Sunday Worship – 1st September 2024 – Bradford North Circuit

(All our songs this morning are from Singing the Faith (StF) or Hymns & Psalms (H&P) numbers will be given where available)

Welcome to our Sunday Service, today shared on paper across our circuit and with the congregation at Christchurch LEP where Methodists and Anglicans worship and witness together and led by Rev Nick Blundell one of our Circuit Ministers, Nick has chosen to focus on the new church year rather than following today’s lectionary.

Click on the blue links to follow them for bible readings and associated links

Call to worship – Revelation 21:5-6

He who was seated on the throne said, “I am making everything new!” Then he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.”

He said to me: “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.”

For our opening hymn we use Jan Struther’s hymn

Song – StF 526 or H&P 552 – Lord of all hopefulness, Lord of all joy

Prayer

God of every time and space, in this moment and this place we gather to worship you, opening ourselves to one another and to you in your Spirit. We come as people with history, aware of past triumphs and disasters, seeking to learn from what has gone before, grateful for your provision and forgiving grace. We come also as people with potential, looking to the future you have for us with confidence and hopefulness. In these moments, this liminal space between all that has been and all that is yet to be, we seek your guidance, direction and blessing, both as individuals and as your people in this place. Amen.

Reading

2 Corinthians 4:1, 5-9

Song – StF 346 or H&P 455 – Christ is the world’s light, he and none other

Reading

Revelation 21:1-7

Reflection – treasure in clay.

Today isn’t just the first day of the rest of your life, it’s also, for those of us who are methodists, the first day of a new church year. We perhaps notice this most in those years when we see changes in ministerial staff, of which this year is one, and the fact that the first of September falls this year on a Sunday highlights it even more. So this morning Rev Lisa Quarmby is taking the service at Calverley for the first time, and this afternoon will be welcomed at a Circuit service at St Andrew’s, Undercliffe, while Rev Christine Crabtree will be welcomed this morning, indeed probably as I speak, at a circuit service at Central Hall in the Coventry & Nuneaton circuit. And for me personally, today is my first day as a 0.49 (semi-retired!) minister, and this service therefore one of only two I will lead this month. It feels quite strange.

So, happy new year. I want to reflect a little on the turning of the year as an opportunity to think about who we are and where we’re going.

Standing at the turn of the year, the natural thing to do seems to be to first look back at the year just gone, take stock, good and bad, lessons learned, journeys made. In this spiritual stocktaking we give thanks for the good things, we do our best to be thankful for the difficult stuff, and some years we acknowledge those events over which thanksgiving is impossible, where we can only offer lament. And as we look back we seek to notice God’s presence with us through it all – the one who receives our thanks and hears our lament has kept us company through it all.

And so we turn to face the new year, the future, wondering what it will hold. Will the expected come about as we expect it? What will surprise us? The optimist will anticipate sunshine. The pessimist will expect disasters. The realist knows there will be sunshine and showers. And the Christian – the Christian is hopeful. In the penultimate chapter of the last book of the bible we are given a picture of God’s intention – the new heaven and new earth, with every tear wiped from the eyes of God’s people. No more death, mourning, crying or pain, for God is making everything new – the Christian is hopeful.

The poetry of Revelation 21 captures for me the promises of God for the people of God – it’s the hopefulness which is the treasure at the end of the rainbow, the hopefulness that God will make all things new.

This treasure is at one and the same time a lens through which to see, a staff to hold, a light to show the way, a compass by which to steer our path. Whatever the new year might throw at us, this treasure will illuminate, give perspective, shape our response, enable us to overcome.

As Paul explains in writing to the under-pressure Christians of Corinth, God has made light shine in their hearts giving them the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ. This knowledge of God’s glory Paul calls ‘treasure’. But, he says, we have this treasure in ‘jars of clay’ (NIV), ‘earthen vessels’ (KJB), ‘fragile clay jars’ (NLT), ‘unadorned clay pots’ (The message). It’s not stored in a treasure chest, or safe, or display cabinet, but in the ordinary everyday jars that people would recognise as representing their, and their neighbours’, lives. In the jars that would hold spare clothes and dried fish and all the ordinary stuff of life.

I’ve been thinking about today’s equivalent of ‘common clay pots’. Probably because the second half of last year saw us moving house, I wonder about cardboard boxes. We have this treasure in cardboard boxes. Then I picture the moving days and want to add, ‘and bin liners, and old suitcases, and bags for life’. And I remember that the boxes were of various removal companies, over decades of moves, labelled and re-labelled and labelled again, often mis-labelled, sending them to the place furthest from that intended (like the set of Encyclopedia Britanica intended for the attic but delivered, unfortunately, to the basement).

Whether or not storage boxes work for you as common clay pot equivalents, the thing to notice is Paul’s challenge and encouragement to his readers that this great spiritual treasure of the knowledge of God’s light in Christ, with its consequent hopefulness, is housed in the ordinary, in the cracked, marked, sometime bedraggled and mis-labelled, often disregarded, ordinary stuff of life.

God doesn’t call us to be something we’re not, or to pretend to be someone we’re not, rather God calls us to be ourselves, but to recognise that as ourselves God has blessed us with a way of living and looking at life that is indeed treasure, of great value to ourselves and to those with whom we might share it.

In the ordinariness of the 365 days that will make up this year, may we know the treasure God has set within us, and not hesitate to share it freely with our ordinary neighbours. May we accept who we are, as children of our loving God, but also be open to God’s intention, which is to be making all things, including us, new. Amen.

We sing Sydney Carter’s new year

Song – StF 476 or H&P 746 – One more step along the world I go

We offer our prayers….

Creator God, you are the one whose light shines through creation, and you are the one whose light shines in our hearts because of Jesus Christ. Nurture that treasure within us which is faith and confidence and hopefulness, and let your light shine through our common clay