Thought for the week by Rev’d Vicci

Friends

I always feel a sense of anticipation when the 1st of September comes around, and it was odd this year for that significant date, The Methodist New Year, to fall on my day off.  Discussing it with old school friends, we agreed that even if not in education or the church, there is an unshakeable sense of new beginnings after all those years at school, college and university.  I know that we are all praying for those who started or are about to start a new academic year this week. 

Our new Chair of District, Conrad Hicks, who many of you will know as our previous superintendent’s husband, reflected on it himself, and decided that this week he would change his day off.  Do please pray for him as he takes on this new role. 

New beginnings can be a really positive thing.  They let us hit the re-set button, and I will not be the only one who starts September with a clean house and an organised desk, even if I know that by mid-October at the very latest, chaos will once again reign! 

God, faced with the lack of response from humanity, and our constant missing of the mark, hit the reset button with the great flood.  It was more than turning the world on and off again, it was a “return to factory settings” and he promised not to do it ever again.  What then to do, when successions of priests, judges, prophets and kings failed to bring the people into right relationship with him?  As in the parable of the wicked tenants, God’s response is to send his son, who they kill, intending to take the inheritance for themselves.  Yet in a final and prophesied, but still unlooked for, response God raises his Son from the dead and, having torn the temple curtain in two, offers relationship to all people.  This extraordinary act of love in response to hate and fear allows every one of us to hit the reset button in our own lives, to become a new person, renewed in the Spirit and changed towards that being that God created us to be.  Yet our faith is not entirely a personal one, and God’s love is for the world, a community love, drawing us together to understand him through conversation, prayer, service and worship.  Happy new beginnings.

God bless, Vicci