1/9/24
Your weekly update from the Benwell & Scotswood Team.
Click below to read this week's information and latest news.
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Services this week
Sunday 1 September
9.30am - St John's Holy Communion
9.45am - St Margaret's Holy Communion 11am - Hub service at St James (Parish Eucharist)
1pm - Baptism at St James
Tuesday
4.30pm bible study with Farsi translation
Thursday
10.30am Venerable Bede - Holy Communion
Dates for your diary
Sunday 8th September
Generous Giving campaign begins
Thursday 19th September
7pm - PCC (with Archdeacon of Northumberland)
Sunday 29th September
11am Harvest festival at St Margaret's Scotswood, NE15 6AR (no other services this day)
News
Harvest Festival
Sunday 29th September
11am
St Margaret's Scotswood
NE15 6AR
If you can, please bring non-perishable food items to donate to local charities and a dish to share for lunch.
On the last Sunday of this month we will have a team service at St Margaret's in Scotswood for this year's harvest festival! We will give thanks for God's creation, offer what we can for those in need, and share in fellowship together with a meal after.
Please note: as this is a team service, it will be the only service that day.
Benwell and Scotswood Giving Generously
Beginning Sunday 8th September
Throughout September we will be carrying out a generous giving campaign.
The aim of this is to:
Say thank you for all that you do!
Help you understand how we use our funds to support the community and celebrate all that is going on in our churches.
Make it simpler to offer your time, money and talents to all of our churches through the Parish Giving Scheme (which you will hear more about!)
Keep our work sustainable and enable our churches to keep growing.
We are excited about making it easier to give financially, but remember, this is just a small piece of the puzzle! Your presence and participation in our churches are truly treasured, regardless of your ability to give. You are always welcome and appreciated!
Watch this space!
Thank you from David and Elspeth
David and Elspeth would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who helped make last Sunday so special. We were both overwhelmed by the love and support from you all. The music group did a fantastic job, the flowers looked lovely, the food and the cake were great, and we had loads of positive comments from visitors and friends. Yvonne Greener sent us all out with an inspiring message adding to the prayers and good wishes of all attending. Thank you too for all the encouraging messages and cards, and of course for the gifts, which we look forward to putting up once we move as a reminder of the parish. Elspeth adds an extra thank you for the gifts of flowers which are brightening up the Vicarage as we embark on clearing and packing. It is not possible to say individual thanks for everyone or everything, but we felt the day really made a good ending to what has been a wonderful thirty-nine years of ministry the last eight in ‘probably the best parish in the Diocese’.
A great day out in Cullercoats!
Just over a week ago we took a group of kids to Cullercoats for a fantastic day out! Thank you so much to the Cullercoats Watch House, CBK Adventures, and Bills Fish and Chips for giving the kids such a memorable day out paddle boarding and exploring Cullercoats and its history.
Embrace - Gaza appeal
The people of Gaza are living through an unprecedented humanitarian crisis. Israel’s response has led to indiscriminate civilian suffering, with residents forced to move from place to place in search of safety. Food and medical supplies have all but run out; water, electricity, and fuel have been cut off.
The people of Gaza were already on their knees with 80% of residents reliant on humanitarian aid to survive. Please, can you make a donation into help in their hour of need?
You can donate online, by clicking below, or by calling 01494 897950. Your gift will support Embrace’s Christian partners in the immediate aftermath of this humanitarian crisis and to help to heal the wounds it’s caused across Israel – Palestine.
Sunday Worship
Sunday 1 September 2024
Trinity 14
Green
Readings
James 1.17–27
17 Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.18In fulfilment of his own purpose he gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.
19 You must understand this, my beloved: let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; 20for your anger does not produce God’s righteousness. 21Therefore rid yourselves of all sordidness and rank growth of wickedness, and welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls.
22 But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves. 23For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; 24for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like. 25But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act—they will be blessed in their doing.
26 If any think they are religious, and do not bridle their tongues but deceive their hearts, their religion is worthless. 27Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.
Mark 7.1–8, 14, 15, 21–23
7When the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around Jesus, 2they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. 3(For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; 4and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) 5So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, ‘Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?’
6He said to them, ‘Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written,“This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me;7 in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.”8You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.’
14 Then he called the crowd again and said to them, ‘Listen to me, all of you, and understand: 15there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.
21‘For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: fornication, theft, murder, 22adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. 23All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.
Intercessions
Prayers for others:
John Nicholson
Malcolm Smith
Paulette Thompson
John Peterson
Maria Hawthorn
Herbert Agbeko
Ellis & Pauline Nelson
Michelle Wilson
Peter Wilson
Alan & Maureen Taylor
Irene Foskett
Pat Law
Moe and Mary
Hilary Dixon
Lynn Mosby
Irene Scaife
Baby Alice Rose, Jodie and family
Christina Wilson
Diane Humphrey
Rest in Peace
Lorraine Atkinson
Baptisms
Stephen Davison
If you would like to add someone to the prayer list please email church@benwellscotswood.com
The name will stay on the list for 1 month unless requested to be long-term.
Sermon
Revd Anne
What can we make of today’s reading? St Mark describes a big issue about hand-washing.
When we are children our parents probably insisted we wash our hand before a meal. When we were in lock-down during the Covid epidemic we were instructed to wash our hands very thoroughly – two minutes, back and front and between each finger.
We all see the common sense in such hand-washing. So we may wonder why the disciples were eating their lunch with dirty hands. Why did Jesus respond so angrily to the Jewish people who were criticising them?
To understand we need to know the context.
Their hands were probably as clean as they needed to be to avoid infection. The issue was all about ‘ritual or ceremonial’ washing, a rule which was strictly adhered to by orthodox Jews.
This was not a rule which was written in the scriptures. Ceremonial washing was one of many thousands of rituals created by a class of legal experts, the Scribes, who interpreted the Law of the Torah for daily life. They were part of an oral tradition and were not written down until 3 centuries after Jesus.
The rituals were not about health and hygiene but were designed to demonstrate distinctive Jewishness. To the orthodox Jew, these rituals were the mark of honouring God. Failure to follow them would defile you; would make you unclean and untouchable.
The apparent lack of concern by the disciples for these elaborate rituals was a great excuse for the religious people of the day to criticise Jesus.
So let’s unpack the facts – as Mark invites us to do.
The hand-washing ritual was a very elaborate process involving purified water which had to be poured in a certain way before any food could be touched. Also – if you had been to the market, or near anything unclean, you had to have a complete bath in purified water before you could eat.
Many things were ‘unclean’ – including women after childbirth or if they were bleeding. Non-Jews were unclean, so too those who were sick, lame, deaf, blind, mentally infirm, poor, or homeless. Their illness or disability or misfortune was considered to be the result of sin.
To the devout Jew, the rituals had become sacred. To observe them was to honour God. To break them was sin. So long as they upheld the complicated rituals, they believed they were righteous in the eyes of God, despite their behaviour towards others.
Jesus saw beyond the rituals to the hardness of their hearts. He accuses the learned Jews of the day of making a religion out of the regulations – that the rules had become more important than the spirit of God’s Law.
Jesus quotes a passage from the scriptures:
“This people honours me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me;
Jesus accuses them…‘You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.’
Jesus goes on to tell them that what goes into their mouths is not what defiles them, but what comes out of their mouths.
For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come: like greed, deceit, envy, slander, pride. These evil things come from within, and they defile a person.’
This was extremely revolutionary talk. Jesus’ words would shock the Jews of the day. It is not surprising that they plotted to get rid of him – as a dangerous revolutionary. Jesus stood up to their hypocrisy. Jesus urged his listeners to heed the Spirit of God’s Law in their hearts and minds and in their lives, rather than allow the rituals to be the important thing.
Jesus ignored these rituals many times – he touched and healed the sick, spoke to women and to non-Jews.
Jesus opened God’s Law so that its spirit could breathe again. Jesus opened the gates to freedom – to the lame, the blind, the deaf, the infirm, the mentally disturbed, the refugee, the foreigner, the poor, the homeless. Imagine all our paralympic competitors in France this week – speaking up for disabled people of every kind. Every one of them would be considered ‘unclean’ in Jesus’ day. Jesus was a paralympic champion of the time.
There is a remnant of these rituals in our holy communion – the ritual washing of hands and vessels – but these acts themselves are not the holy things – they simply symbolise the importance of holy communion. We may dress in fine garments, perform careful ceremonial actions as we bless the bread and wine, but this is worth nothing if our hearts are not in tune with God.
We can come up for the bread and wine very devoutly, but it means nothing if our lives fail to reflect God’s love in our daily lives.
We can come to church every Sunday but if during the rest of the week we are critical of our neighbours, if we harbour hatred for our fellow human beings, then church is a sham – we are being hypocrites.
Traditional rites and rituals are helpful, but they exist as reminders of the more important things in life – to live as Christ in the world – with kindness and a generous spirit, with a willingness to forgive and to respect each other.
St Paul tells us: Every generous act of giving is from above, and those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, will be blessed in their doing.
May it be for each and every one of us, that the rituals we share in worship are a true symbol of what must be in our hearts – a love for one another, as God has love for us.