Cooksmill Green Congregational Church

Thought for the Month November 2023

Do we Remember?

This weekend has seen Remembrance Day Services and commemorations throughout the country and beyond. People have come together to remember those who have lost their lives in the service of others, Men and Women who have sacrificed their lives in pursuit of a better world where justice and freedom prevail.

Alongside that we have seen demonstrations calling for a ceasefire and humanitarian aid in Gaza. Leaving aside for the moment the mindless thugs and agitators whose only motive is to seek to bring mayhem and disorder into any peaceful situation, whilst there will, of course, be some who will have raw and understandably angry feelings of injustice (on both sides) the vast majority of the demonstrators, I’m sure have a heartfelt desire to see peace, and ultimately a reconciliation that leads to both Israelis and Palestinians being able to live in peace and security. Currently this would seem to be an enormous, some would say an insurmountable task.

There are many who feel, however justified these protests may be, they should not have happened on the one day reserved for the remembrance of those who have die in conflict and I understand that sentiment. Yet, in their way, both remind us of the futility and dreadful cost of war and conflict, whatever it’s original cause.

There is a line from a Rudyard Kipling poem written in 1897 called ‘Recessional’ which is now synonymous with Remembrance Day, the line is ‘Lest we Forget’

The Following poem below speaks for itself

Poem:               The Inquisitive Mind of a Child (John F Wilcox)

The Inquisitive Mind of a Child

Why are they selling Poppies, mummy?

Selling poppies in town today

The poppies, child are flowers of love

For the men who marched away.

But, why have they chosen a poppy, mummy?

Why not a beautiful rose?

Because, my child, men fought and died

In the fields where the poppies grow.

But why are the poppies so red?

Red is the colour of blood, my child

The blood our soldiers shed.

The heart of the poppy is black, mummy

Why does it have to be black?

Black, my child, is the symbol of grief

For the men who never came back.

But, why mummy, are you crying so?

Your tears are giving you pain.

My tears are my fears for you my child

For the world is – FORGETTING AGAIN

This poem, Remembrance Day, Israel and Gaza, Ukraine and many other conflicts in the world should be wake up calls to us all.

Surely we cannot let the lives sacrificed in so many conflicts be lost in vain!

In our service the week before Remembrance Sunday, Penny Bloom spoke to us about building bridges. How Jesus has built a bridge between us and God and how we should build bridges between each other. Jesus commanded us to Love one another (see John 15: 9-17). Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians said:

¹³ And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. (1 Cor. 13:13 N.I.V.)

I believe the reason Love is the greatest, is because without love, there is no hope and without hope, there is no faith.

I pray we will all find love, hope and faith in abundance and that we will share it with all our strength, building bridges – however small- between Families, Communities and Nations. In Jesus name. Amen.

Fergal Keane has written an article about bridge building between two writers, one Israeli and one Palestinian that started before the current conflict – it’s worth a read.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67335042

Thought for the Month September 2023

Can you remember your early childhood? Do you have memories of a time where you could be carefree and could be cherished for a naivety that brought smiles to adult faces, even though you didn’t really understand why?  Can you recall a childhood milestone that caused you to have to stop and view the world through adult eyes, and in that moment began what might be described as an erosion of the age of innocence?

The reason I ask, is that this is the thought I was presented with when my six-year-old granddaughter Naomi asked me what a concentration camp was, after reading a book about Anne Frank and her famous diary. Naomi likes to read a lot and this book was one of a series to educate children about famous influential people who came from simple backgrounds to make a lasting impression on the world around them, and is suitably titled “Little People, Big Dreams”. The book mentioned Hitler and the Nazis as the reason for Anne hiding in the attic, and that when she was found, she was sent to a concentration camp where she died, but it held back in its illustration of the depth of evil that these people and places are known for in the adult context, which of course is to be expected of a children’s book. The problem was that Naomi struggled to understand the significance of what Anne Frank experienced and therefore what made her diary so special, and this invited a series of searching questions to enable her to comprehend who Anne Frank really was, and if you have never experienced the onslaught of a child’s curiosity, then you should know that it is incessant and insatiable to the extreme!

Her main point and one that she would not let go of was ‘why’? Why would any person be so cruel to another, how could they be so horrible as to do that to a small girl and her family, and how could concentration camps be allowed to exist if they were really that bad? The carefully diluted answers that I provided for a six-year-old, did little to alleviate her perplexed understanding of the nature of evil.

This was the moment that it struck me about the innocence of young children, what it is to be childlike when viewing both the world and the people around them, because unlike adults, they are seemingly devoid of prejudice, bigotry, intolerance and prejudgement, well at least until ‘growing up’ changes all that they know, but when exactly is the right time for that to happen? What value do we place on a child’s worldly innocence, and are we too quick to turn them into ‘little adults’ in order to protect them? The sheer incomprehension of the evil that adults can do to each other, was there to be seen in Naomi’s questions and response, and it left me sad at heart that the sharing of well-intentioned knowledge, even diluted well-intentioned knowledge, can come at a cost where children are concerned.

When reflecting on this moment in Naomi’s development, it caused me to think of my own, and how quick young people want to be grownups and to no longer be recognised for being a child, even to the point of completely forgetting how to be childlike, probably because adults tend to chide other adults for behaving in a childish way, simply because it’s not what we are meant to do as part of a mature society. Being childish though, is not necessarily the same as being childlike, for me the first is being immature when the situation requires us to be the grownups that we are, and the latter is possessing the ability to remove the inhibitions of adulthood and return to seeing the world through the child eyes we all once had, an ability we may have lost or forgotten about over time.  

This inability to be childlike is what can also cause us adults to devalue the contributions that children can make to our lives, simply because we place so much emphasis on maturity that a child cannot possibly be a contributor to our social or personal ethics, at least until they have learned more about life itself, and somehow earn the right to do so?

Yet a child can smile at others for no other reason than they simply want to, they will say hello to an adult sitting near them on a bus or train for much the same reason, they will sit with other children regardless of skin colour, social class or status and it’s done without prejudice or reservation and simply because it’s a childlike thing to do, their world is not our adult world and maybe we should at times remember this, and to remind ourselves of how it was also our own starting point in life, and that it would not be a bad thing to be a little childlike every now and then. 

Jesus had much the same idea about children and being childlike when He said:

“Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. ⁴ Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. ⁵ And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me. (Mathew Ch18)

The virtues contained within the innocence of children, embodies everything to be found within the Kingdom of Heaven, and until we remember how to be childlike in the manner that we treat others and the world around us, or to humble ourselves and acknowledge that children are far better at accepting others than we are and therefore it is they who are the example to follow, then the Kingdom that Jesus spoke of, will always remain elusive and far beyond our reach.

Danny

Heavenly Father we pray to you,

For childlike eyes to see the world with the innocence of children.
For courage to approach the world with the daring of children.
For love of others given with the eagerness of children.
For desire to heal the world with the purity of children.
For insight to change the world with the wisdom of children.

Amen

Thought for the month August 2023

The e-scooters of Life!

Recently there was a news item on the TV regarding e-bicycles in London reporting on how, when they’ve finished, the people using them -sometimes thoughtlessly sometimes intentionally – leave them in an awkward place and sometimes in the most dangerous places imaginable. Most mornings I go for an early morning walk through the estate where we live in Chelmsford. Every morning without fail I encounter ‘e-scooters’ littering the pathway, this morning I counted ten. Some are parked very sensibly, at the inner edge of the path next to a wall or fence. Other however are not! Some are left strewn across the path, some obstructing lowered curbs designed, for example, for wheelchairs. The estate has a main bus route, a school and is a busy thoroughfare for traffic, especially in mornings and afternoons. If you happen to be in a wheelchair or a mobility scooter, or perhaps you’re a parent with a toddler and a baby in a pushchair and a couple of bags of shopping, these unnecessary stumbling blocks are not only an inconvenience they are potentially dangerous!

Are ‘e-scooters’ such an important subject for a ‘Thought for the Month’?

Of themselves maybe not, but I do wonder if the inconvenience they cause (or should I say some of their riders cause) is not a little symptomatic of life.

How often are we guilty of putting a stumbling block into someone’s life? Do we ever put a stumbling block along the way of someone’s spiritual pathway? If you’re reading this I suspect you won’t have done so intentionally, but have we ever done it thoughtlessly? In our eagerness to speed up our own journey, or make it easier, have we left debris along the way for someone else to trip over?

There are enough stumbling blocks in life without us adding to them and Jesus understood this and was very clear on the subject.

Matthew 18: 6-7 (NRSV)

⁶ ‘If any of you put a stumbling-block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea. ⁷ Woe to the world because of stumbling-blocks! Occasions for stumbling are bound to come, but woe to the one by whom the stumbling-block comes!

Paul too wrote on the subject:

Romans 14:13-14 (NRSV)

Do Not Make Another Stumble

¹³ Let us therefore no longer pass judgement on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling-block or hindrance in the way of another.

By all means, let’s ride an ‘e-scooter’ – but let’s be careful what debris we leave behind!

Steve

Lord help us never to be a stumbling block to others

But give us the wisdom and strength

To walk beside one another,

Supporting and encouraging each other

On our spiritual journeys through life.

 Amen

Thought for the Month – July 2023

Pilgrims or refugees?

I heard the great English composer John Rutter recently talking about the Brahms German Requiem. He quoted the first line of the sixth movement taken from the Epistle to the Hebrews: “For here we have no abiding city, but we seek the city which is to come”, and he said, “We are like pilgrims – or refugees.” It was a comment that has stayed with me ever since: it was in the same week that I watched the last instalment of a BBC series called “Pilgrimage” and went to see “The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” at the Everyman – both, in different ways, very moving.

I started thinking about the idea of what it is to be a pilgrim and whether I qualify.  The Bible is no help at all – the word does not occur in it: understandably, when even a twenty-mile walk from Jerusalem to Jericho was fraught with danger, people were not going to commit to long journeys. Nor, surprisingly, was Pilgrim’s Progress – I love the Vaughan Williams setting of this, but it is made quite clear in it that Pilgrim knows exactly where he is going and what he needs to get there. But when it comes to “No lion can him fright – he’ll with a giant fight; No goblin nor foul fiend can daunt his spirit” -well, call me a big wuss (you won’t be the first) but I think lions are best encountered behind bars at Colchester Zoo, and if you must fight, don’t choose someone bigger than yourself. And my problem is not with foul fiends, but with the nice ones: “Go on, have another ice cream / chocolate biscuit / G and T,” followed by the fatal words, “You know you want to!” As for Hymns Old and New, it has a ghastly “woke” version of Onward Christian Soldiers which ignores the fact that Christian Pilgrims don’t march Onward to the same rhythm as soldiers.  Best binned.

I found it far easier to identify with Harold Fry (spoiler alert – if you haven’t read the book or seen the film, you MUST, and you must skip this paragraph). His pilgrimage was an act of faith; the book acknowledges that faith being illogical, doubt and uncertainty and, in his case, fatigue are understandable constituents of it. It is also a journey into his own past – he confronts in particular his own failure with his son. He learns to forgive himself for what he has done wrong; he comes to see that his view of the past is distorted by his sense of guilt, and that he needs to see things as they truly were; he then can move on to salvage what has seemed like wreckage in his life, principally his marriage, where love has become a stranger, but can also learn to accept that some things are irrevocable, cannot be changed, cannot be undone or rescued. All of these things resonate most powerfully with me.

The BBC series “Pilgrimage” – still on iPlayer and definitely worth a look – followed a group of minor celebs of different religious backgrounds as they walked the pilgrim’s way to the Sanctuary of Fátima in Portugal. I could say a lot about this, but I want to focus on what was to me the saddest moment. Only one person dropped out of this – even the devout Moslem, who struggled with a lot of Catholic iconography made it – and this at the last moment, when the site was in sight. All the ones of lukewarm or no faith made it, and all were uplifted by the experience. Only the born-again Christian turned aside, convinced he had no need of this. So, memo to all pilgrims: don’t let dogma, or habit, or pride blind you to God, wherever he may be found – which is everywhere.

Rutter also said we were refugees in this world. I was reminded of (Lord) Danny Finkelstein, whose book about his family was published that month, tracing his roots back to the Nazi death camps and Siberian starvation labour farms; I thought too of Stravinsky and Rachmaninov, who made new lives for themselves in the West but could never cease melancholy yearning for Mother Russia. It is easy as I type this in warm Cooksmill Green to feel that all is well. I read though that 108 million people in the world are refugees. We have a kinship with them; in our own lives too we have a duty, as Christ enjoins us, to be in the world but not of it. Our true home is elsewhere.

David

Thought for the Month – June 2023

“A man’s ethical behaviour should be based effectually on sympathy, education, social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary.

Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death” – Albert Einstein

Firstly, if the use of gender pronouns offends you then please do excuse Mr Einstein as he lived in very different times, although his viewpoints, in my opinion, remain very relevant, regardless of how you choose to identify. The real question being asked here is whether in a technologically advanced world, where science strives to deliver all the answers and capitalism can provide all of the niceties that makes us feel happy and fulfilled, does Albert Einstein make a valid contemporary statement? Just why would Generation Z or the currently developing Generation Alpha, who represent the last 25 years of human development (I’m a Boomer apparently, which simply translates as ‘old’ and makes me want to put in an emoji to prove otherwise!), why would they have any need for religion or spirituality to help them make sense of life, their world, or their place within it? Not when you can simply ask the new age oracles that we know as Google, Alexa, Siri etc?

Einstein is of course right when he says that humankind should be able to coexist in social harmony, but the reality is there to be seen in the world around us, we simply can’t. It seems to me that humans have always dreamed of a utopia where we naturally adhere to principles of love, kindness and unconditional acceptance of others, because deep down that is a world that we know could make us feel secure, happy and content, but humankind has a dark side, and it is in constant conflict with this utopian desire. Religion as we know has been around since we first stopped to consider who we are and why we are here, and for all its faults it has always provided some sort of social adhesive for human beings to aspire to. In the Christian faith we see countless examples in the bible, where, having been given a moral charter from God, we have then decided we didn’t need religion and went off to do things by ourselves, only to find we couldn’t and came back to God asking for help when we realised that we had made a right mess of things. If anyone proposes that we do not need religion, I would like to ask them as to where we can find just one single secular charter for coexistence, especially one that has ever worked? At least religion gave it a go.

Interestingly, I came across a Gallup International Survey of religious self-identify, carried out across 57 countries (this is what prompted my thought for the month) which showed that atheism was on the rise with an estimated 13% of the world’s population identifying as atheist, an increase of 6% over 5 years and that only 63% of people now identified as being religious, down from 73% for the same period. It subsequently generated a view that religion was on the decline and questioned whether if the trend continued exponentially, that religion might disappear altogether? Personally, I always treat survey data with caution and at best this data represents a snapshot of global religious identification, but if there is such a trend towards the secular, then the next question has to be why? One of the survey findings was that the greatest increase towards a secular life was to be found in the wealthier countries, where technology was easily accessed and where the citizens had good social security, basically religion had no purpose anymore, the state became the provider of all.

In the poorer countries where the citizens experienced hardship, loss, poverty, disasters and all the suffering that being poor can bring, these people leaned heavily on a divine belief that their faith would help them to find comfort and hope, in contrast, religion was needed, as there was nothing else to alleviate their plight. It would seem on this basis that our spirituality is partly nurtured and influenced by our physical needs and desires, and if correct, might explain why church congregations grow smaller, as Generation Alpha and fast approaching Beta, see no use for religion in their more materialistic lives.

Coming back to Mr Einstein and his comment about constraining human behaviour through religious doctrine, ensured through fear and promise, I wholeheartedly agree! The Christian Church has made much use of this method in the past and some elements still do, and I would fail to see its appeal to anyone in current times, especially for those who have already experienced a freedom of expression, one that allows you to identify in society in any way you choose. My faith tells me that God is a constant and is a God of love, forgiveness and hope, but especially of love and the teachings of Christ show us all just how to do that for each other, and for the world in which we live. It should not be doctrine, creed or dogma that brings us to God but a sense of relationship with the universal concept of love, a love from which all other utopian values can grow, we know it as fellowship, and it is the foundation for God’s Kingdom. The Church is struggling to be relevant in society in the way it once was, but times have changed and perhaps that is exactly what the Church needs to do also. How do we convince a new generation that religion can be relevant, valuable in life skills and a positive experience for them?

Answers on a postcard, text message, email, Whatsapp, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, please.

Danny

Dear Lord, we pray for a world in turmoil,

for a world that is becoming lost in its own self-indulgence,

for a world that has turned its eyes away from you.

Help us to know you better, to sense you in our lives and to never lose sight of your commandments of love.

Heavenly Father we pray for the young people trying to grow up in

this challenging and rapidly changing world

and we ask you to enlighten our minds and strengthen our hearts,

in our endeavour to nurture them and to

find a way to bring your love, grace and hope,

to a new generation of your children.

We ask this through your Son, our Saviour, Jesus Christ,

Amen