Weekly Bulletin for St Mary's and the Villages

Collect

Almighty God, whose Son Jesus Christ is the resurrection and the life:
raise us, who trust in him, from the death of sin to the life of righteousness,
that we may seek those things which are above, where he reigns with you
in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Additional Collect

Risen Christ, faithful shepherd of your Father’s sheep:
teach us to hear your voice and to follow your command,
that all your people may be gathered into one flock,
to the glory of God the Father.  

Barton:
8.00 Said Eucharist
9.30 Parish Eucharist
2.00 Baptism
6.00 Said Evening Prayer

Villages:

11.00 Eucharist at Worlaby

Principal Readings: 

Principal Readings:  Acts 9.36-43 Psalm 23 Revelation 7.9-end John 10.22-30  
This Week

Wednesday

9.30 Eucharist (St Mary's)

10.30 Castledyke School visit to St Mary's. 

7.00 Ladies' Singing Group  (St Mary's  Hall)
Thursday

1.30 Sewing Bee (St Mary's  Hall)

Next Sunday: The Fifth Sunday of Eastertide

Barton:
8.00 Said Eucharist
9.30 Parish Eucharist
6.00 Said Evening Prayer

Villages:

9.30 Morning Praise at Bonby

11.00 Eucharist at Horkstow

Principal Readings: Acts 11.1-18 Psalm 148* Revelation 21.1-6 John 13.31-35  

For our prayers

Church: 

The Church in Jerusalem & The Middle East . 

Our parishes, deanery & diocese at a time of change.

Our keeping of Eastertide. 

Pope Leo XIV; Christian Unity.

World:

In the wake of VE Day, Peacekeepers and Peacemakers. 

Those in authority. 

Those leading in the protection of our planet and the resolution of the issues surrounding migrancy. 

The governments & peoples of Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Gaza, Iran, Ukraine. 

Our Community: 

Parish cycle of prayer: The Low villages — 

Saxby, Horkstow, South Ferriby, Bonby & Worlaby.

 Diocese: Healthcare services.

The world’s half-forgotten troubled lands- 

Afghanistan, Myanmar, Sudan, Haiti.

Those in need. 

All who are fleeing war, poverty or climate change. 

People living under the shadow of fear, deprivation or illness; 

the anxious, the lonely and mourners. 

Those struggling to make ends meet. The homeless. 

Those in hospital or who watch with them.  

The Departed.

Meditation: Sheep at half the price

There’s a bit of a railway tradition in my family – my great granddad was in LNER’s Darlington works, my dad was Eastern Region, and I toyed with the idea myself (next best thing, be a CofE parson) so when, in 1955 my uncle was considering his future, he thought ‘British Railways’. Even now, in his 80’s, he’s one for the fresh air, and aged 14 or so he decided on a ganger’s job out in the open, maintaining tracks and infrastructure.  

Alas, his mum, my granny, a fearsome old-school North Country matriarch whom one would only cross with the assistance of a team of Sherpas, had other ideas, and signed him up for an apprenticeship in a local factory. The poor bloke spent 50 years working indoors at a bench. He hated it, and the only reward he got from his job was the money to get out into the countryside at weekends.

A 1932 song by Ewan MacColl says it all;

I'm a rambler, I'm a rambler from Manchester way,
I get all me pleasure the hard moorland way.
I may be a wage slave on Monday,
But I am a free man on Sunday  

Some jobs are like that; they give us no more than a pay-packet. They’re not ‘us’. Alan Sillitoe summed it up in ‘Saturday night and Sunday morning’ - ‘Factories and labour exchanges and insurance offices keep us alive and kicking - so they say - but they're booby-traps and will suck you under like sinking-sands if you're not careful.’

And then, if we’re lucky, there are the jobs which somehow pick up on who we are and what we think matters. Not just the obvious ‘professional’ ones – there can be pride in a job well done even if it gets your nails mucky. A bit of who we are leaches out into the work. It may be frustrating, disappointing, exhausting, dangerous in a way that work at the factory bench isn’t, but there’s something of us woven into its fabric.

And so we come to Good Shepherd Sunday.

It can get a bit ‘sheep may safely graze’ or ‘shepherdesses on the green’ – but it’d be a pity to let it rest there, since there’s far more to the Good Shepherd theme, stuff which gives us an insight into the nature of God.

In traditional societies, wealth and status was – and is - often bound up with ownership of livestock. It crops up time and again in the Old Testament, and if there are some slightly ‘off’ jokes about how much a potential wife is worth in camels, at least it takes us away from pay-packet talk. Flock, herd, they’re central to the owner’s standing and identity.

This makes sense of the comment in John’s Gospel about ‘the hireling, when he sees the wolf coming, flees.’ The zero-hours contract chap has nothing of himself bound up with the flock. He can get another job, if he wants.  It’s not his concern, not for a minute. He’s a wage-slave, when it comes down to it.

The other sort of shepherd is the one whose entire purpose is bound up with the well-being of the flock. The loss of one will diminish him; the flourishing on one will bring him delight. To be this sort of a shepherd isn’t a job, it’s a calling, a way of being. The loss of a single one will grieve the shepherd, and so it’s worth all the risks and discomforts and perils of weather and wild animals and unexpected precipices to get them back.

This is the way in which the Jesus of John’s Gospel invites us to see God. The one whose own being, existence and calling is somehow bound up with the flourishing of the flock – that is, us. To abandon us – any of us – would be a betrayal of God’s own calling. Even the apparently excluding lines we get in today’s Gospel (‘not of my flock’)may not be as clear cut as they seem, for Jesus talks of gathering other flocks into his fold, too.

So if John’s Gospel is to be believed, out goes the angry bully in the sky, eager to punish, for one thing. Out, too, I think, goes the idea that God punishes Jesus instead of us, since that does rather presuppose a split within the nature of God – there appears to be one bit of God who risks all for the flock, and another whose need to punish overrides all else.  Instead, in comes a vision of humanity (and perhaps more than humanity? Paul almost seems to say so) which is too precious to lose.  

The sting in the tail to this one, of course, is that if God views all humanity like that, where does that leave us, God’s under-shepherds?

The ordination service talks of setting before ourselves ‘the example of the Good Shepherd’. We can(if we so wish) restrict this to the idea of rescuing the chosen few from the wicked world, but does that really fit the picture which John’s Gospel is trying to paint for us? The God who seeks out and untangles and carries home doesn’t seem to be that choosy about whether the sheep deserves rescuing or not – God simply gets on and does it.  

And what’s mint sauce for the shepherd….

David

Notices.

Open Gardens, Manor farm S Ferriby, are on Sunday June 1, 11-4.30, and there are posters all over the place!

Grateful thanks to those who co-ordinated VE day celebrations and commemorations across our villages over the last few days.

The Italian Job:

We’re planning an Italian evening at St Mary's on Saturday 31st May. Posters are appearing, and a sign-up list will present itself before very long. 

(Despite the fact that David has an Italian recipe book which includes a sausage (and I quote) ‘made only from the youngest, tenderest donkey’, food will be rather less adventurous than that, and will contain a veggie option!) 

The St Mary's Hall Appeal has reached the Tesco blue token system. Please put your blue tokens in our slot, and encourage other people to do so too.

325 And All That

According to the book '1066 and all that' there are only two dates known to the English, that of the first Roman invasion on Britain  and that of the Battle of Hastings and all that followed it. So the year 325 (exactly 1700 years ago) isn't likely to ring many bells.

In 325, the Christian faith was facing a very

 new situation, as Church and state moved from hostility to co-operation.  

It was also a time when some important issues were being settled, which Christian writings were to become the Christian companion to the Jewish Scriptures? What were the dead ends of Christian thinking? And it was a time of massive upheavals across the Roman world, upheavals which affected the greatest to the least, including the Church, upheavals which still have knock-on effects today.

We're going to run a short series of sessions looking at'325 and all that,'- the issues raised than are ones we still struggle with today. What are the limits of Christian belief? What weight do we put on Scripture (and how do we read them)? How should Church and State relate to one another? And what of the Church and people?

There'll be a couple of sessions before the summer break, in St Mary's Hall. May 24 (The Church and the People) and July 5 (The Christian Scriptures), 10.30-12.30. No need for specialist knowledge or anything - just turn up and we'll see what we can discover.

David