St.Peter's Church Parkstone
From the Rector
On Sunday 16th August I preached a sermon about the
Blessed Virgin Mary. I suggested that she provides an important
model for us as we seek to live as the Church in our own time. Mary
is rightly given high and exalted titles. We look up to her as first
among the saints. Yet her extraordinary role in the history of the
world does not flow from any great skills or abilities she had, but
from the simple response by an ordinary young girl who, when faced
with the reality of the Divine, simply said “yes” and became the
person through whom the Divine broken into human history as Jesus
the Christ.
There is no level of holiness, expertise in prayer or moral
excellence that can make us worthy of the love of God. We are loved
as we are and called as we are. Like Mary, all that is required of
us is that we surrender our lives to the God who will never tire of
seeking us out – the God who will always see us as being worth dying
for. Our personal “yes” to God is where we start the journey of
faith, yet in saying “yes” to God we often find, like Jeremiah, that
God was always there in our lives and that he knew us and called
even before the day we were born. Saying “yes” to God does not bring
to us all life’s answers. It does however set us on a road of
discovery in which we move ever deeper into that heart of life that
we call “God”. Such a pilgrimage or journey means living with the
fact that we have not yet arrived, yet it brings to life a sense of
purpose and direction, which flows from having caught but a glimpse
of our destination.
Such living out the journey of life as a Christian does mean being
drawn into a shared sense of celebration. To be loved by God, to
have one’s live touched by his grace, can only lead us to one
response, which is to say “Thank You”. As Mary put it: “My soul
magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my saviour”. There
is little wonder that the central Christian service is the
Eucharist, which is the Greek word for “Thanksgiving”. We take bread
and wine and we give thanks over them and, as re recall a real body
once broken for us and real blood shed, we are filled with the
Spirit of Christ and we are constantly being reformed in His image
in a way that leads us to our growth as human beings as our life of
prayer deepens and we live out the Gospel message in our lives.
But there is a second picture of Mary, as well as that initial “yes”
to God. At the end, when Jesus hung dying on the cross, Jesus gave
Mary, his mother, to John, his best friend, and told them to start
life together as a new community. Many people see the Church as
being founded at that moment. In the Gospels we often find Jesus
being less that helpful to his family, preferring to call everyone
around him his family. So maybe Mary and John did not have that good
a relationship with each other. But at this moment in time they
found themselves standing together, drawn to this spot by the man
dying on this cross. In that shared moment they discovered that they
were a new family and
that they had been given
to each other in a new and special way.
As the Church we are people who have responded to the touch of God
in our lives and we have said “yes” to that calling. Our lives are
transformed as we discover a love, which pours out from the cross,
and which not even death can destroy. As we stand at the foot of
that cross, we find the most unlikely people standing there with us,
people often very different to us; yet we are bound to them by the
shared experience of this death, given for us. That too gives us a
model of what it means to be Christ’s Church. We may not always
like one another, but we
have been given to each other and we need to treat one another with
gentleness, respect and love. In a summer when there has been a good
deal of tension and difference of opinion within our Church
community, we need to remember the need to cherish one another and
to delight in each other’s gifts. For such a way of living is what
begins to transform our Church and leads us to be people in whom
Christ is found. That is how we can best say “yes” to God, that is
the way in which we ourselves become the agents of His
reconciliation in the world and that is the gateway through which
our hearts can be set on fire with the life of the Spirit.
Other Magazine Items
Baptisms
Remembering the departed
Confirmation
Use of the Chalice
St.Peter’s Choir
We are delighted to report that our St.Peter's Choir has taken on a new lease of life under the direction of Richard McLester and the support of Beverley Manning and Andrew Rickett. After a difficult summer, the choir have rediscovered a joy in making music together, which is evident in the quality of their singing. The future looks bring for our choir and for music at St.Peter's. If you would like to join the choir, please talk to Richard or to Fr.Nigel.
The console of the organ at St.Peter's Parkstone