Minister’s Message – Page 8 – Christchurch United Church

Minister’s Message – May 14, 2023

May 14, 2023

We’d probably agree that truth is at something of a premium today. When the fact-checking team of the “Washington Post” started to catalogue President Trump’s false or misleading claims, they recorded 492 in the first 100 days of his presidency alone. And that was just for starters: by the end of his term, they reckon that he had uttered 30,573 untruths, which comes to about 21 erroneous claims – or should we say “lies”? – per day. What’s especially striking is how this “tsunami of untruths” kept rising the longer he served; it increased steadily from about six per day in his first year as president, to 39 per day in his final year. And, of course, we all know how he attacked incontrovertible, proveable facts which he didn’t want to hear as “fake news”; I’m troubled by the fact that so many people, including Christian pastors, believed (and still believe) that he is a truthful man.

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Minister’s Message – May 7, 2023

May 8, 2023

One of the trials of modern life is being asked to fill in Evaluation or Feedback forms. You go to the theatre, you buy plants at the garden centre, you catch the train to London or a flight to Spain, you ring the company that insures your car, you get someone in to service the washing machine … and, within minutes, an email cheerfully headed “How did we do?” plonks into your Inbox with the assurance that your view is important. Your heart sinks as you read the questions whose responses, you are promised, “will help us to improve our services” – you cynically wonder if they’re more about telling the company that they can now bombard you with advertising? Perhaps we should start asking all of you to fill in a questionnaire after every Sunday’s service – although I’d dread reading the answers on Monday morning!

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Minister’s Message – April 30, 2023

May 3, 2023

I did old-fashioned maths at school, the kind that Rishi Sunak wants us all to learn, with arithmetic, algebra, geometry – and calculus in the Sixth Form. But, as a spot of light relief in the last week of summer term in the year before my A-levels, our teacher introduced us to “new maths” – which, just a few years later, was being taught to young children in primary schools. At the heart of what we learned that week was “set theory”, a way of doing maths by grouping or placing objects together. I won’t go into this any detail, but simply say that we were shown how it could be illustrated with Venn Diagrams: you’ll know what they are even if you don’t know what they’re called. For each circle represents a set of objects. If you have more than one set, they may be quite distinct or overlap: a bigger set may even envelop a smaller one.

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Minister’s Message – April 23, 2023

April 27, 2023

There are many stories told about the famous orchestral conductor Sir Thomas Beecham. Here’s one of them. “In the foyer of a Manchester hotel, Beecham saw a distinguished-looking woman who he thought he knew, though he could not remember the name. He paused to talk to her and as he did so vaguely recollected that she had a brother. Hoping for a clue, he asked how her brother was and whether he was still in the same line of work. ‘He’s very well’, the lady answered, ‘and he’s still king’.”

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Minister’s Message – April 16, 2023

April 17, 2023

Two major legal investigations made the news just before Easter: one which we’d all known about for months, the indictment of Donald Trump; and one which caught us totally “on the hop”: the arrest of Peter Murrell, the Scottish National Party’s chief executive. Murrell was of course released the same day without any charge being made against him (although investigations continue); Trump will definitely come to court. He definitely won’t come quietly!

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Minister’s Message – Palm Sunday, April 2, 2023

April 3, 2023

In just five weeks’ time, the eyes of the nation (and, indeed, of the world) will be focussed on the coronation of King Charles III. We’ve been promised a “slimmed down” and “modernised” ceremony in comparison to his mother’s back in 1953 – whether the weather will be better is anyone’s guess! Nevertheless it’s sure to be a grand occasion, full of pomp and ceremony and doubtless with cheering and flag-waving crowds lining the route to and from Westminster Abbey.

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Minister’s Message – March 19, 2023

March 20, 2023

There are many characters in the Bible who just make a brief “cameo” appearance: they enter a story, do their “thing”, and are never heard of again. So, for instance, we have the boy who brought the loaves and fishes to Jesus at the feeding of the 5000 – we know nothing about him but there wouldn’t have been a miracle if he hadn’t come forward! Almost at the other end of the Bible we have the mysterious Melchizedek who blesses Abram with bread and wine after a victory.

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Minister’s Message – February 26, 2023

February 28, 2023

On the evening of February 5^th 2020 the cruise liner “Diamond Princess” dropped anchor outside the port of Yokohama in Japan. There were 3,700 passengers and crew aboard the ship but no-one was allowed to leave. That was because of one elderly Chinese passenger: he had joined the cruise on January 25^th and left at Hong Kong with a cough. Now news came back that the gentleman had tested positive for the Covid-Sars-19 virus. The Japanese authorities were worried and, following World Health Organisation protocols, placed the ship under quarantine for 14 days. But in the intervening period the ship had docked in a number of places and the usual onboard social life had continued without restrictions.

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Minister’s Message – February 19, 2023

February 21, 2023

The moment in “The Wizard of Oz” when Dorothy steps out of her cabin into Oz must be one of the most memorable sequences in movie history – and it must have been very difficult to achieve with the technical resources available at the time. What, of course, really “makes” it is the transition from the dreary sepia of Kansas to the glorious Technicolor of Oz – no wonder Dorothy was filled with wonder and amazement. I’m sure that audiences were, too!

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Minister’s Message – February 12, 2023

February 15, 2023

I wonder if you’ve ever come across the word “thoughtcrime”? If you haven’t, let me tell you that it was coined by George Orwell for his famous book “1984”, a suggestion of what a repressive regime like Stalin’s in Russia might look like if it came to Britain. “Thoughtcrime” was one of many words that were part of “newspeak” – a heavily edited and highly political form of English which sounded rather like the old-fashioned language used in telegrams. In “newspeak” complicated ideas were reduced to short statements which sounded clear but in fact deliberately concealed truth and misled their hearers.

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