13/2/22
News from the Benwell & Scotswood Team
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Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the sea of fog, 1817
Oil on Canvas, Hamburger Kunsthalle
Dates for your diary
16 Feb - MAP group meeting
7pm at St Margaret's
Sun 20 Feb - services in all churches
9.30am St James'
10am St Margaret's
11am St John's
11am Venerable Bede
Sun 27 Feb - 'Carnival' experimental service
11am at Venerable Bede
Wed 2 Mar - Ash Wednesday
Service time TBC
Sun 6 Mar - Altar server training/taster session
Directly after the morning service
Wed 9 Mar - Lent course begins: Living in Love & Faith
7pm at St James
Sun 27 Mar - Mothering Sunday
11am at Venerable Bede
Sun 10 Apr - Palm Sunday (Holy week begins)
11am at Venerable Bede
Thurs 14 Apr - Maundy Thursday
7.30pm at St John's
Fri 14 Apr - Good Friday
2pm at St Margaret's
Sat 15 Apr - The Easter vigil
8.30pm at St James'
News
Living in Love and Faith - Lent course 2022
How do questions about identity, sexuality, relationships and marriage fit within the bigger picture of the good news of Jesus Christ? What does it mean to live in love and faith together as a Church?
During Lent we will follow the Church of England's Living in Love and Faith course. We will get together weekly (one group in-person and one group online) to discuss the big questions of our times around sexuality and gender and how the church can truly welcome everyone with all their differences.
5 weekly sessions
Group 1: Beginning Wednesday 9th March, 7pm at St James
Group 2: Time TBC, on Zoom
Watch the introductory video below:
4 church Sunday next week - 20th Feb
Join us in each of the local churches next Sunday.
9.30am at St James'
10am at St Margaret's
11am at St John's
11am at Venerable Bede
New rota for reading, intercessions, and camera
Those who help with readings/intercessions/camera can now view the rota up until Easter here >
Or you can view and print the PDF here >
If you are unavailable for any dates please let us know before Thursday 17th Feb. If you become unavailable nearer the time, that's fine, please just find someone to swap with and let us know.
There are some gaps for Holy Week and other special services. If you know you definitely will or won't be around for those services please let us know.
If you would like to join the team for readings and intercessions please ask one of the clergy.
Altar Server training/taster session
We hope to have return soon to having servers in Sunday services. This is a great way to help us all in worship.
We will hold a taster session on Sunday 6th March after the morning service. Please join whether you have been a server in our services before, if you are interested in learning, or are just curious.
Ask Chris if you have any questions!
Worship Texts
The Collect
Almighty God,
who alone can bring order
to the unruly wills and passions of sinful humanity:
give your people grace
so to love what you command
and to desire what you promise,
that, among the many changes of this world,
our hearts may surely there be fixed
where true joys are to be found;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
Amen.
First Reading
1 Corinthians 15.12–20 Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised; and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation has been in vain and your faith has been in vain. We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ—whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised. If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died.
Gospel
Luke 6.17–26 He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them. Then he looked up at his disciples and said: ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. ‘Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. ‘Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. ‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. ‘But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. ‘Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. ‘Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. ‘Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.
Sermon
Matt Dobson
One of my favourite subjects to teach in my job as a primary school teacher is geography.
It really is extraordinary to watch as children try to make sense of where they live, how we understand, appreciate and impact our natural world, the physicality of creation, what makes community, how we understand who we are, the lives of others and the kinds of physical spaces and places we occupy, that we need, that we value and ascribe meaning to, the things which make us different and the things which unite us, our commonality.
Geography, place, space, is woven into the fabric of our everyday existence. Our identities, our sense of selves are bound up within the places and spaces we find ourselves in. Never before have space and place been so politicised, economized, strategized over. We manoeuvre around visible and invisible boundaries all the time, boundaries and borders created by other people, which tell us we must be a certain way, that we look a certain way, decisions which dictate how much we are worth, how much we can earn, our ambition, our lot. Place can be used to other, to divide, to fetishize, to forget.
Space can be thrust upon us, forced upon us, or brief stopping off points, places that are new, unknown, alien; they can be spaces of challenge and sanctuary, of new life, of hope. They can be physicality of deep emotion and connection to understanding who we are. There are places we have once been, places we have missed, places we could become if we take control of the decisions, the boundaries, our identity. If you asked the same children who I teach geography what place God is they would most likely point upwards to the sky, they know very well the song ‘Lord I lift your name on high’. They can sing you all the words accompanied by actions. ‘You came from heaven to earth to show the way…’from the cross to the grave from the grave to the sky…’
We have a geography of faith, we place God and ourselves somewhere between an up there, a heaven, a holy and a down here earth, and even further down grave or name it Hell. It is a framework of space and place on which we hang ideas of incarnation and revelation, of sin, death, resurrection. To an onlooker, to my Year 4 class, some of our scripture too can be very good at alluding to God as being up there, in the sky, in clouds, up the top of a mountain, the holy is out of reach. And even if we get beyond that kind of thinking, the stories we tell of our faith, the narrative of God with us, as one of us is bound up in places far beyond Benwell and Scotswood. We tell the story of our God who walked as Christ in the hills and mountains of Judea, who was baptized in the River Jordan, who performed miracles on the Sea of Galilee, who found himself hung on the cross outside the city of Jerusalem… on a green hill far away we sing. These settings for salvation can seem so far removed from our experience that for some, God might as well be somewhere up in the sky.
But today's Gospel reading from Luke is a reminder that a geography of Christ, the spaces and places of Gods revealing are all part of the process of saying something about the kind of world, the kind of Kingdom Jesus came to demonstrate, to live out. A Kingdom that is beyond borders, a Kingdom that reaches across land and oceans and time itself, possible to see and help build here in our streets, in our homes, in our communities in all our churches.
Luke is constantly showing us how God uses people and place to tell us something of his purposes. It is in a Judean town in the hill country where Mary sings of the powerful being brought down, the lowly being lifted up, the hungry being fed. His son, our King of Kings is born in the royal city of David but laid in a manger, shepherds from fields were some of the first to witness God with us. It is in Nazareth that Jesus echoes the words of Isaiah ‘the spirit of the Lord is upon me…to bring good news to the poor”. Jesus spoke then into a space occupied, moved through land so connected to the identities of the people, preached of and into a place of shifting power struggles, of puppet kings and prefects.
Immediately before our passage we have just heard, Jesus has been up the mountain praying, in his own faith and piety he has been in communion with God, discerning who it is he will call to follow him, to be his disciples. He returns to stand, before his disciples, before us, on a level place, into the ordinary plane of human existence, people from all over, Jew and Gentile have gathered and he enters their lives healing, exorcising, holding all that they are in the same prayerful holiness and power of the mountaintop, that reality, that presence of the divine is bought down to the plain. That vertical movement between sky and earth which we can so often recognise, moves across to a more encompassing and enduring embrace of us all.
He looks at his disciples, those who he has chosen, who he knows will go out in deeds and words across borders and nations and peoples and continue his work, his disciples in who’s task we share today, and he speaks to them in what has been called the Sermon on the Plain, he speaks to them and us, levels with us.
Blessed are you who are poor, Blessed are you who are hungry now, Blessed are you weep now. Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you.
The poor, the hungry, the weeping, the hated will be embraced by that divine reality of salvation, a salvation which is economic, structural, and spiritual. It is with these people, the disciples, the crowds, in all their vulnerability where God’s generosity, God’s grace and power will most tangibly be revealed and recognised.
But so what, what about us. I won’t stand here and preach about the reality of life in our parishes in this part of the world, reduce us to statistics on a poverty index, or number of food bank users, or minority groups. Because for me, the point is that with God the poor, the hungry, the weeping, the hated have worth, have value, have a place in his Kingdom in his challenging new hope for the world, for us.
We are on that plain, that level place here in this church today. We are in a space where heaven touches the ordinariness of things, of bread, of wine, of ourselves which we share with each other, grace comes down and moves outwards across our plain and blesses those who God loves. We have turned from the crib and move towards the cross not on that green hill far away but here in the West End of Newcastle, we gaze on the pierced hands of Christ which are open to embrace us knowing that we must use our hands, our woundedness, our new life and hope to embrace those who Jesus calls blessed and for some of us that might mean recognising that it is us whom Jesus blesses.
The Sermon on the Plain, the cross, the eucharist all show, like the points of a compass the movement of God’s goodness, God’s challenge and God’s grace and direct us where and how to respond, through our worship, through our prayerfulness, our openness to the spirit, our response to his Word, through our building up of community, our welcome, our fellowship with all who we meet as we move out from our churches and into the lives of others.
Jesus uses and transforms spaces and places with his words, with his actions, with himself. We have the opportunity as we continue to pray and discern how we are tasked with creating plains in our parish, Kingdom spaces, able to look outwardly towards those who God has blessed, to look inwardly, to reflect, to discern, to pray. All of Benwell and Scotswood is our geography and all of Benwell and Scotswood is the geography of Christ. He is present in St Johns, St Margaret’s, St James’ and here, he is with the poor, the hungry, the hated. He will walk the West Road, beside the Tyne, down the back lanes and alleys, and beside each of us as we navigate our lives.
As Jesus called his 12 disciples, and spoke of his Kingdom on that level place, may we live in the comfort and challenge of his words, may it map our steps on our journey to explore the spaces and places in which we share with him.
As T S Eliot once wrote :
With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling we shall not cease from exploration.
Intercessions
To add names to the prayer list please email church@benwellscotswood.com
Prayers for others:
Joyce Cuthbertson
Donna Krol
George Irving
Alistair
John Nicholson
Alan Robson
Peter Wilson
Michelle Wilson
Esmaeel
Liz Holliman
Joan Finley
James, Christina, Anastasia, and Xavier
Ali Zareie and family
The Riches Family
Jill Sorley
Joyce Phillips
George Snowden
Claire Mozaffari
Herbert Agbeko
All those who are struggling at home or in hospital with Covid-19
Rest in peace
Colin Bell
Hamid
Post Communion prayer
Merciful Father,
who gave Jesus Christ to be for us the bread of life,
that those who come to him should never hunger:
draw us to the Lord in faith and love,
that we may eat and drink with him
at his table in the kingdom,
where he is alive and reigns, now and for ever.
Amen.