8/9/24
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 11am - Hub service at St James (Parish Eucharist)
4pm - St Margaret's Evening Prayer
Tuesday
No bible study this week
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!
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
Trinity 15
Green
Readings
James 2.1–10 [11–13] 14–17
2My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favouritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ?2For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, 3and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, ‘Have a seat here, please’, while to the one who is poor you say, ‘Stand there’, or, ‘Sit at my feet’,4have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts? 5Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters. Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? 6But you have dishonoured the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court? 7Is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you?
8 You do well if you really fulfil the royal law according to the scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ 9But if you show partiality, you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors. 10For whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it.
[11For the one who said, ‘You shall not commit adultery’, also said, ‘You shall not murder.’ Now if you do not commit adultery but if you murder, you have become a transgressor of the law. 12So speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty. 13For judgement will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgement.]
14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? 15If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, 16and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? 17So faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead.
Mark 7.24–37
24 Jesus went away to the region of Tyre. He entered a house and did not want anyone to know he was there. Yet he could not escape notice, 25but a woman whose little daughter had an unclean spirit immediately heard about him, and she came and bowed down at his feet. 26Now the woman was a Gentile, of Syrophoenician origin. She begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter. 27He said to her, ‘Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ 28But she answered him, ‘Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.’ 29Then he said to her, ‘For saying that, you may go—the demon has left your daughter.’ 30So she went home, found the child lying on the bed, and the demon gone.
31 Then he returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon towards the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. 32They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. 33He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. 34Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, ‘Ephphatha’, that is, ‘Be opened.’ 35And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly. 36Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. 37They were astounded beyond measure, saying, ‘He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak.’
Intercessions
Prayers for others:
Lawrence Okonkwo
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
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 Chris
“Faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead”.
This passage holds no punches.
The letter of James is one of those books of the Bible that is hotly disputed. Martin Luther, the great protestant reformer, once said “I almost feel like throwing Jimmy into the stove” because he didn’t believe this letter was authentic. He struggled to accept anything as scripture that might contradict the idea of salvation being dependent on faith alone. He believed we are saved by Jesus and are welcomed into his kingdom on the basis of whether we have faith, and not on the basis of how good we are. He therefore took issue with James’ idea that faith needs works.
*
I think Martin Luther is wrong of course. Not about ‘salvation by faith alone’. We do become part of God’s eternal kingdom only because God has chosen to love us, to redeem us and reconcile the whole world to himself through his power, because none of us are strong enough to do it ourselves. Salvation is through faith. But I disagree with Martin Luther that James contradicts that idea. Not least of all because Luther’s view is based on extreme antisemitism - he believed that James was displaying a Jewish point of view that Christians still needed to follow the law of the Old Testament. This is just not true.
*
Either way, this little letter, written almost 2000 years ago, delivers a powerful punch that declares how much God cares about justice and how he wants our world to be transformed. James has no fear about turning the social order upside down to do this, he says:
Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him? 6But you have dishonoured the poor. Is it not the rich who oppress you? Is it not they who drag you into court?
More than anything else the Bible emphasises the need to care for the poorest and to show no partiality in who is valued. We can debate forever about morality and which commandments to follow, but this one thing I think is indisputable. Yet somehow it is the thing that the church manages to gloss over and ignore time and time again.
*
Poverty is always relative. What makes someone poor is only by comparison to what the rich have. We are often told that Benwell and Scotswood is a poor area of Newcastle. Which it is by comparison to other parts of the city and the country, we have struggles here that no-one should have to go through. But by comparison to the early church, we are much richer with safer homes and longer lives. Even today, by comparison to our link diocese in Botswana, we are very rich, we have much more resources, wealth, and infrastructure. Yet Botswana, in comparison to other African countries, is rich, they have access to healthcare, natural resources and infrastructure. To tackle poverty is to always be working for a more equal and better society from whatever our starting point, a society without inequality, and with dignity for all.
*
One thing that we have here in Benwell and Scotswood that we are so rich in, is community, there aren’t many communities in the country as diverse as this, yet people know each other and help each other. And our churches are part of that. We must keep being part of that. James says:
14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but do not have works? Can faith save you? 15If a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food, 16and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and eat your fill’, and yet you do not supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that?
We live this here. We are so rich in our community because of it, and we must keep sharing those riches.
*
The question is whether we are being complicit in the oppression of the poor, whether we keep people poor by helping them. By stepping in where government services should, we could be giving an excuse for the authorities not to take responsibility and improve things. And that is true to a certain extent, every week there is at least one thing that happens that we shouldn’t have to deal with, something that social services, the Council, the Home Office should deal with. And that makes me angry. But I believe we must not stop doing it, because I believe in strong communities.
I believe that things should be better, and I believe that if we are strong as a community then we can advocate for those who can’t do it for themselves, we can help each other when we can’t help ourselves, together we can demand a world that is better than the one we know.
*
I have faith in God, and I have faith that God is here in Benwell and Scotswood, in us. We are by no means perfect, but we are alive – we can see it because we love God and we love our neighbours.
Over the next few weeks we will be talking about money in our generosity campaign, we will be asking people to give what they can, because the fact is it does cost money to do what we do. But the aim is not money in itself, we are not looking for comfort and security. The aim is to be a team of four churches where we God is present and that transforms the world around us. We want you to partake in doing this by offering, time, prayer and, only if you can, money. This is a place where our faith is alive, because you make it so, we want you to believe in what we do and we want it to continue and to grow.
*
This is a place we can partake in the transforming kingdom of God by building it with love, with faith. This is shown in the works of making cups of coffee, and dance classes, and art, and socials, and foodbanks and more. We must continue to be a place where people can encounter God and encounter their neighbours, because then we are a strong community, then we are a community where God is visible, where we treat individuals with dignity as children of God, made in his image.
We are strong, we are rich in our love, and we are alive.