30 Years of Square Meals

February 17, 2019 / admin / 2019, News

The Square Table Luncheon Club celebrated its 30th birthday on Thursday 7 February 2019. In that time, a total of 88,561 meals have been served; a tremendous achievement!

The club, which received a silver commendation award from the Chair of North Tyneside Council in 2015, was set up on 9 February 1989, with the aim of serving reasonably-priced lunches in a friendly and caring environment to church members and members of the local community.

At first the ladies served lunches out of the small kitchen next to the Livingstone Room in the former west wing of the church premises, but after two years, the club had grown so large that it moved to the church hall, with a much larger kitchen. The 2007 improvements to the church premises provided a much more accessible kitchen and toilets, all on the same level as the hall. The club itself has contributed to the running of the premises and improvements to kitchen facilities, and has also been able to donate over £35,000 to good causes.

A varied menu is offered each week. On the anniversary itself, customers could choose from: chicken soup and roll, egg and cress sandwiches with side salad, shepherd’s pie with carrots and peas, arctic pear, tray bakes, tea/coffee/orange juice. The meals are appreciated, and indeed customers sometimes leave tips; over the years these have enabled the club to donate almost £12,000 to St Oswald’s Hospice.

Over the years, many friendships have formed around the lunch tables, although it has been sad to lose some regulars as age caught up with them. The club continues to welcome all comers from 11.30 to 13.15 on Thursdays, with usually 30-40 each week.

Mind the Gap!

February 13, 2019 / admin / Sermons

Sermon by the Reverend Trevor Jamison preached at St Columba’s United Reformed Church, February 10th 2019

Isaiah 6:1-8; Luke 5:1-11; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11

Mind the gap!

Mind the gap between who and what you are and what God chooses to make of you today.

How do you view people in general? Are we generally ok, even though we all have some failings? Alternatively, do you think we are a bad lot, perhaps exhibiting some redeeming features? I once attended a regular meeting for preachers. In conversation we discovered that we lived life on the basis that people are generally good. When it came to sermons, however, we planned and preached on the basis that people are generally bad, the odd sliver of goodness notwithstanding.

And how you view everyone else is related to how you view yourself. Do I see myself as just like the others? If so, it’s important how I regard the others. If the others are generally good, then so am I. If the others are a bad lot, then …

I might believe that I am better than those others, though if I think people in general are terrible, then I might not have a high view of myself. On the other hand, if I believe, or if I have been told, again and again, that others are better than me, then there’s no limit to the potential depths of self-loathing that might be instigated by such unhelpful criticism.

Well, today we encounter three people who see themselves as being at least as bad as others, if not worse. This doesn’t make them sound like positive role models, for our general outlook on life, for our good mental health or in maintaining reasonable levels of self-esteem. Let’s mind the gap, however, between who and what we think we are and what God might choose to make of us today.

Isaiah, Simon (also known as Peter) and Paul: none of them speak highly of themselves here. ‘Woe is me,’ says Isaiah, in this account of a vision received whilst part of a worshipping congregation. ‘I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips.’ At least Isaiah doesn’t see himself as a cut above the others, though he is hardly flattering, either to himself or to the people of Israel.

‘Go away from me Lord,’ says Simon to Jesus at his fisherman’s work place, ‘for I am a sinful man!’ How Peter compares himself to his fellow workers is not recorded.

‘I am the least of the apostles,’ writes Paul to Christians with whom he is at odds over questions relating to resurrection; ‘unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.’

For all three – for Isaiah, Simon and Paul – there is a gap between the people they are supposed to be and the reality of who and what they really are. Many of us will know that feeling and that reality. Importantly though, all three of them know the gap exists or existed. More importantly still, and most importantly of all, each one of them encounters God. And this encounter with God closes the gap between who and what they think they are and what God chooses to make of each of them.

For Isaiah, the encounter with God comes in the context of worship – yes, people really can have an encounter with God in worship! Isaiah’s is a vision of the holiness and glory of God, possibly expressed here in words sung in the temple of his time: ‘Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory.’ And God’s glory confronts Isaiah with his lack of holiness: ‘I am a man of unclean lips.’ God’s grace, however, closes the gap. As the vision continues, God’s seraph acts, with a cleansing touch of the prophet’s lips, and now Isaiah’s ‘guilt has departed’ and his ‘sin is blotted out’.

Simon must have longed for a divine seraph to turn up and blot out his sin when he was confronted with Jesus and an overwhelming catch of fish: ‘Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!’ As was the case with Isaiah, we don’t know why Peter regarded himself as a sinner. Did he recall with shame some specific actions of his own? Alternatively, was it just a general sense of not being the person he was supposed to be? Whatever the case, once again God reaches out. This time the divine touch comes not via a vision of a seraph but in the form of the flesh and blood Jesus, sitting in Simon’s own boat. And just like Isaiah, Simon is called to action. The prophet Isaiah is instructed to speak to the people; the newly recruited disciple, Simon, to go fishing for them.

Paul would sympathise with Isaiah. He might even sympathise with Peter (this time anyway). Paul’s life-changing encounter with God, his road-to-Damascus experience, resonates with what happened to the temple-worshiper and to the Galilean fisherman. Like Isaiah, Paul experiences God reaching out to him in a visionary blaze of glory. Like Peter, Paul’s encounter with the God of the whole earth, the whole universe, the whole of creation, comes through a meeting with Jesus Christ. Yet Paul’s experience was also different to that of the others.

Yes, like Peter in the boat, Paul’s meeting is with Jesus, but it is with the risen Jesus Christ. (Peter also had a meeting with the risen Christ, Paul tells the Corinthian Christians, but that’s another story.) And yes, like Isaiah, Paul’s divine encounter comes in the form of a vision, but in a “we-can’t-quite-put-our finger-upon-it” sort of way, it differs from other visions. Yet for all the other similarities and differences, what really matters is that once again God has reached across the gap between who we are and what God chooses to make of us.

Now I don’t see myself – or any of you – as an improved version of Isaiah, a perfect Peter, or the latest twenty-first century version of the apostle Paul. Reflecting upon myself, observing others, and reading the historical record of humankind suggests to me that you and I are rather average. Like all God’s people we are capable of good but frequently and inevitably fall short of what we should be As Brian Wren puts it so well in one of his hymns, ‘Your living likeness still we bear, though marred, dishonoured, disobeyed.’ ¹

Ultimately, our hope lies not in attempts at self-improvement, though there’s nothing wrong with some of that. Our hope, as Isaiah, Peter and Paul would all attest lies in God reaching out to us, closing the gap between who we are and who God intends us to be. God blots out sin. God sends us off fishing for people. God makes us messengers of good news – apostles.

Perhaps Saint Paul was overegging it a bit, for the purposes of winning an argument, when he said, ‘I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church’: others have done as bad and possibly worse, Paul. But he got this right, as I am sure Isaiah and Peter would have agreed: ‘But by the grace of God [who chooses to close the gap] I am what I am, and God’s grace towards me has not been in vain.’

So, may God continue to close the gap between who we are and what God intends us to be. And may God give us the ability to respond positively, as Isaiah, Peter and Paul once did. Amen.

I Corinthians 15: 1-11, Isaiah 6: 1-8, Luke 5: 1-11

God Gets Angry?

February 5, 2019 / admin / Sermons

Sermon by the Reverend Trevor Jamison preached at St Columba’s United Reformed Church, 3rd February 2019

Jeremiah 1: 4-10; Luke 4: 21-30

When we, the human beings of God’s world, reject God’s messengers, reject God’s will, and reject God, gods-self, what’s God to do? Does God just walk away, muttering something about not getting into a fight: “Just leave them, they’re not worth it”? Alternatively, does God get angry? Is now the time to deploy divine fire and brimstone? Is this my moment for a sermon declaring to you “the wrath of God”; that we are sinners in the hands of an angry God? Or yet again, does God decide not to make a fuss, taking it on the chin; determined to go on loving despite the abuse he receives in a toxic relationship with the humankind?

These questions that come into my mind when I read that prophet Jeremiah is concerned that he is ill-equipped to talk to the people and fears what their response will be should he declare God’s message to them. These questions come into my mind when I read about the reaction of the synagogue congregation in Nazareth, when Jesus, deploying words of the prophet Isaiah, declares God’s message for the people of his day: ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ (4:21)

Jesus, as we heard last week, given the opportunity to read the scripture in his home town synagogue on the sabbath day, read from the prophet Isaiah: ‘the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ (4:18-19) The initial response to the quotation from scripture, and its contemporary application by Jesus’ declaration of its fulfilment, is one of surprise and delight: we never knew he had it in him, especially when you remember who his father is!

Things change, however, when Jesus begins to set out the implications of what he has read and is saying. God, according to Jesus, is as much or more concerned with other people that he is with his supposedly chosen people. Not only that, Jesus deploys the scriptural life stories of Israelite prophets to drive home his point. You think Elijah is one of our great prophets? Well, when he was in danger of starving God provided food for him via a foreign widow-woman in Zarephath. And as far for Elijah’s successor as prophet, Elisha, well he’s best known for healing a Syrian army general Naaman, leaving Israelite lepers to fend for themselves. God has sent me, says Jesus, not as a doctor who heals himself, nor to entertain my home-town folk with wonders. I’m here to look out for those on the margins of your society – the poor, the captives, the blind and the oppressed – and to put foreigners first. That’s God’s will.

And what’s the human response to God’s will, expressed through Jesus of Nazareth? ‘When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him up to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.’ (4:28-29) If this is how things were in earlier times (and they were), you can see why Jeremiah was a bit concerned by God’s intention for him to deliver a message that God was going to pluck up and pull down Jerusalem, destroy and overthrow the kingdom. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, one Jewish tradition is that Jeremiah died by being stoned to death by some who did not like his message. Throwing someone off a cliff, as the Nazareth folk intended to do with Jesus, was a frequent prelude to stoning them to death.

So, what’s God to make of all of that? What are we to make of it and how do we think that God responds to such violent opposition? Make no mistake, this is not just about one incident in Nazareth, two thousand years ago. Wider issues are at stake here. This event encapsulates the life, the message and the ministry of Jesus: for the sake of others, he arrives from God, declares God’s love for the downtrodden and for other people, and then identifies himself with God and God’s message. The people – perhaps particularly the religious people – are enraged by this, turning to violence, and arranging his judicial execution. They are his home town folk, but they are also representative of the whole of humanity, in how it rejects God’s ways, God’s messengers and God’s very self.

That’s how it was then and that’s how it is now. So, what does God do? How does God respond? Well, not with any one of the three responses I have mentioned, but with a combination of two of them; not by walking away, but with a combination of anger and love.

“God is not here,” so the slogan goes, “he is elsewhere, contemplating a less ambitious project.” God has walked away; that’s a widespread, popular view in a society where the majority of people still believe that there is a god, however you define the word “god”, but that this god has little or no impact upon how the world is and how we lead our lives. Such a god has nothing to contribute to the plight of the poor and the sick, the homeless and the oppressed, the victims of violence and torture; nothing to say those at the bottom of the economic and social heap; to those forced to flee from war, drought and famine that has engulfed their homeland.

Now, I believe that that’s a false image of God. Approaching God by way of this Jesus of Nazareth, I believe that God is greatly concerned with the world, including us human beings, and is interested in how we live our lives within that world. I believe that in Jesus God steps into the world to deal with what ails the world, which is closely tied up with how we human behave and misbehave in this world. And I believe that Jesus’s death and resurrection is central to how God deals with what is wrong; wrongness that moves God both to anger and to love. Somehow, through the death and resurrection of Jesus, which is the pivotal moment in a bigger story, God reconciles us, reconciles the world, with all our flaws, to God’s perfect self. The technical term here is “the atonement” – the action that brings about our “at-one-ment” with God.

Some people’s understandings of this atonement – our being made one with God – emphasise how the cross of Jesus deals with God’s anger, God’s wrath. For them, Jesus’s death turns aside or absorbs the anger of God over neglect of the poor, captives and the oppressed in Jesus’s time. It does the same with regard to God’s anger over our shortcomings, our sin, our actions that hurt others; our disregard for God and opposition to God, which puts us in solidarity with those who were enraged by Jesus and sought to destroy him.

You will find a good example of that understanding of the work of Jesus and the cross of Christ in the hymn we are going to sing after this sermon, Stuart Townend’s, In Christ alone my hope is found. I really like many of Stuart Townend’s hymns; twenty-first century singable tunes, combined with words that clearly express a strong Christian theological message. Whilst I like his hymns, however, most of them contain a line that I find difficult or wish he had not written – you just can’t please some people!

In Christ alone is no exception. In verse two I happily sing, “In Christ alone – who took on flesh, fullness of God in helpless Babe! This gift of love and righteousness, scorned by the ones he came to save.” Then I find myself hesitating, if not choking, on the next line, “till on that cross as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied, for every sin on him was laid; here in the death of Christ I live.”

I understand that Stuart Townend forbids all attempts by hymn book publishers to amend that line; publish it unchanged or you don’t get to publish it. I respect and understand that. After all, what’s the appropriate feeling about child abuse, sexual violence, the Holocaust, racially inspired violence, injustice towards those without power, and a host of other wrongs. Don’t you feel angry about them? I do! If you see these things in the world, or experience them, and you don’t feel angry I fear that there’s something wrong with you. AND, if God is not angered by these things then I would think, surely there’s something wrong with God. Yes, I fear God’s anger, God’s wrath, but not as much as I would fear a God who knows no anger in the face of such things.

The reason though that I hesitate or choke at singing that on the “cross the as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied,” is that I believe it does not tell the whole story of God. The God who gets angry is the God who is loving, just as the God who is loving is the God who gets angry: for love of the abused, the violated, the murdered, the victims, God gets angry. It won’t work, as some think it is ok to do, to take the word, “wrath” out of the hymn and replace it with love: “as Jesus died, the love of God was satisfied,” even if that feels more comfortable to me and to you. Where is the justice for the victims of this world if there is no judgement; no divine anger or wrath.

If you want to see why that is so, consider this story, one told to me by a child protection social worker: “A man was going down the road when he was set upon by robbers. They beat him, stripped him, and stole his possessions, leaving him lying in his own blood. A church minister came down the road, and seeing the man, crossed over to the other side and carried on without stopping. A church member came down the road, and seeing the man, hurried by on the other side. Finally, a social worker came along the road, saw the man, rushed over to his side, observed his sad condition, and said, ‘Whoever did this to you … really needs help.’” Love without justice is insufficient.

On the other hand, anger, divine or human, without love, won’t work either. Part of the bad reputation that some churches have, and which affects all churches today to some extent, relates to our long tradition of enthusiastic preaching about the wrath of God. Sometimes the enthusiasm with which this has been preached is as much a symptom of human shortcoming as it has been an observation of it. I remember one preacher I heard who catalogued the horrors that awaited those who did not accept that God’s wrath had been dealt with through the suffering of Jesus of Christ. He then said, “don’t think I enjoy telling you these things” … but he did.

So, what shall we sing when we get to verse two of the hymn? Here’s my suggestion. When you get to the line, “as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied,” make a choice. Choose either to sing “the wrath of God” or choose to sing “the love of God.” I don’t care which one you choose. I do care that next time we sing the hymn you remember whether you chose “wrath” or “love” this time, and you then sing the other one. At the cross, through the death of Jesus, God is dealing with the ways of the world that anger God, and saving the world that God loves.

We are told that having on this occasion escaped those who would kill him, Jesus ‘went on his way’ (4:21) Ultimately, of course, he went on his way to the cross, where God’s anger with all which is wrong is swept up into God’s saving love for the world. Thanks be to God: Amen.

Jeremiah 1: 4-10, Luke 4: 21-30

Water, Wine and Belief

January 20, 2019 / admin / Sermons

Sermon by the Reverend Trevor Jamison, 20/01/2019

John 2: 1-12

John 2: 11: ‘So Jesus performed at Cana-in-Galilee the first of the signs which revealed his glory and led his disciples to believe in him.’ Well you would do, wouldn’t you? If you met someone who could do something like that right before your eyes, and there was no possibility that it was some sort of conjuring trick but rather that here was a person with command over the elements of God’s creation, you would believe in him.

You would believe in in him, not just because he can do something impressive – dreadful people can do impressive things – but because in turning water to wine Jesus demonstrates divine power over creation. And he does so in a way that expresses love: love for the mother who draws the need to his attention.; love for the unnamed couple whose wedding day might be spoiled; love for a crowd of guests, his own disciples included: ‘So Jesus performed at Cana-in-Galilee the first of the signs which revealed his glory and led his disciples to believe in him.’

Yet something that puzzles me. John has already told us in the first chapter of his Gospel Jesus had already attracted disciples – followers, pupils. Why then are we told that when he performed this sign, when he turned water into wine and kept the wedding party on track, that this led his disciples ‘to believe in him’?

Didn’t they believe in him already? If not, why were they following him and why were they described as his disciples? We are told, Andrew, having previously met with Jesus, had sought out Simon Peter, his brother, to inform him, ‘we have found the Messiah.’ (1: 41) Nathaniel, when introduced to Jesus by Philip, heard what Jesus had to say, responding with a declaration: ‘you are the Son of God; you are the king of Israel’. Isn’t that enough believing? Yet, as we have heard in this morning’s reading, when Jesus performed the first of these signs that revealed his glory it ‘led his disciples to believe in him.’

As I ponder that conundrum three things come to mind. You shouldn’t be surprised that three things come to mind – this is a sermon, after all! The first thing that comes to mind is that there is room within the company of those who follow Jesus for those who don’t believe. We don’t know which disciples came to belief at that wedding party. Were Andrew and Peter, Philip and Nathaniel amongst those who now came to faith? Perhaps, but by the time the wedding day came around others had tagged on to this new group of people following Jesus; people whose understanding and commitment was more limited.

In recent years, we have begun to rethink, in the light of experience, the process by which people come to faith in Jesus as their Saviour and Lord. Until relatively recently we worked with a model that assumed that people came to faith somehow, perhaps through some evangelistic event, where the message ‘clicked’ and as a result they started coming along to church. Asking people who have made a public declaration of their Christian faith how they come to that point reveals a different story as far as most of them are concerned. The process seems more often to flow in the opposite direction. Generally, people don’t come to faith and so come to church; people come into the life of the church and then come to faith. My bet is that this is the way things worked for most of us who are here in this church building today.

That makes sense in the context of this verse from John’s Gospel. People were attracted to Jesus and what he said and did, but they were not yet personally committed to him either as ‘messiah’ or as ‘Son of God’. For such people this sign, this change of water to wine, was a significant moment in the process of a change that had been taking place in their lives. Indeed, it was so significant it was worthy of explicit mention by John, that they came to ‘believe in him’.

It also makes sense then, today, that every church congregation ought to contain people who do not believe, for within fellowships like this one those who do not yet believe can have the opportunity to discover the things they need to do in order to come to belief. In fact, if this congregation does not contain non-believers then it is time to get worried, for how else do we expect significant numbers of people to come to belief? Some people love to tell me, ‘you don’t have to go to church to be a Christian’. Usually I reply, ‘and you don’t have to be a Christian to go to church’; today, I feel I’ve been saying the right thing.

So, firstly, there is room in the church for those who do not believe. Secondly, there is always room for those who do believe to believe differently. One of the implications of Jesus attracting a group of followers who were at different stages of belief and who came from different backgrounds is that there must be room in a church for people to believe differently.

Some years ago, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I attended the Queen’s University of Belfast, I was having a conversation with a fellow student. In those days, as today to a large extent, many young people from Protestant backgrounds did not meet or make friends with Roman Catholics until after they had emerged from the de facto segregated schooling system. My friend was (and still is) a committed Roman Catholic Christian, and she was telling me that she had been to an ecumenical event – daring for the time – where a Protestant clergyman had been preaching on this Gospel passage where Jesus turns water into wine. When I asked what she thought about the sermon – Irish Presbyterians always want to know what you think about the sermon – she shared with me her shock at what had been said, or not said: ‘Trevor’, she told me, ‘you won’t believe it, but not once – not once! – did he make any mention of the fact that Jesus performed this sign because his mother, Mary, asked him to do so.’

How many of us, I wonder, have given great thought to the importance of the role of the Blessed Virgin Mary in getting her son, Jesus, to do something about the wine crisis at the wedding at Cana in Galilee? My guess is ‘not too many’ and yet, there it is, in black and white, in the verses of scripture that we United Reformed Church folk declare is ‘the highest authority for what believe and do … God’s Word in the Bible, alive for his people today through the help of the Spirit.’ (From Statement Concerning the Nature, faith and Order of the United Reformed Church – R&S 760)

There must be room in the church, amongst Jesus’ disciples, for people to believe differently, not just so we discover how to avoid some of the conflicts and suffering that comes when those of different beliefs meet together, but positively, because through the different beliefs of others our belief in Jesus can grow and mature, and, hopefully, so can theirs.

So, in the church, among the group of Jesus’s disciples, there must be room for those who do not believe, there must be room for those who believe differently, and thirdly, there must be room for us to believe more.

I’m still thinking about those calculations about how much wine Jesus provided for the wedding guests if it was produced on a one-to-one ratio with the amount of water in the jars: a one-thousand-wine-bottle-sized miracle. Some people wonder why St John records this event in his Gospel. I’m more surprised that anyone was capable of remembering the wedding itself, never mind remembering the drinks crisis or the identity of the miraculous wine supplier. The question is, ‘how open are we to being surprised?’ How much room do we have for more belief, not less? How ready, for example, to acknowledge Jesus as Saviour and Lord of creation, not just of its human element; not just the people like you and me.

Through custom and practice people talk of about ‘laws of nature’, as if that description is simple “common sense”; taking for granted that nature of itself is all that exists and matters; that we human beings can, in our greatness, discern the set of “laws” that govern its course, and that through utilising them we can govern it. With that sort of belief or conviction, water turned to wine makes no sense at all. It just does not happen. The laws of nature say so.

Is that how we understand ‘creation’? “Creation” is a rather different word from “nature”. “Creation” presupposes a Creator. A Creator could decide to introduce a variation into their creation on occasion – variety’s the spice of life we’re told. A Creator can do things for the Creator’s own good reason – maybe even that it would be fun to do so. Is it a problem for you to picture God doing something fun? It’s the Creator that makes the laws – the rules – not the laws which control a Creator.

And if this Creator – let’s call her God – should decide to inhabit his own creation and do so in the person of one human being – let’s call him Jesus – who knows what Jesus might do on occasion, even if that has the effect of surprising us, perhaps even making us feel uncomfortable? And John tells us in his Gospel that Jesus, with his mother’s prompting, transformed water into wine, and as a result, some who followed him also put their belief in him; belief in him as Messiah as the beloved child of the God of creation.

Today, then, in this church, among this group of people who are known to follow Jesus, there is room for those who do not (yet!?) believe. In this travelling company of Jesus-followers there is room for those who believe differently, and as a result, we others also may in turn come to come to believe differently. In the company of Jesus, who turns water into wine, there is room to believe more; more about God, more about the Lord of this creation, discovered anew in Jesus; someone to believe in and to follow today.

‘Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

John 2: 1-12, water into wine, wedding at Cana

Being Connected

January 19, 2019 / admin / Sermons

Sermon by Reverend Trevor Jamison, preached 13/01/2019
Isaiah 43:1-7; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
Preached on a Sunday when the power company had turned off the electricity in order to carry out work in the area around the church.

So, here we are on the first Sunday after Epiphany. If you were here last week, you’ll remember that “epiphany” is about making something that has been obscure apparent or manifest; that there are three Sundays in this short epiphany season where we remember three occasions where something is made apparent about Jesus. Last week it was the light of the star that revealed Jesus as a king. Next week it will be about Jesus’s first public “sign” in John’s Gospel – turning water into wine. This week it’s about Jesus’s baptism. What does the baptism of Jesus tell us about him? What does that tell us about our own baptism? Also, how does having the electricity turned off help us with any of that?

Well, the baptism of Jesus tells us about how he was well-connected (unlike the church this morning): with the world, with people, with God. And that in turn suggests that when we think about and so “remember” our baptism we too should consider our connection to the world, our connection with other people, and our connection God.

‘When Jesus also had been baptised …’ (3:21) What do you need in order to have a baptism? Water! No water = no baptism; it’s a very simply equation. Actually, you need a bit more than water. You also need the earth, the land. Fish don’t carry out baptisms, if for no other reason than that they are always swimming around in water. For the water to be notable you need it to be different. Jesus’s baptism takes place in the Jordan river – water – but the Jordan is known for coming between two bits of land, one of them the “Promised Land” that the Jewish people had entered centuries before.

Not only do you need water and land, you also need a living creature for there to be a baptism. No God-created creature, no baptism. So, in being baptised, Jesus is connected with creation. He, a created being, is standing on land in the midst of water, which itself depends on an eco-system of rain falling and springs rising. Jesus is well-connected with creation.

And Jesus is revealed to be connected to humankind: ‘when all the people were baptised, and when Jesus also had been baptised.’ (3:21) This was no private baptism for Jesus got baptised in company with other people. Other people were looking on, and witnessing it. If you want to find one of the reasons why in the Reformed Church tradition baptism normally takes place in the context of public worship (as we are due to do both in February and in March this year) then you could do worse than look at this event in Luke’s Gospel.

We often say that in Jesus Christ God came to be with us fellow human beings; the name “Emmanuel”, which is attributed to him in Matthew’s Gospel, means, “God with us”. And here in Luke’s Gospel we see Jesus at his baptism in the company of others, and the others, according to the Gospels were a pretty varied crew, not just the religiously observant and respectable people of their day. Yes, the focus is on Jesus’s baptism, but it’s a baptism undertaken in company with, connected to, other human beings.

And Jesus is revealed not only to be connected to creation and connected to humankind but also to be connected with God; so closely connected that it seems like we are connecting with God, “godself” when we connect with Jesus: ‘and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven. “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’ (3:22-23)

It’s often said, because it’s true, that the phrase “The Holy Trinity” is found nowhere in the Bible. But there are several places in the New Testament – and here’s one of them – where you can see why the Church has developed this doctrine. Here we are, as far away from God, from heaven as you can get. In fact, even trying to describe earth and heaven in spatial terms – here and there – does not really express the difference. So how do we connect with God? We connect with God because God chooses to connect with us through Jesus; to step into or unto the earth in a human being. Then, when Jesus has gone from the earth – crucified, risen and returned to “heaven” – we still have a conviction of the continuing presence of God in our lives; God’s Spirit at work in us.

To try to explain all of that we come up with something like understanding God as Trinity – Father [Parent], Son and Holy Spirit. And Jesus’s baptism is a biblical occasion when we get a glimpse of divine interconnectedness – a voice from heaven, a person in the Jordan, the Spirit on him in the form of a dove.

So, since Jesus’s baptism reveals or makes apparent that he is connected with creation, connected with humankind, connected with the God of heaven and the God still here on earth, that should make us think about our own baptism.

You and I have been baptised with water here on earth, as God-loved, God-created creatures – we are connected with the rest of creation. We are baptised in the name of Jesus and in imitation of Jesus, and in the setting of the public worship of the Church; we are connected with humankind. We are baptised in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; our baptism connects us to God.

To know that we are connected with creation, with each other, with God, then, needs to effect how we see and how treat and respond to the world that we inhabit; affects how we relate to the other people with whom we share that world; affects how we understand the God who created all of us; made known to us in Jesus Christ, including upon the occasion of his baptism.

Isaiah 43: 1-7, Jesus' Baptism, Luke 3: 15-17 and 21-22

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