Pentecost: Christmas for the Holy Spirit (I)

As I think about this year’s holy day, two things keep coming to mind.  One was a television programme I happened to catch late one Friday night.

There wasn’t much on that I wanted to see, so I started channel hopping, and I ended up on one of the religious channels.  The programme was called “This is Your Day”, and featured a televangelist called Benny Hinn.

    I’m not sure who’s familiar with Benn Hinn, but he’s got quite a following in America, and across the world actually — he claims to have reached over a billion people through his Holy Spirit Miracle Crusades.

    This particular programme was one part sermon and one part healing service, and it was one of those hugely charismatic affairs where Benny got the congregation (or perhaps audience is a better term) jumping out of their seats, weeping and wailing and falling over as they were ‘slain by the Spirit’.

    There were thousands of people, literally thousands, so that the ones at the back had to watch Benny on a TV screen. A bit like I was doing, except they weren’t in their pyjamas, and they didn’t have a cup of tea handy.

I’ll be honest, I was a bit uncomfortable watching the whole thing; and one of the most discomforting things was the supernatural healings. Not the healing itself: I am totally into healing. I know that it can and does happen. What troubled me was the way Benny Hinn went about it.

He has a staff team and they bring people up out of the audience on to the stage; they announce what the person’s affliction is; Benny puts his hand on their head and throws them backwards, no, not throws, hurls, he hurls them backwards.  There are two staff members standing by to catch the person; they do so and then lift them back up so that Benny can hurl them back down again.

    “Praise Jesus”, he says as the staff lay the person on the ground and leaves them there twitching and thrashing like a dying fish.

    The staff will sometimes pick them up again for a final head slap accompanied by “Alleluia!”, “Praise Jesus” or “Shazam!” or whatever.

    And the whole time that this is going on, Benny and his staff are having a conversation about the person, talking about them as if they weren’t there, or as if they were a piece of meat.

    The thing that really jarred was when Benny’s sidekick announces a woman getting up on stage.

    “Benny, this woman says she has been cured of Coeliacs’ Disease.”

And I was like, “What?”

    “Coeliacs’ Disease?” asks Benny.

    “Yes,” says the sidekick, “As you were talking she felt a warm sensation in her stomach and the Coeliacs’ Disease was gone.” (Pause for dramatic effect) “She had been in constant pain for ten years, and the pain is gone.”

    “Is this true?” asks Benny (he’s good at asking questions).

    “Yes,” says the woman and then Bang! He slaps her on the forehead and she goes down like a sack of spuds.

I had two thoughts at this point:

1.       If she had been in constant pain for ten years, this woman hadn’t been following a gluten-free diet.

2.       She said she felt healed while Benny was giving his sermon, so what were they bringing her up on stage for, and what was the slap on the head for?

Let me be clear. I believe in miracles. I believe that God can do anything.  I believe that God can use us to work miracles. But that doesn’t mean that people can do miracles in their own time to their own agenda: it takes the Holy Spirit according to his timescale. 

This Pentecost, I think it's worth remembering who the real power is, and recognising that we are blessed that we can tap into that power, but let's not get carried away. We aren't the source of the power. The I AM is.

Easter Day 2015

I didn't preach for very long today. That’s not because I didn’t have lots to tell the congregation: I’ve got so many stories from my time at Brigham, Clifton, Dean and Mosser, I could've gone on all day, but I chose to wait for another time.

There was so much to take in this morning that if I'd started going on about what life was like in Jerusalem during a Passover weekend in the year thirty something AD, or what the burial practices were during a traditional Sabbath, or any of that, I think there’d be a risk of overkill.

Instead I chose to take a few minutes and think about resurrection: 

I know that most of us know the resurrection story pretty well, we know the characters and the events, we know quite a few of the lines that people speak: Mary and her declaration of “Rabboni!” when she realises it’s Jesus.

But even those of us who know the story, might struggle a bit to understand it, because resurrection isn’t something that happens very often; we don’t have similar life experiences to compare it to.

Then for some of us this story might be quite new, and that’s brilliant, because it should be, because the whole point of the resurrection story is about newness and about change.

[Look at the way the Gospel writer describes Peter and John’s arrival at the tomb, the two different ways that they respond to something strange; something out of the ordinary; something that’s changed.]

There are two things about change that are certain: one is that change is inevitable, it will happen, it is always happening. Day changes into night, which changes into day; seasons change; our tastes change

Who likes the taste of red wine? And did you like the taste when you were nine or ten years old?

  

Whether it takes centuries to see the effects of change (like global warming, or cooling, or whatever) or whether it happens instantly (like the rain shower that comes seconds after you’ve left the washing on the line) change is always happening around us.

The other certainty about change is that it’s irrevocable, once a thing has changed it can’t change back, not to be exactly the same as it was. Day might change to night then back to day, but it doesn’t change back to the same day, it’s new.

You can freeze and defrost an ice cube a hundred times, but every time it changes from solid to liquid it becomes a new ice cube, or a new puddle of water.

After a big fight, a couple can kiss and make up, but things don’t go back to exactly how they were before the argument, because the things that have been said can’t be unsaid, the relationship is slightly different, it’s new.

With the resurrection, we had the ultimate in newness.  People were going to have to look at life in a whole new way, because death didn’t mean the end anymore; and that meant that it wasn’t enough to see yourself right in this world, when there’s an eternity to come.

The main reason that Jesus died was because the religious leaders — the priests — and the political leaders — King Herod and Pontius Pilate — didn’t want change.  But they’d heard Jesus talk, and they’d heard the stories about him.  He wanted to change stuff.  He wanted people to be nice to people they hated.  He wanted people to forget about the hundreds and hundreds of rules that governed life, and to have just two rules: love God, love people.  He said that people could do stuff on the Sabbath, actually get up and walk about, help each other out.

The leaders would rather kill Jesus than let him change the way things had been for hundreds of years. So they nailed him to a cross, to make sure everything stayed the same.

But change is inevitable, and nothing, nothing that they could do would stop God’s plan for change.

And change is irrevocable, we can never go back to the way things were before the resurrection.

And there was so much newness in this service today that the place was practically buzzing.  It’s so exciting! We’ve got our new paschal candle, lit from the fire atop Shore Hill, a fire that saw the new dawn on this Easter Day. We have a new member of our church family who was welcomed in as Steve baptised Dylan. I’m back in my home church, and it’s a new me, shaped by four months of experiences in different churches.

I want us to remember today what the resurrection really means.

And Stuart Townend and Keith Getty summed it up for us in their resurrection hymn:

Death is dead

Love has won

Christ has conquered

and what that means is that our lives are changed, every day, for the better. It means that we are to step out into the world as bigger, better and stronger people for God.  We are people without fear of death being the end. We are God’s chosen people. We are Sonrise people.

Lent 2015

9 In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. ¹⁰And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.¹¹And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’

12 And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. ¹³He was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.

14 Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, ¹⁵and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’ 

[Mark 1.9-15] 

It’s the fifth day of Lent, a perfect time to be nosy. So here’s a quick straw poll for the brave.

Who here has given something up for Lent?

And who has slipped up already?

I have, I do almost every year. Now I know that that might look really bad, only five days in and I’ve messed up already. 

In a way I empathise with Peter, James and John when Jesus says to them at Gethsemane “You couldn’t stay awake for an hour?”

It does look bad, especially when you hold me up against Jesus and his time of testing.

He’s just had his baptism and the Spirit immediately drives him into the desert, there’s no baptism tea, no celebration in the pub. It’s straight up and straight out, and then he spends forty days in the wilderness.

Now I’ve not spent a lot of time in wildernesses, but I know they don’t have much in the way of luxuries.  Food is going to be berries and insects, and shelter is probably under a tree or amongst some rocks, at best it’s going to be a cave.

Sunbeams scorching all the day,

Chilly dewdrops nightly shed,

Prowling beasts about thy way,

Stones thy pillow, earth thy bed.

It’s cold, bleak, uncomfortable, and it’s for forty days.

And then there’s me, who gave up chocolate one Lent and on about day three ate a chocolate Hob Nob, or the year I gave up sugar in my tea but accidently sweetened it on day four, or last year, when I tried a juice fast. But that’s another story.

And even when I get it right, I only have to wait until day five and I get a day off, because I don’t fast on a holy day.

[That did for me the year I gave up cigarettes for Lent.  I was doing okay, but I was hanging on until the Sunday, and then I had about twenty and felt physically sick.]

This is all my way of saying that I’m no shining example when it comes to Lent, but then, are any of us when we compare ourselves to Jesus, to God in the flesh?

No, we aren’t. We’re actually failures. At pretty much everything we do. We’re rubbish.

I should say: please don’t take offence at this.

But we really are pathetic.

So what’s the point of Lent, if it’s not to go without and show our commitment to the faith? Why bother doing it if we can’t get to day forty and say, “hey, I went without food and water this year, so I’m automatically in Heaven’s penthouse suite”?

As I’m sure most of you know, I’m training to be a reader and I’m studying a lot as part of the course. So, I’ve come across this great debate about justification.  Which is: are we justified by works, or by faith alone?

Now I’ll be honest, I don’t think there’s much of a debate here. I reckon anyone who reckons we’re made right with God by what we do is a little bit cracked.

God asking us to justify ourselves by our actions is a bit like me expecting my seven year-old daughter Faith to do the housework.

Yes I encourage her to take part, but the job takes twice as long and I often have to go back and do bits of it again to bring it up to scratch.

So why bother? Why don’t I plonk her in front of the TV and do the job myself, faster and more efficiently?  Parents, grandparents, aunties and uncles, you know the answer: it’s because I love her; it’s because I enjoy her company; because even if it takes me longer to get the washing up done, and secretly putting some things back in the washing up bowl, seeing her having a good time with the bubbles is worth every extra minute.

She thinks she’s helping me.

But she is making the job more enjoyable.

The time spent doing the housework with her passes quicker than doing it myself, because it’s fun.

So, let’s go back to the question: what’s the point of Lent?

Lent is about self-denial, it is about going without things, but it’s not about scoring points, or earning anything. Nothing we do can possibly pay back God for everything he’s already done for us.

He came to earth as a human being, he lived among us (in a time before central heating, and the minimum wage, and Wi-Fi), and he died a horrible death.  Giving up chocolate isn’t going to make up for that.

But it doesn’t have to. That’s not why we do it.

It’s about relationships.  Giving something up is a good way to shake us out of complacency and thinking that we’ve got it cracked.  It’s a way to get us to refocus our attention.  It helps us appreciate the joy of Easter all the more.

Lent is for us.

Some of you be like wha?

What did Jesus say in Matthew 6?

 ‘And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.’

Now I ask you, did Jesus ever tell people to lie?

No? Then he wasn’t say pretend to be suffering.  He was saying don’t pretend that you are suffering.

Lent isn’t about making yourself miserable, if that’s all you do then you’re missing the point.  Lent is about coming closer to God.

I know we’re already five days in, but I would like to make a suggestion, call it a plea if you will. Whether you’ve given things up this Lent or not, as of tonight, or tomorrow morning, can you make a promise to draw closer to God for the rest of this season?

That might mean read the Bible more if you read it daily, can you do it twice daily? Or it might mean to pray more fully — twenty minutes instead of ten.

I don’t know what your relationship with God is like, so I can’t tell you what you should do.

But I know that God loves you even more than I love my kids, and I know that he would love for you to want to spend more time with him.  

Food banks

I'm not one for gambling really. Never seen the fun in it.

In our office though there are a few opportunities to have a 'little flutter', including the 'scratch off syndicate': about twelve staff members pay a pound, buy scratch cards with the money and split any winnings.

They decided last week that if they had a medium sized win they'd split the profits between themselves and the local food bank.

They ended up with £10 spend on food items, and I volunteered to help choose what to buy. Partly because I thought that was the right thing to do, but mostly because I had nagged them into thinking about people less fortunate than themselves, which led to a long debate about the fairness of society (all of which is too boring to go into now).

So, anyway, we chose Aldi as the store to spend the money in, because it's pretty inexpensive so obviously the cash goes further. Or does it?

You see, it seems like a simple job: spend a tenner on food; put it in the foodbank; job done.

But it's not that simple.

First of all you have to think about what people need.  This bit is helped along by the foodbank giving a list of items that they're running low on.  This week it was sponge puddings and instant mash.

But then there's the quantity vs quality debate.  You can buy quite a lot of budget instant mash with £10.  But I wouldn't give it to my dog -- seriously, the stuff looks like it has the nutritional value of wallpaper paste, and that's not good for anyone, much.

We bought the instant mash on this occasion because it was specifically requested by the foodbank, but we decided never to buy it again, instead we'd go with something better.  Even tinned potatoes would be preferable to the stuff we bought.

And the next factor to be considered is ethics: take tuna as an example.

Should you buy cheap tuna, knowing that it is probably net-caught, which is a practice that endangers other aquatic life, including the dolphin?

Source: Observer.com

Or, should you spend that little bit extra on pole-caught tuna, which is considerably more environmentally friendly?

Well, we agonised about it in the shop.  (Seriously, we discussed it for about 10 minutes). Finally we went with the ethical option, knowing that people eating it couldn't care less because they're hungry, but also knowing that we could care less.

The conclusion for me was a long time coming, but actually quite simple: people are hungry and will eat whatever they're given; the cheap stuff is nutritionally substandard; the expensive stuff is preferable; therefore, if you're gonna add to foodbank stocks, spend more money.

In the end, a tenner wasn't enough to buy what we set out to get, and to meet our own standards, so we spent about £12, and that felt right.

In future, when I buy anything for the foodbank, I'll be setting myself some standards:

1. There has to be enough stuff to feed a family of four for a full meal
2. If I wouldn't buy it for my own family, then I won't buy it for someone else's
3. If I think it might hurt our world to buy something, then I won't do it.

Anything else is like a grasshopper: it's just not cricket.

Seek and find

43 The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, ‘Follow me.’ ⁴⁴Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. ⁴⁵Philip found Nathanael and said to him, ‘We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.’ ⁴⁶Nathanael said to him, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’ ⁴⁷When Jesus saw Nathanael coming towards him, he said of him, ‘Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!’ ⁴⁸Nathanael asked him, ‘Where did you come to know me?’ Jesus answered, ‘I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.’ ⁴⁹Nathanael replied, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’ ⁵⁰Jesus answered, ‘Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.’ ⁵¹And he said to him, ‘Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’

[John 1.43-51]

Through the Bible, Jesus tells us “ask and you shall be given, seek and you shall find.” [Mt 7.7]

  That’s a great promise, but in reality it’s not that simple.  I’ll give you an example: I’ve been asking for a big lottery win for about twelve months now, and still nothing.

  I want to look a bit closer at the ‘seek and you shall find’ bit today.

  I suspect Jesus wasn’t thinking about my children when he said this.

  Things go missing in our house all the time: shoes, school uniforms, TV remotes, hair brushes, coats and bags; and the absence is usually only noticed about five or ten minutes before we’re all due to leave the house.

  At this point chaos ensues: Charlie and I take off in different directions, we rummage, we ratch, neat piles of clothes are hurled across the sofa as we try and find the elusive item.

  The twins, who are teenagers, do there bit and glance in the general direction of their bedrooms, and Faith, who’s seven invariably plonks herself back on the sofa figuring she’s got another ten minutes to play with her dolls.

  Now, we’ve tried various techniques for tackling this problem of lost things and time lost searching.  I’ve reminded the kids of the wisdom of “a place for everything and everything in its place”, and for a time that works, until someone’s in a rush and doesn’t put the hairbrush back where it should be, then when they next need it they trash the house to find it and nothing’s in its place anymore.

  Charlie tried bribery — offering a pound to whoever found the missing item.  That worked well, sort of, for a bit.  Actually, I made thirty pounds and Charlie stopped offering.

  This got me thinking though: why can I find these things, yet the kids can’t; and I came up with three reasons.

1) It’s not in the place they’re looking.  Obviously if you’re looking in the wrong place you’ll never find the thing you’re looking for.  I once spent an hour looking for a coat before Harry remembered that he’d left it in his locker at school.

2) They don’t try hard enough. I’ve been blessed with the ability to move things when looking; I’m able to actually pick up a cushion and look behind it, Heaven forbid my children should ever move anything in the house.

3) They’re not sure what they’re looking for. This usually happens when they’re sent on an errand, Charlie might ask one of them to get her slippers, and they won’t find them because they were looking for the pink slippers she threw out six months ago, and the new slippers are white; or they might be sent for a cardigan, and mistake it for a jumper and not fetch it.

  So those are the three reasons: not there; not trying and not sure.

Now how does this apply to today’s reading? Well if you look at it, there’s a lot of seeking and finding going on: Jesus finds Philip; Philip then finds Nathanael and invites him to come and see; Jesus sees Nathanael, and tells him he saw him under a fig tree; then Nathanael sees Jesus for who he is, the Son of God, the King of Israel.

There was even more seeking going on in the bigger picture: the Jewish people had been seeking this Son of God for hundreds of years.  And I wondered,  why was it that Nathanael, a Jewish person, didn’t recognise Jesus, the Son of God, right away, is it the same as my kids not finding their P.E. kit?

So let’s look at the three reasons:

Not there: was Jesus not in the place Nathanael was looking for him?  To begin with, maybe not, but Nathanael doesn’t recognise him even when seeing him face to face, even after being told by Philip that this guy is .the one’.  So it’s not that.

Not trying: was Nathanael not trying hard enough? Well, Jesus calls him a ‘true Israelite’, which I suppose could be an ironic term, but we’re told that Nathanael was sitting under a fig tree, which is traditionally where Jewish Rabbis would teach the people about God and the Messiah.  So it’s probably not that either.

Not sure: was Nathanael unsure because Jesus didn’t look like the Messiah? Well, what does a Messiah look like? A lot of Jewish people at that time were expecting a mighty warrior who would wipe out the Romans, or someone like Moses who could lead the people to freedom.  Jesus was a wandering preacher from Nazareth — a town with a pretty poor reputation — so for Nathanael at least he doesn’t fit the description.  Not until he demonstrates his power by seeing something he shouldn’t have been able to see.

What can we learn from this story?

A couple of things really: firstly we shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.

Secondly, Nathanael was a ‘good’ Jew, who was looking for Jesus and trying hard, but not seeing because he didn’t know what he was supposed to be looking for.

We can be good Christians, and we can still be wrong about our expectations of who Jesus was and is, and if we’re wrong and we go telling other people wrong things we can drive people away from Jesus instead of to him.

There’s only one place to get the right picture of who Jesus was — the Bible, particularly the Gospels.  If anyone wants to get to know him better, that’s the place to start.

And remember, seek and you shall find. 

Christingle 2014

Well, this year I went to another Christingle service on 7^th December.  The 7^th! That felt so strange, because for me Advent is all about preparing ourselves and the Christingle service means that Advent is over and Christmas has started.  It means that the presents are bought, most of them are wrapped, the advent calendars are all but finished, the food is ready to prepare for Christmas dinner, and the excitement level has been turned up to 11.

And it means that the message of Jesus is here amongst us.  We’ll talk a bit about the Christingle later, but for now let’s talk about the message.

The reading we’ve just heard is all about the Angels announcing Jesus’s birth to some shepherds, and it’s very important that it was shepherds. Now I wanted to take you through the reading step by step, but I can’t really do that without having some shepherds. If only we had some shepherds.

Anyway, there were some shepherds living out in the fields not, as we have all probably sung, washing their socks but watching their flocks.  That means that they were looking after sheep, at night. They probably should have washed their socks because hanging out with sheep is a bit of a sweaty and smelly job. They’d be a pretty grubby, grotty lot.

And it was probably quite cold out in the fields, maybe even raining, so the shepherds would’ve been chilly, possibly shivering…

[…]

When suddenly an angel appeared and scared the shepherds…

[…]

Now it’s not every day you see and angel so you can imagine the surprise and fear they felt. The angel said, don’t be afraid, I’ve got good news for you, and not just for you, but for everyone.  In Bethlehem, the town where King David was from you’ll find a baby wrapped in cloth in a manger. This baby has been chosen by God to come and free everyone from fear and captivity.

Next thing there were huge numbers of angels in the sky singing about God’s greatness. It would have been more spectacular than the X Factor and Strictly finals combined.

The angels then went up to heaven and the shepherds set off to find this chosen one, the Messiah.

But the angel had said where to go exactly and Bethlehem was pretty full that night. So the shepherds put their heads together and had a think.

[…]

They knew that the baby would be in a manger — that’s a feeding trough for animals, a bit like a big dog bowl.  So this baby was probably in a place where they kept animals — a barn or a cave (they didn’t really do stables in those days) — but which barn, which cave?  So the shepherds would no doubt have to go knocking on doors, asking if anyone had a baby in their barn.

[…]

Probably leaving someone behind to look after the sheep.

[…]

When they finally found Jesus and Mary and Joseph they would’ve bowed down to worship the Messiah,

[…]

And then go and tell everybody what they’d seen, probably knocking on doors on the way back to their sheep, all the time saying how amazing God was.

[…]

So why shepherds, why not the priests of that time, why not the writers, or the silversmiths?

I think God chose the shepherds for two reasons: firstly because their job was to look after sheep, and that’s important.  David was a shepherd before he became king, (probably in the same area where these shepherds had been huddled together for warmth), before that Moses was a shepherd before leading the Israelites to the promised land. Some of the prophets were shepherds too. Later, Jesus would call himself the ‘good shepherd’, meaning that he looked after the people.

The thing about shepherds is that they learned to care, and if they could care about sheep, they could care about people.

The other thing about shepherds is that they were pretty poor.  They hired themselves out and were treated like peasants: so even though they had a very important job to do, people saw them as being pretty grotty types.

But when Jesus grew up, he used to hang out with all the grotty types, thieves, beggars, lepers.  If he were to come to earth today who do you think he would spend his time with?  People on benefits, disabled people, people in trouble with the police, people who take drugs and drink too much, that’s who.

God picked the shepherds as the first ones to see Jesus because he wanted us to know that he loves everyone, it doesn’t matter what job you do (or don’t do), it doesn’t matter how good or bad, how clever or stupid, how busy or lazy you are. He loves everyone.  That means you and you and you and you….

So when we get our Christingles in a bit I want us to remember that the things represent are there for every single one of us. Even the smelly shepherds.

Harvest

13 Someone in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.’ ¹⁴But he said to him, ‘Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?’ ¹⁵And he said to them, ‘Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.’ ¹⁶Then he told them a parable: ‘The land of a rich man produced abundantly. ¹⁷And he thought to himself, “What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?” ¹⁸Then he said, “I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. ¹⁹And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.” ²⁰But God said to him, “You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?” ²¹So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich towards God.’

[Luke 12.13-21]

It’s harvest festival. When I was a kid that meant going to church with whatever we found at the back of the cupboard that we were unlikely to eat, and I know we weren’t alone in that.  The altar was frequently strewn with tins of Marrowfat peas, pink salmon, sweetcorn, fruit cocktail, and Tiptop.

I always felt sorry for the poor buggers that were gonna get the fruit cocktail, it always had those weird white grapes in it. I swear we only ever bought tins of that stuff in for harvest festivals or carnival day.

The Jewish people had several, and there were three major ones: the Feast of First Fruits, which was the start of the barley harvest; the Festival of Weeks (Pentecost) celebrated fifty days after the Passover, and recognised the start of the wheat harvest; and the Festival of Tabernacles, or Booths, when they spent a week living in tents at the very end of the harvest period.

In preparation for this service, in Sunday School last week we made barns, well silos. Well actually we coloured in some toilet roll tubes and stuck a cardboard cone on the top, but you get the idea.

In the reading Jesus tells the story of a rich man who doesn’t do the right thing with his wealth, he tries to store it all away. So our activity was to fill our silos with things that really do matter.

First we asked the question: what’s important to you, and the answers were: Mum, friends, family, happiness, class at school, after school clubs, job, blanket, and Doctor Who. 

Would anybody like to add to the list?

Then we asked which ones will last forever, let’s go through the list…

Happiness lasts forever, and relationships (it might feel like Dr Who does, but I think that’s unlikely).

What should the rich man have done, do we think?

He could’ve used the extras that he had to help people less fortunate than himself.  He certainly shouldn’t have stored it all away, because I don’t know much about farming, but I’m pretty sure that things that grow from the land start to rot after a while, so even if he had more than he needed, it wouldn’t keep him, it wouldn’t last.

So our task last week was to fill our silos with treasures that would last: we drew pictures of the things that mattered most to us and the idea was to keep them inside the silo, instead of material things.

The thing I found most interesting was Faith’s reaction… Can you remember what she did?

Faith drew a picture of herself with her mum and Mayson.  But when it came time to put it in the silo, she had a complete meltdown, she wanted to keep that picture for ever.  I’m not sure where that picture ended up, but I know that by the time we got home last Sunday, it wasn’t the most important thing in the world anymore.

I know, you’re all thinking, oh how cute, she’s six.

The truth is, it doesn’t matter if you’re six or eighty-six, we all get our priorities wrong. Whether it’s the new car, or the replacement slippers, the set of pans, the cuddly toy, whatever.  We think that if only we had… then things would be better. We give material things far more value than they actually deserve, and she’s six so at least she has an excuse.

The rich man in this parable was exactly the same. Instead of just enjoying what he had, thanking God for the abundant harvest, and sharing the produce, he decided “if only I had a bigger silo (a bigger toilet roll tube with a cardboard cone on it), then I would be happy. Wrong.

The idea of harvest festival is that we give a sample of our harvest as thanksgiving for all that God does for us. The rich man should have given his surplus to help people around him and to further God’s work on earth. 

Meanwhile we should give enough so that we notice the difference to our lives.  At the very least we should give more than fruit cocktail and Tiptop.