When I was young, every Wednesday was pocket money
night. My Dad would come home from work and he would give me and my sisters 6d
each. That was in old money by the way… (showing my age now). For the benefit
of you little ‘Olivers’, that’s two and a half pence in today’s money and
according to an online inflation calculator, it is the equivalent of 51 pence
today.
Anyway, every Wednesday armed with our sixpence, we
would dash to ‘Stannards’, the paper shop in the next street, to spend our dosh.
Every week we would spend absolutely ages in the shop, agonising about how to
spend our sixpence. They had every sweet and chocolate you can imagine. We were
absolutely spoilt for choice.
I felt just like that when I read the readings for
today:
Noah’s Ark - the beginnings of the early Christian
Church - Jesus, the good shepherd and of course - the first of Jesus’ ‘I am’
sayings. AND on top of that it is Vocation Sunday.
Oh …decisions, decisions!
Choice is something that
most of us exercise automatically every single day! We decide what time to get out of bed, what to
wear, what to eat, what we do in our spare time …and so on. But in recent weeks, things have changed. We are
no longer allowed to go where we want. We can’t get together with our families
and our friends. We can’t gather as a crowd and we can’t even enter a shop without
being told when it is safe to do so.
What hasn’t changed is
God. He is the one constant in the strange world that we find ourselves in.
The three readings we’ve
heard this morning tell us about fresh starts. About points in time when decisions
made meant a change of direction that changed the world as they knew it.
Now, you may be sitting
there wondering how we can possibly be thinking about life-changing things when
we are living through such difficult times… most of us are confined to our
homes and we can’t see beyond today, never mind tomorrow. This whole Covid
thing is too big for us to deal with on our own. And that’s the thing, we are
not in this alone. God is with us. Sometimes we have to trust God to see us
through because we are living through a time in history that is going to change
things whether we like it or not.
Jesus, the good shepherd
is here for us. Now…I’m a Leeds lass, and I don’t profess to know much about sheep
or shepherds… however, we are told that the shepherd calls his own sheep by
name and leads them out. Jesus knows each one of us by name. He knows us inside
out. He knows our likes and dislikes, our strengths and our weaknesses …our
hopes and our dreams. He knows what our worries are and the things that
we avoid. He even knows the real us, the one that we hide from others and
sometimes even from ourselves. Yes, Jesus
sees it all…and yet, he loves us despite all of that …or even because of it.
Jesus said, “I am the
gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find
pasture’.
So, the big question… do we
know his voice? And if so, are we prepared to follow him?
Are you? I don’t mean just to pay lip service to God but
to truly turn to Christ and follow where he is leading us. It’s not an easy
decision because it does mean change.
We’ve heard the account from
the second chapter of Acts. About how in the infancy of the Christian church, “awe
came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the
apostles. And “day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being
saved”. Those early Christians knew all about change.
At the moment, most
people are longing to get back to normality. And slowly - probably very slowly,
a lot of what we consider normal will return. But a lot won’t and I think
church as we knew it will quite
naturally evolve into something new. This isn’t a time to mourn the loss of a bygone age but
it’s a time to embrace all that God is showing us during these times. He is
leading us to discover new, exciting ways of being church, to worship him in a
way that feeds us and equips us to grow his kingdom. But to do that, we need to
be obedient to his call. To
put our trust in him to see us through.
We only have to look at
the amazing story of Noah to see what true faith in God looks like. Thankfully we are not
being called to build an ark…! But we are called to listen to his voice
amongst all the other
voices that influence our behaviours and decisions. We do have choices, regardless
of isolation, of queues outside shops, of social and physical distancing.
Listening to the voice of
Jesus, the good shepherd and answering his call is the biggest decision
we will ever make because there is a lot more at stake …if we don’t go through
that gate. Living in this covid age where within just a few weeks 250,000
people around the world have died, there is an urgency about saying yes to God
and doing our bit to help others to say yes to him too…
…the decision is ours.
Amen
"He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.
When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them,
and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.
and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.
John 10: 3-4
Thank you, Rev Julie, for your inspiring message. I saw a cartoon which had 'BC' as a caption about things we used to do - 'Before Coronavirus', or Before Covid-19'. Then a 'now' image. It struck me, and re-enforced by what you said, that the REAL 'B.C.', Before Christ, and where we are after Jesus' birth, that great watershed in time, makes everything new, and that perhaps God is preparing us for the new thing He will do now.
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