Minister’s Message – May 22, 2022

As a boy growing up in the 1950s and early 60s I was expected to wear shorts, except in the most extreme of wintry conditions. Indeed my school – I’m talking about High School here – had a rule which was rigorously enforced: you had to be a certain age (perhaps 12 or 13) or have reached a certain height (probably 5 feet) before you were allowed to don longer trousers. There were several disadvantages in wearing shorts, quite apart from the embarrassment of exposing one’s knobbly knees. One was simply feeling a bit chilly on cooler days; another was getting onstant cuts and scrapes on one’s legs which never seemed to be in quite the right place as one grew taller.

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Minister’s Message – May 15, 2022

I’m sure we’ve all come across these words:

“The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth:
one is nearer God’s heart in a garden
than anywhere else on earth”.

They’re part of a longer poem by Dorothy Frances Gurney who also wrote the hymn “O perfect Love, all human thought transcending” which is often sung at weddings. As far as I can make out Dorothy lived her entire life in London, born in the City and ending up in Notting Hill; although she was a Vicar’s wife and possibly lived in a spacious house, I’d like to think that she regarded gardens as a welcome refuge and escape from the noise, smoke and filth of city life.

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Minister’s Message – May 8, 2022

Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world;
red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight:
Jesus loves the little children of the world!

Those words, by the American evangelist Clarence Herbert Woolston, were first published in 1913. Woolston, the Minister of Philadelphia’s East Baptist Church was an interesting character: his speciality was using what he called “Object Lessons with Magical and Mechanical Effects” to present the Gospel and he claimed to have “addressed more than a million children” during his lifetime. His obituary noted that he was known as “a pastor-magician who used sleight-of-hand to demonstrate features of his sermons with which he wished particularly to impress his congregation”. I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I’ll tell you now that you won’t be seeing any of that in my message today!

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Minister’s Message – May 1, 2022

Today’s three readings show us a number of people who encounter or see Jesus in radically different ways. First we have seven disciples, who’ve been fishing all night without success, unexpectedly noticing Jesus on the lake shore. He shouts to them because he can see a shoal of fish which, in the dawn light, is invisible to the fishermen. On his instructions they put out their nets one final time and haul in a bumper catch. They beach their boat and Jesus cooks breakfast. Even though this is one of Jesus’ somewhat mysterious resurrection appearances, the whole scene seems commonplace, even domestic.

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Minister’s Message – April 24, 2022

The late lamented “Room 101” was a comedy programme on which people could talk about the things that made them angry. Well, I don’t know about you, but over the last couple of years I’ve definitely become more and more angry about more and more things. Some of those things are trivial and make me sound obnoxiously self-righteous: I get annoyed by people who get on the bus and only then start rummaging around for their purse and credit card; I get angry (though I never say anything) with people who swim too fast in the slow lane of the pool; and I get really cross every time I see the long line of cars – all with their engines running – queueing at the McDonald’s Drive Thru.

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Minister’s Message – Good Friday, April 15, 2022

The people who run the TV networks don’t want us to be adversely affected or upset by their programmes. So they quite often give us warnings to make sure that this doesn’t happen – in fact they may be required to do so by the television regulator. The warning we hear most often comes on the news, and is of course designed to protect people with epilepsy: “This report contains flashing images”. But there are many others: a murder mystery may be preceded by the warning that “it contains scenes of violence from the start”, a drama may come with the comment that it “contains strong language”, we can be told that characters in a historical documentary display “historic attitudes which some viewers may find offensive”. My favourite advisory though is the one that’s given before Channel 5 programmes about a hospital Accident and Emergency Department: “contains scenes of trauma and surgery”. To be honest, I’d feel a bit short-changed if it didn’t!

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Minister’s Message – April 10, 2022

You probably all know the story of Jones the Welsh spy. At the height of the Cold War a Russian secret agent is sent (I can’t think why) to a village in the Rhondda with instructions to make contact with a fellow-traveller called Mr Jones. The Russian has never met Mr Jones, he hasn’t been told his first name, and has no idea what he looks like. All he has is a coded message: “The tulips are blooming well today”.

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Minister’s Message – April 3, 2022

Shumukh is the world’s most expensive perfume. It’s made from “a stunning combination of ingredients” including Indian agarwood, sandalwood, musk, Turkish rose and others that haven’t been made public. The packaging features a leather display case nearly 2 metres high, while the bottle itself – all three litres of it! – is decorated with symbols of the United Arab Emirates, who commissioned it. So it has three gold Arab horses and three silver clamshells on its base, each (naturally) containing a real pearl. Elsewhere there are three roses in pink gold and diamond dust, and a mini globe with gold continents; while three marble pillars support a golden dome topped with a diamond-studded gold falcon. Altogether the bottle is studded with 3,571 jewels: diamonds, gold, silver, pearls and topazes. I have to say that you can’t buy Shumukh at your local Boots or even on London’s Bond Street: there’s only one bottle in existence and it’s valued at well over a million pounds – which I think is pretty good value for what you get. I wonder if they throw in free gift-wrapping and delivery?

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Minister’s Message – March 20, 2022

“Early one autumn evening the cheap-jack arrived with his cartload of crockery and tinware, and set out his stock on the grass by the roadside before a back-cloth painted with icebergs and penguins and polar bears. Soon he had his naphtha lamps flaring and was clashing his basins together like bells and calling: “Come buy! Come buy!”

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