2 minute read
Clergy Letter
Autumn can often seem to be a wistful season. The leaves change colour, the weather turns, the days shorten and nights begin to draw in earlier. Usually, autumn is the time of year when the vibrancy of life suddenly appears to be a little muted.
But this is a funny old year and the usual patterns seem disrupted. It is hard to write in advance with any certainty about what October might be like, but as nature changes before our very eyes in a familiar way, perhaps this is a good time to reflect on the changeable nature of life.
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This year has called into question many of our own certainties, and with this there is an opportunity to empathise with the plight of countless millions around the world who, every year, find their ways of life changed beyond all recognition. The sight of refugees on our screens and in our papers is so commonplace in the 21st Century that we easily lose sight of the human reality that these are people like us. Beyond the photos are people from all walks of life: doctors, teachers, artists, lawyers, engineers, musicians – any occupation you are to name, any walk of life which you yourself pursue. Many of them led lives of relative comfort before war, disaster, genocide, famine or political ineptitude swept through their lives. We should be in no doubt, especially after the months we have experienced lately, that famine, war and pestilence are human universals. In fact, the Bible is full of such tales of these three kinds of disaster (often accompanying one another in sequence!) sweeping through the ancient world.
I don’t say this to distress, disturb or depress, because the Bible also offers hope in these repeated stories. These disasters are awful elements of human history, but amid all of that there are other strands of humanity’s tale. In the Bible we learn that we are not alone and adrift. Time and again, God reaches out in love to offer justice and hope to those whose lives have been turned upside down, or who find themselves on the sharp end of history. In Jesus we see that God is not aloof from the tide of human affairs. Jesus came not as someone of political power or wealth. Instead, when God sent his only Son, Jesus, he sent him to a politically irrelevant backwater town of an occupied territory of a military superpower, as a carpenter who got his hands dirty in the very ordinary business of life and who chose to hang out with people of no particular significance to the world around them. Within forty years of his death and resurrection, many of his followers had dispersed around the eastern Mediterranean and beyond – some of them, indeed, as refugees fleeing Roman persecution - taking that message of hope with them and enriching the world as they spread the good news.
Wherever we find ourselves and our lives this autumn, remember that in seasons of change, even dramatic ones, God is with us, and in Jesus God blesses us so that we might go and bless others.
Bless you all.
