). it is hoped to add further sites and resources in the next few days.

Church-members who do not have access to the internet can have paper copies of meditations or recordings on CD.

Weddings, Baptisms and Funerals are permitted, but under very restricted conditions. Please check the Church of England website for further details.

http://www.churchofengland.org/more/media-centre/coronavirus-covid-19-guidance-churches

Sermon preached 7 July 2019

Readings: Isaiah 66: 10-14  Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Two headlines caught my attention this week:
the first read – “Mark Wood’s lucky touch symbolizes England’s change in fortune”. I really didn’t know I was so influential!

The second was rather brief and read simply:
“A good week for teenagers”.
Behind that article was the separate successes of two fifteen year olds. Firstly there was Alex Mann, who found himself quite literally plucked from the crowds at the Glastonbury Music Festival and hauled up onto the main stage where – for almost 5 minute – he performed flawlessly alongside his hero – a rapper called Dave; whom I’d never heard of, possibly because I’m not a teenager!!

And there was Coco Gauff, the American tennis player who astonished the crowds at Wimbledon by beating her own here – Venus Williams – and going on to win her match against the Slovenian Polona Hercog – so making it into the last 16.
For two particular teenagers, then, it was a VERY good week.
I heard something rather different on Thursday, however, at a meeting of the Local Youth Network – the group which advices the “Area Board” on which local initiatives deserve Council support.

In the middle of the meeting we wandered into the area of mental health – and our main youth worker suddenly said “You know, I think this is a really depressing time to be a teenager.” And seeing the raised eyebrows around her, she went on to explain why.

Although we may think that young people have more freedom, more opportunity, than we ever did, the fact that the school leaving age has been raised to 18 takes away some of the choice we had: if you really are not academically minded, you can’t now leave school and get started on a career – as previous generations could.
If you’re the kind of teenager who just doesn’t fit in at school – the prospect of living with that until you are 18 can feel like a life sentence. And of course there’s far more scope for bullying now – on and off school premises.
None of which is great for mental health and wellbeing.
Young people today are only half as likely to have a Saturday job as their parents’ generation – not because they’re lazy, but because the opportunities just don’t exist. Retailers don’t hire as many staff, Newsagents don’t have paper rounds any more, employment legislation designed to protect the young from exploitation makes them, in some cases, too expensive to employ.

And with that loss of opportunity to work comes the loss of independence – the sense of pride that comes from earning your own money and deciding what to do with it – the ability to go and do things for yourself without having to ask your parents for the money.

For many in our own area, that lack of freedom is exacerbated by lack of public transport: if you live down the valley in Fovant, or Compton Chamberlayne, or Dinton – you may well live in a very lovely house and a beautiful area – but if you want to get into town or to visit friends, you still have to rely on Mum or Dad to drive you.
And while their parents may well have got on a bike and ridden into town – today that simply isn’t safe.
On balance, it really isn’t clear whether today’s teenagers have greater or lesser freedom than their parents.
And when they do finally make it into the grown-up world of work – there will be the prospect of zero-hours contracts and other unpredictable employment systems that just didn’t exist 20 years ago.

The likelihood of being able to afford to rent a house, let alone to buy one, as many of us did in our 20s or 30s will be pretty much zero.
And the prospect of a decent pension at the end of our working life is seeming increasingly distant for MY generation, never mind the next one.

There is now much more freedom from some of the constraints that were imposed on us – at school and through social pressure beyond that. But even there the lack of an agreed social norm produces a new set of pressures – needing each of us to decide for ourselves what to regard as “normal society” and where we fit in.

So, a good time to be a teenager? Not necessarily.
As so often, it’s a question of perspective.
Of course teenagers are going to feel hard done by – they can’t remember any of the hardships or constraints their grandparents or parents faced, only the sense that NOW their elders seem to have all the power. That’s always been true to an extent.

But then, their elders generally see things through the lens of their own experience too.
We remember what it was like, don’t we – we’ve all been to school after all? Except that school life today is rather different than it was 10 years ago, is very different from when I left school in 1986, and completely unlike anything many of you would ever have experienced before then. And it’s easy to make assumptions which may actually rest on rather flimsy foundations.

I’m labouring this point rather, not to make us ALL depressed – but just to encourage us think about the way we do read the headlines or interpret comment in the media: do we make assumptions about people who are younger, or older than us, that really we have no right to make? Do we ever challenge those assumptions – whether made by us or someone else?

The question of “perspective” is there in our Gospel reading today – with its equally challenging picture of power-play and motivation.

The section we just heard comes at the end of a gradual unfolding – in Chapter 8, Jesus set out on his ministry of healing and teaching, then in chapter 9 he sends the 12 to continue this work, and now in chapter 10 he sends out “70 others”. They are evidently successful in their mission, and return excited and eager to tell Jesus all about it.
But he’s not interested in that; he’s more concerned that they have they eyes set on the future – on the coming kingdom of God. “Do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you – but that your names are written in heaven.”

What matters, it seems, is not the power we can achieve – the things we make happen, for good or ill – but the reason we do anything at all.

If we are motivated by God’s love and concern for all people and all life, and a desire to make that love known and that life a rich experience for all, then surely we will develop a perspective that sees things from many angles – that sees the world in the way that others do.
And that, I think, is what Jesus is asking of us.
We somehow need to work for a practical vision of the future which both recognises and encompasses the mix of needs and perspectives across the generations and within each generation – to avoid generalisations about “young people” or “old People” or any other category of people and to see just “people”.

The world in which Jesus first preached the kingdom of God is as alien to us as life on Mars would be – 2000 years away and with social complexities that we simply can’t comprehend.
And yet that vision does speak to us, as it does in hugely different cultures around world and as it has throughout the intervening generations since Jesus first spoke of it.
That vision is one of inclusion, of justice, of love and forgiveness – it is a broad vision of life in all its fullness.

To all of us, then and now, Jesus gives an urgent call to action – to be labourers in the harvest of God’s people – and not to feel that we have failed when some refuse to see that vision with us. It’s not success that he asks from us, but our willingness to join in the attempt.

Sermon preached on 4th March 2018

This morning I’m going to speak about “snowflakes” – both the literal kind, that clump to gather to turn our world white, and the human kind – “snowflakes” in the modern sense of people who can’t stand any criticism, or even being exposed to strong views with which they disagree, who need to be warned in advance if a particular talk or film might contain themes of an upsetting nature.

I’m not sure who first used the term “snowflake” to apply to a person – or quite what they had in mind – but there are perhaps two ways in which human and “literal” snowflakes are similar – just one strong blast of heat and they simply dissolve; and, clump enough of them together and they can very effectively distort reality.

Beginning then with actual, fluffy white bits of snow, and on Wednesday morning I heard a new phrase on the weather forecaster when the presenter spoke of a pestering of snowflakes”. I’ve heard phrases before like “persistent rainfall”, but a “pestering of snowflakes” had a slightly poetic ring to it.
Over the next two days, of course, much of the country has seen rather more than a pestering of snowflakes – with heavy falls and drifts of snow in many places.
And it’s remarkable how quickly the landscape changes. From the warmth of our homes, looking out – the pristine white that covers the ground can seem very beautiful, adding a brightness to the sky, after weeks of soggy greyness, and bringing our surroundings into sharper focus – making everything seem fresh and clean.

Out in the countryside, however, the snow-covered landscape can feel rather bleak – threatening even.
It’s often no longer easy to tell where the road surface ends and the roadside ditch begins.
One wrong turn and you find yourself well and truly stuck, and feeling a long way from any human help.

And it seems to me that the snow-laden experience of the past few days provides us with a good image for Lent.

This is the time when we are called to change the “landscape” of our own lives, just as Jesus took himself into the wilderness – enduring heat rather than bitter cold – away from familiar routines, familiar faces, away from his usual means of support.
During Lent we are meant to echo that wilderness experience to some extent, in order to bring into sharper focus our lives and our dependency on God, rather than the frills and distractions of human society.

For me, not being able to wander off somewhere for 6 weeks, the only way of refocussing that I could think of was to limit my reliance on technology – and I decided not to check emails either before 9am or after 9pm: to spend half of each 24 hours ignoring the annoying ping on the phone and keeping my attention on something else instead.

The effects of that MAY be that some of you will wait slightly longer for a response to your messages – but it also means, hopefully, that when you do hear from me it will be better thought out and at a more social hour.
For me, not being in thrall to the email means beginning the day with a little more time for the things I’d normally rush through without thinking, and ending the day without quite so many ideas jumbling around in my brain.
I think I might just keep this up when Lent is over!

Part of our “collective refocussing” here, each Lent, is the installation of the Stations of the Cross – I never get used to how different the church feels the first time I walk in and see them each Lent.

Like the snowfall, they change feel of our surroundings – perhaps making our church seem even more Italianate.
Those symbols of Christ’s passion – of the Way of the Cross – help to point us beyond the noticeboards and notices of our activities – and to remind us of Christ’s presence in his temple.

And, again like the snowfall, those stations can appear both beautiful and also rather stark
– a reminder of Jesus’ very real pain and death
– a reminder that Jesus knew the bleakness of isolation, feeling very far from human help,
despite the pressing crowds all around him.

The seriousness of Lent, and the starkness of those Stations, point us to what we heard in our first reading -that “the Power of God is Christ Crucified” – a notion which the author himself suggests is a “foolish” one from a worldly perspective.
But I would interpret that as saying that Christians should not be “snowflakes” – in the sense of overly-fragile people.

We should not expect to experience God’s power as a means of keeping us always safe – cushioning us from the harsher realities of life, or as a hiding place from anything that might upset us. (Jesus himself was not spared suffering and distress.)

The power of God is revealed most clearly precisely when we do face hardship and challenges, but then, by God’s grace, find that we can work through those difficulties, and emerge from them with new energy and insight.

To stretch the analogy a little further –
we appreciate the warmth of the sun far more powerfully when we are thawing out after a cold spell,
than when its heat is constant at the height of summer:
it’s in the transforming process – in the changing of the seasons – in the healing of broken hearts and minds – that God’s power is most vividly displayed.

During Lent, then, yes – we are called to look beyond some of the ordinary, everyday things that clutter our lives – in order to focus our minds more clearly on seeking God, and his ways.

And yet, we need to be careful that doesn’t become an escape into fantasy.

Lent isn’t just about making ourselves feel virtuous, or hiding away in some private sanctuary of holiness. Nor should we clump together, like snowflakes, to disguise the realities of life under a false covering of perfection.

If we are serious about seeking God – we shouldn’t be surprised if what we find challenges us, rather than consoles – just as Jesus challenged the temple traders who seemed to have lost sight of what their Temple was really for.

God, whose wisdom and power is revealed through Christ crucified, calls us into the dark places – calls us to notice what is wrong in the world around us – and to use our faith to do something about it.
In the last few days, we’ve heard of some heart-warming acts of kindness – from 4 x 4 drivers getting through urgent supplies and stranded workers; the determination of medical staff walking miles to and from work each day; the Greggs delivery man giving out cakes to motorists stranded on the motorway with him.

It’s that same generosity, that same awareness of other people and of our responsibility to and for each other, that God challenges us to find in more usual circumstances.

Let us pray then, this Lent,
that the vision of Christ crucified might teach us
to see more clearly the needs of the people around us,
and honestly to acknowledge our own needs,
and, in the power of God, to find the resources we need to bring about the transformation that he wills for us all.

newsletter spring 18 v 2

Diary Dates April 2016