Morning Prayer Wednesday, 10 February 2021
Good morning everyone on this Wednesday morning. The days are getting longer but the weather is still somewhat chilly. Let us not get too miserable about it, we need all the seasons, so let us spend some time giving thanks for our beautiful world.
Bless the Lord, O my soul, O Lord my God, how excellent is your greatness.
You are clothed in majesty and honour, wrapped in light as in a garment.
You spread out the heavens like a curtain and lay the beams of your dwelling place in the above.
You send the springs into the brooks which run among the hills.
They give drink to every beast of the field, and the wild asses quench their thirst.
O Lord how manifold are your works!
In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.
There is the sea, spread far and wide,
and there move creatures beyond number both small and great.
There go the ships, and there is that Leviathan which you have made to play in the deep.
All these look to you to give them food in due season.
When you give it to them they gather it; you open your hand and they are filled with good.
When you hide your face they are troubled;
when you take away their breath they die and return to the dust.
When you send forth your spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the earth.
Psalm 104 verses 1-3, 11-12, 26-32
Creator God, send your Holy Spirit to renew this living world,
that the whole of creation, in its groaning and striving, may know your loving purpose
and come to reflect your glory in Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen
(Jesus is teaching that the Tradition of the Elders contains so many elaborations that they can obscure the original intention, if ‘taken to the letter’.)
Then he called the crowd again and said to them, ‘Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that can defile but the things that come out are what defile.’
When he had left the crowd and entered the house, his disciples asked him about the parable. He said to them, ‘Then do you also fail to understand? Do you nor see that whatever goes into a person from outside cannot defile, since it enters not the heart but the stomach, and goes out into the sewer?’ (Thus he declared all foods clean). And he said, ‘it is what comes out of a person that defiles. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come; fornication ,theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly. All these things come from within, and they defile a person.
Mark chapter 7 verses 14-23
The psalm sings about how we can see the greatness of God in creation and that all life springs from God. The gospel considers the ways in which we as humans fail to live in harmony with God’s creation, our ill treatment of it and in our failure to relate with love and generosity to one another.
I read an article in The Economist last weekend on a government funded paper by Professor Partha Dasgupta, of Cambridge University researching possible ways of measuring our natural environment. It considers the capacity of ‘nature’ both to replenish the resources we take and to remedy the pollution we put back into the earth’s air, land and oceans. The article had this sentence which has remained in my thoughts:
‘The demand humans currently place on nature in terms of resource extraction and the dumping of harmful waste, are roughly equivalent to the sustainable output of 1.6 Earths (of which, alas, there is only one.)’ (‘The Natural Question’, The Economist 6 February 2021)
The pandemic has thrown many of our assumptions about how we conduct our civic and economic life as a community into confusion. Will we continue to buy our goods and services on-line and work more from our homes to earn our living? Will the health of our people and the education of the coming generations still feature so highly in the thoughts of our politicians? Will the price we pay for food and other goods and the services we need reflect sufficiently the damage/ benefit to the environment that they cause?
I think that we will need a new set of values, which brings me back to the story in the gospel; “What defiles us, our consumption or our contribution or both?” In our current secular society we appear to ignore all those options.
Let us pray for the world wide church, in China entering a new year, in the southern hemisphere thinking of harvest and a new academic year, in the north thinking of Spring and a new year in the garden. Now that we are using modern communication for our worship and life together we are not bound in one location. Let us pray for a greater feeling that we are part of a worldwide family and not stuck in one cultural tradition or one language.
We are coming up towards Lent and in Christ the Cornerstone we are following a scheme prepared by the Methodist Church with the title ‘Woven – God’s Story, Your Story, Every Story’. This will be a chance to look afresh at our approach to our spiritual life. This evening there is a zoom meeting to launch the Mission Partnership venture called ‘The Vine’ to consider new ways of discipleship for us.
Last Sunday’s gospel had the words of our Lord saying, ’Let us go somewhere else to the nearby neighbourhoods..’, so let us remember our intention to create a virtual Christian community in Campbell Park, initially by taking some of our daily exercise there with one other person and as soon as we can gather in larger groups to take bigger steps. Let us pray for these ventures and all the work of the church to be active even in lock-down.
Almighty God, you have created the heavens and the earth and made us in your own image: teach us to discern your hand in all your works and your likeness in all your children; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord who with you and the Holy Spirit reigns supreme over all things, now and forever.
Amen.
The world continues to struggle with the pandemic. We can give thanks that in our country we are able to deliver vaccination to everyone who wishes in an orderly way. The virus can mutate and some of the variants may not be prevented enough by the injections, so we cannot be as safe as we would like to be until we stop the spreading and vaccines are delivered to people in every country. Let us pray for those who are working on new variants of the vaccine and on international co-operation to fund vaccines for poorer nations and for a fairer distribution of protection to all.
The world continues to struggle with human greed. This causes wars in many areas of the world and lack of food, clean water, basic health and education in even more places and in all continents.
Let us pray that both at international, governmental and individual levels we will find ways always to ‘seek the common good’.
Let us remember Ernesto’s message on Sunday, our Lord taking the hand of Simon Peter’s mother in law to show how we should have ‘empathy and compassion’ in how we treat others. Let us pray that we each may be able daily to give empathy and compassion. Let us pray that the world will find a new set of values in order to preserve us, our world and all of God’s wonderful creation.
Almighty God, who alone can bring order to the unruly wills and passion of sinful humanity, give your people grace so to love what you command and 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 our Lord.
Amen.
May you find things to delight you today, so that you will feel able to give thanks to God for it with a light heart when we prepare for sleep.
Don Head
