St Martin's & St Paul's
Parish Canterbury
St Martin's & St Paul's
Parish Canterbury
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See everything has become new!
A typing error may have caused the repetition of that sentence on our newsletter this week, but in a way it doesn't matter. Old things becoming new is one of the great themes of the Bible.
Today at 9.00 am and 10.30 am we're going to be hearing from Steve Hook, who works with the Kainos movement in prisons - an initiative that enables prisoners to meet together to study the Christian faith and to encourage one another. You may recall that we supported Kainos during Lent. To most prisoners, the possibility of a new start in life after a short or long sentence must be a frequent preoccupation. Yet it is all too easy to slip back into the same ways, the same company, the same expectations.
Experts in other fields where change is needed, such as our eating habits, weight, carbon footprint and so on will know how difficult it is for an individual to change the habits of a lifetime. This is because these habits are not things about which we make daily conscious choices: they are things that we do or are by default, things that are our norm. Some of them are very good habits: getting up in the morning in time to get to work is a good habit; some of them are things that we ought to change. Helping out at a service at St. Martin's Hospital chapel some years ago, I came across a joke displayed on the vestry wall: it said, "How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb?" The reply was, "Only one - but the lightbulb really has to want to change". Motivation is the key factor in change.
Can faith take the place of our weak motivation? Can a text we read in the Bible give us the confidence to embark on a new way of life? Christians respond in varying degrees of confidence to that question. In childhood, I attended a church in which people were always being invited up to the front to tell us how God had changed their lives. As I grew older, I didn't lose my faith but I did become more sceptical of some of those claims - because so many of them were very recent - and of an ethos that promoted them. But at the same time, I believed what Jesus promises: that a seed planted in the ground can grow; that a mustard seed can become a tree.
So let us never lose faith in the power of God to bring renewal and change in our tired and jaded lives - especially if we ask him in a spirit of openness and trust.
Amen
.