One of the downsides of being part of a church tradition that doesn’t follow a liturgy or weekly church calendar is that sometimes you miss out on unusual events that can help us to look at all life from a spiritual perspective. One of these (perhaps rather odd) traditions is ‘Plough Sunday’, which this year will be on 10th January 2021. I’d never heard of it until this week! (I can’t believe I’ve never even heard it on The Archers!)

Plough Sunday is the day in the Anglican year when a plough was traditionally brought into the sanctuary and the community dedicated their ploughing to God, seeking his help and his blessing on the work that was so vital to their very existence. Can you imagine it? A plough in the church building?! If ever we needed a visual reminder that God is interested in our everyday lives and what goes on outside our church meetings, this is it!

Perhaps if we did this kind of thing in our church, a plough wouldn’t be needed to represent our work (we don’t have any farmers in our congregation), but other items could be brought: memory sticks and corporate coffee mugs, ladders and a mop, van keys and Allen keys, schoolbooks, robots and engineering equipment… all brought by the people who use them in their week. And each person could dedicate the work of their hands – home and away – to the Lord their God, in the hearing of their fellow believers. And each person could be commissioned for their work, in the presence of their fellow believers.

So come prepared on 10th January at 6 p.m. with your ‘ploughs’! You can show us them via Zoom or we can have a ‘show and tell’ in our service as we think about the role of work in our everyday lives and remember that our whole lives belong to God, not just a couple of hours on a Sunday. As Mark Greene says, ‘this communal act will quietly subvert the self-vaunting ideology of our age, that it is by algorithms and systems, hi-tech and nano-tech, human strength and human ingenuity that nature yields its bounty and that economies and nations thrive. As we go into the new year, Plough Sunday reminds us of our total dependence on God, and that, whatever we do, with him we plough a different furrow.’

None of us knows what this new year will bring (nothing new there, even if perhaps this year the shadow of 2020 makes us more apprehensive about that fact.) But we do know that God cares about every aspect of our lives and is as interested in the plough as the altar, as interested in our work lives as in the worship we bring in our church buildings. Let’s celebrate our work and bring it to God as an offering to Him.

As we approach the end of 2020 and the advent of a new year, many of us feel more nervous and apprehensive than usual. This past year has been so unusual and ‘unprecedented’ (surely one of the words we never want to hear again!) that our usual nostalgia at the end of a year has been replaced by trepidation and anxiety: Government announcements (another one due today…) with yet more restrictions on our lives, rising infection rates, new mutations of the virus… the headlines continue to be dominated by bad news in one form or another. Many are pinning their hopes on the new vaccines, but others are still wary about what 2021 will bring, and so it can be difficult to feel positive about this new decade.

We’ve seen snow and ice this week, and that always gets me thinking about slipping and falling (you can tell I’m getting older now… I managed to slide down a muddy hill on Monday, losing my footing even before the snow and ice!) Many of us can readily identify with Asaph’s feelings in Ps 73: ‘But as for me, my feet had almost slipped; I had nearly lost my foothold.‘ (Ps 73:2) His situation was caused by envy of those who seemed to do better without God than he was doing with Him. We might well identify with him in that regard too; certainly, many of us may feel that we are standing on very insecure ground right now.

And yet when we read the Bible, that is not at all the picture we get. Doubt and fear certainly feature in Scripture, but God does not want us to dwell in that place. Many of the psalms are resolute and confident:

“Surely the righteous will never be shaken;
    they will be remembered forever.
⁷ They will have no fear of bad news;
    their hearts are steadfast, trusting in the Lord.
⁸ Their hearts are secure, they will have no fear;
    in the end they will look in triumph on their foes.
⁹ They have freely scattered their gifts to the poor,
    their righteousness endures forever;
    their horn will be lifted high in honour.” (Ps 112:6-9)

Jesus spoke of us having a sure foundation in Him: ‘everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock.‘ (Matt 7:24)

Other psalms, like Ps 91 and Ps 121, are similarly confident that no matter what may come against us, God is with us and for us, and that truth brings security and hope.

We always have a choice: will we listen to the news, to the doomsayers, to those who have no faith, or will we listen to God when He tells us that we can live without fear of bad news? God never promises us a trouble-free life (quite the contrary, in fact), but He does promise to walk with us through every trial (see Is 43:2-7, John 16:33). Because of this, we can face 2021 with courage, hope and (if I may be so bold) holy defiance and a steady heart.

Garry continued his series on Joseph this morning, looking at Gen 37:5-11. In this passage, we read of a young Joseph having two dreams where sheaves of wheat bow down to him and the sun, moon and eleven stars also bow down to him. We do not know how he told his brothers and father (simply with amazement or with something of a smug bragging), but this revelation further exacerbated the poor relations between Joseph and his brothers. They hated him all the more because of these dreams which overturned the normal order of things, meaning that the younger would receive the homage normally reserved for the oldest in a family; he was odious to them and their anger further bubbled up (eventually resulting in their plot to sell him into slavery.)

Whether anger erupts (like road rage or a ‘red mist’ descending) or is cold and settled, God wants us to know the self-control of the Holy Spirit so that we do not sin in our anger. (Eph 4:26) He wants us to learn to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matt 5:44). Joseph is a type of Jesus in that Jesus came to His own people, but they hated Him and rejected Him, even as his own family rejected Joseph (see Luke 4:28-30, John 5:16-18, Mark 3, Matt 16:21).

Joseph reminds us that God can speak to and through each one of us (see Joel 2:28-31). We should expect God to speak to us through dreams and visions (as He did with Joseph’s namesake in the Christmas story). These must be weighed and judged (see 1 Cor 14:29), but we should seek God for these spiritual gifts because we need God to speak in this way nowadays as well.

Jacob sent Joseph to check on his brothers (Gen 37:14) who were shepherds, looking after sheep. Luke 20:9-13 again shows us how this is an allegory of Jesus, for God sent prophets to HIs people time and time again, but even when He sent His own Son, Jesus was rejected. There are many different views of salvation and redemption, but it is not true that God the Father acts as a ‘cosmic child abuser’ punishing His Son or that salvation is like a bus driver choosing to run over the one boy rather than hurt a bus-ful of passengers when the brakes on the bus fail. Such analogies fail to understand the unity of the Trinity, of how God the Father worked out His plan of salvation (see Is 53:10, Acts 2:22-23) and how the Son willingly came to give His own life (Gal 1:3-4, Eph 5:1-2, Heb 10.) Just as Joseph was sent to help his brothers, so too Jesus was sent to help us, but He went willingly, praying for God’s will to be done. We can be grateful that our atonement is secured through His sacrifice on the cross (1 John 4:9-10) and can learn much about our deliverance as we ponder the way God spoke to and used Joseph.

On Christmas morning we looked at the phrase ‘Christmas is for the children!’ There’s no doubt that the joy and excitement children feel over this festive period is wonderful to behold, and it’s understandable that we associate Christmas with children since it’s the time when we celebrate God in human form, coming as a helpless, vulnerable baby. But even though we may associate Christmas with children, it’s definitely not just for the children.

Christmas is for everyone. It’s a time when we marvel again at God’s way of doing things, at how salvation comes in the form we don’t expect (a baby, not a ruling king) and in a place we don’t really expect (a manger in a stable in a town called Bethlehem, rather in Jerusalem, the seat of royal power.) Isaiah prophesied about this hundreds of years before it happened (Isaiah 11:1-9), looking ahead to a time when ‘the wolf will live with the lamb,  the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them.’ (Is 11:6) So we need to embrace the wonder, innocence, awe and joy of children (see Matt 18:3, Matt 19:15) whilst understanding that Christmas holds meaning way beyond the glitz, glamour, presents and fairy-tales associated with it. Christmas is good news all year round, and we need to ‘go, tell it from the mountain! Over the hills and everywhere! Go, tell it on the mountain, that Jesus Christ is born!’ Shake those instruments, dance around and sing it loud. We’ve got good news for everyone!

“Who dares despise the day of small things?” (Zech 4:10)

In looking back over 2020, probably the strangest year I have experienced in my fifty-four years on earth, I am struck by feelings of helplessness and inadequacy in the face of such tumultuous changes to life as we once knew it. Our vocabulary has had to accommodate new meanings to words such as ‘bubble’ and ‘distancing’, and we have all become amateur epidemiologists as we’ve watched daily news briefings about Covid-19. In the face of ongoing isolation and separation, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by helplessness, and that adapting to such situations is impossible.

When churches first closed in March, we were thrust forcibly into the world of livestreaming and Zoom in order to maintain any semblance of normality. With no previous experience of either, conducting a church service felt like a disaster waiting to unfold. The services were shorter, but by the end of them, I felt like I had run a marathon and just wanted to curl up in a corner and cry. The day that Zoom itself actually crashed and we ended up livestreaming via Facebook on my phone while people were phoning and texting that same phone to tell us they couldn’t log on to Zoom felt like I would explode. Seeing people on screen left me in tears most Sundays. I was grateful for this means of contact, but at the same time, it hurt so much that this was all I could have; I yearned for more.

Many churches have done amazing things this year, especially with recording separately and editing together to make beautiful worship sets, whereas Garry and I would be in the building, him playing the guitar, us singing to a congregation where the Internet speed and ‘lag’ made it virtually impossible for them to sing along. Inadequacy gnawed away even as we became used to manipulating different devices (“we used three devices today!” Garry declared triumphantly in the second lockdown). What good could this possibly do?

In the run-up to Easter, I bought reams of brown paper and wrapped up craft sets to post out to local families. Could this really do any good? Over the year, this scenario was repeated at key times as we desperately tried to keep in touch with people we would usually see on a weekly basis. Later, we would manage to actually distribute these things in person with a military-style operation of time slots to avoid unnecessary mixing of households. Pointless or helpful? It was hard to know.

Singing nursery rhymes to a picture of yourself, praying while talking to a phone on a music stand, sending packets of seeds to people as a reminder that life goes on beyond our present misery – these have been some of the bizarre things this year has brought. Every prophetic act has seemed utterly crazy and wholly inadequate in the face of ongoing doom and gloom all around us. Our last venture into technology (recording a Nativity in different locations and editing it together) was another exercise in faith, because with our limited skills and resources, this was never going to be the blockbuster which went viral for which I secretly longed.

This year, more than ever, has forced me to understand that ministry is never about performance but all about service done with love. I feel, almost daily, wholly inadequate to serve my local church and local area, but this verse from Zechariah, along with Matt 10:13 and the promise that even giving a cup of cold water to someone will not go unrewarded, have helped me to maintain some kind of perspective. If we sow in faith, then we will indeed reap a harvest. (Ps 126:5-6) I know first-hand that small things mean a lot: the cards and flowers received when my father died helped me to stay grounded in love; gifts of appreciation such as this cross-stitch plaque and flower arrangement have helped me to keep going:

So do not dare to despise small things. Whilst individually these may seem insignificant and even irrelevant, when sown with faith and love, each small act of random kindness and faith can produce a harvest of righteousness, peace and hope. After all, it’s from the tiny acorns that mighty oaks do grow.