Sermon 20th July 2014

Today, our Vicar, Cameron Barker, concludes our study of the Minor Prophets. 

Wow! How do you sum that lot up?! In the past 3 months we have literally had the A-Z of Minor Prophets: from Amos to Zechariah – via Ezra; Haggai; Hosea; Joel; Jonah; Micah; Nehemiah; and finally, today: Malachi. It’s not been done in alphabetical order, but it has been quite a trip!

As ever, I don’t know how (to sum it up, I mean): but I do have an offering. It’s one that’s in keeping with this series, I’d suggest, in all sorts of ways; including the way in which I’ll do it. You see, I know that it would only be a matter of time before several people here could work them each out. If I gave you pen and paper, and said the letters in these words or phrases could make a rather different sense of them if they were rearranged, somebody would be able to do (and enjoy) it. Of course we don’t have the time, so I’ll do them; and you just need to pay close attention.

So the letters in ASTRONOMER, e.g. if rearranged, could be MOON STARER.

THE MORSE CODE turns into HERE COME DOTS.

Rearrange the letters of SLOT MACHINES and you get CASH LOST IN ME.

On a rather less cheery note, DESPERATION could be made into A ROPE ENDS IT.

A DECIMAL POINT is alternatively expressed as I’M A DOT IN PLACE.

And finally, the letters of ELEVEN PLUS TWO can also be read, believe it or not, as TWELVE PLUS ONE!

No I didn’t make those up; and I partly want to say don’t pay too much attention to the exact words and phrases either. However, it did strike me that each of them might have at least some vague relevance to different parts of this series. You can work out how if you want; what I do need to draw our attention to is the principle of that exercise; specifically in relation to today’s concluding Minor Prophet. In some ways Malachi is ‘only’ a typical example of who we have studied and what we have seen here since May. But just because we’ve seen and heard it all before doesn’t mean that we can ignore it! On the contrary, it means that we need to pay even closer attention, to be sure that we really are hearing what God is saying to us.

The choice to end this series with Malachi was a deliberate one – because this is the last book in the Old Testament. (Well, it is for Christians: the Hebrew Bible has a rather different order). For us, this marks the end of prophecy and the start of the silent waiting. As we heard in today’s reading, God has things to say through Malachi about what’s ahead: the coming of His messenger. There’s a particular message for us in here, as we prepare to move on. Rather different things await us, beyond this summer’s break; but, as ever, we won’t be ready for that unless we hear what God says to us NOW. That was the whole point of tackling this series, of course. As I said at the start of it, we’re very aware that as a Parish we have recently arrived in a new place. In order to be obedient to God in this new place, we are having to listen for His ways forward. And there’s every chance that’s based on how, and why, He’s brought us to this place, to where we are now.

Looking back over this series, as I’ve done this week, I do think that God’s messages to us from it are very clear. I’ll encourage you to do the same for yourself this summer, though: all the sermons are posted on our website, so do listen again for yourself. Yes, before I’m done I will tell you what I’ve been hearing; but first I want to return to those rearranged letters and words. I really do think there’s plenty about God, prophets – and human-kind – in there! To start with us: we have this set of letters that we read in a particular way. We could say that God sent His prophets to show people how those letters could, and should, be differently arranged. Given long enough, and the right hints, we might have got there by ourselves. But through these prophets God both speeded the whole process up, and tried to ensure that people heard Him.

The phrase that I used along the way for this prophetic task is forth-telling. This is about the prophets’ calling to tell the people how God saw current reality. As we’ve heard time and again, God’s view of reality often has the same letters that we’re looking at arranged in quite a different order! It’s not so much that we’ve got the facts wrong, but rather that the way we’re looking at them is. In fact, Malachi’s short book – a mere 55 verses in total (so a quick read later!) – is based on precisely that premise. So 47 of those 55 verses are God explaining to His people through Malachi just how they’ve got it wrong. The book opens (in chapter 1 verse 2) with God reminding His people how much He loves them. Their response to that is: “How have you loved us, God? All we see is that you really don’t.”

Now we know that’s never going to be a happy conversation! People telling God He doesn’t love us? (as if we ever would!) But that is how people felt in Malachi time: that is how they saw their reality – that God had abandoned them, and didn’t care. It’s time to put Malachi briefly into his context, then, as we’ve done with all these other prophets. He’s another of those about who rather little is definitely known. Malachi meaning ‘messenger’, that might not even have been his name. But the one thing all scholars do agree on is that he really was the last prophet. Not just in the Old Testament, but in date too; possibly even as late as the low 420’s (BC, obviously!)

If you’ve missed the chronology of which prophet was when and where, there’s another reason to re-read the sermons. The key facts are all in there each time: and they’re set in the sweeping history of God’s interaction with His people in the land that He gave them; through all the ups and downs of Israel, and Judah. Actually, reality is that there were way more downs than ups. The way that we humans like to shape the letters is to say that we’re on this upward trend of progress. Everything is getting gradually better for everyone, as we progress technologically and morally. I’m really not sure how much truth is in that; and the Bible certainly tells a very different story, not least in the Old Testament.

The high point in the Old Testament comes very early, with God’s revelation of himself to Moses. Wrapped up in that was the rescuing of God’s people from Egypt; the promise of a land; and the giving of the Law. Basically everything then goes downhill from there! Yes, there are occasional high points; but none of those were ever able to reverse the decline; or not for long. What occurs is that those who were chosen and privileged become presumptuous and downright rebellious. With the prophets both explaining and fore-telling the process, defeat and captivity are the outworking of God’s judgment, from which the people can never recover. And yet, the prophets also say, God’s not done; it’s not over: there is still hope – in Him.

The letters didn’t exactly read that way to God’s people in Malachi’s time. They’d come back home, from exile, over 100 years before. So their Temple had been standing again for the best part of a century; and it was even more second-rate than it’d ever been. There was no sign that God had filled it, or their nation, with His glorious presence again. Israel was still subject to the whim of any passing power; their life grew ever harder, not easier, it seemed; and the way that they treated God and one another reflected their anger and lack of hope. What Malachi offered them was God’s view of what these letters spelled; and it was very different phrase. Read the detail for yourself; even though it will be no surprise and nothing new. Malachi said that this mess was all because they had turned away from God!

The rest of God’s message through Malachi was a call to re-turn to Him. And haven’t we heard that before time and again throughout this series? The exact shape of how that’s required varies according to the people’s different circumstances; just as it also does for ours, of course. But the message time and again is to put right what we’re getting wrong; and to trust in God for what He is going to do. That may, it will, even, be different to what we’d perhaps expect: God’s message through Malachi is that there will be a burning purifying, of fire and raw bleach, to make His people fit for God again. And while they waited (and waited; and waited – though they didn’t know that was what it would be; for 400+ years!) they were to live right: for God and for each other.

There’s another whistle-stop tour through a book that bears in-depth study and preaching, I realise. As ever, I’ll encourage you to study it yourself: to take responsibility for how you listen to and live for God. We all each responsible for that, of course; and Sundays can only ever be a tiny part of it. It’s how we live day in, and day out, when nobody else is watching, that truly counts. If we’ve learned one thing from this series – though I’m sure that we’ve learned a shed-full, in fact – it’s that. God isn’t fooled by our best, or worst, efforts to make it look different to the way that it is. Whatever we may declare the letters spell out, God sees and knows the reality; and it matters. It matters: He cares; and He is in the process of sorting it, and us, out.

Now I realise that it’s notoriously difficult to try and draw too many conclusions from a series such as this. It has gone over such wide and varied ground; and the contexts have all been so very different to our own. My hope is that throughout it God has been speaking to us individually week by week, in the ways that we have each needed to hear. But to try and draw some wider, more corporate conclusions, here is what I’ve heard and seen over these 3 months. First and foremost I’d say that it is indeed God who has brought us to this place where we are now. I believe that we’ve been affirmed in getting to it by listening to what He wants, by putting Him first, and by being intentional and determined about doing that. We’ve worked hard at keeping God first, and at keeping on going when things haven’t been easy or quick. And God truly has honoured that; He has blessed both it, and us: plenty; and yet where we are now is still only because of His grace.

The message to us going forward is equally simple I’d say: keep on going! It’s not like we’ve already got to the end of the journey, so much as to the beginning of the next stage of it. It is so exciting that the Discovery report in particular scopes out the in-principle ways forward for that. The call to be God’s blessing to this community is one that fits very well with the message of these prophets. It’s about being outward-looking; loving; compassionate; caring about justice, in His name in this place; and that’s all based on keeping God first. And lots of us are going to have to turn, or re-turn, to the Lord, in all sorts of ways to make that happen. It’s not going to be easy or quick; we are going to have to see the letters form different words and phrases; and that is going to be life-changing for us: personally and corporately. The message of the prophets, not least of Malachi, as we head into this new phase is: hear the voice of God; and obey it. So is that an in-principle decision that you are willing to take today? If so, get ready to live it, because God will take you at your word if you take Him at His: and so let’s pray that we will do.

Sermon 13th July 2014

This Sunday, one of our Lay Readers, Adrian Parkhouse, continues our study of the Minor Prophets. 

Today, we look at Zechariah.

1.              Our text this morning is taken from the opening credits of the long-running BBC sitcom The Liver Birds.

                  “You dancing?”  “You asking?”  “I’m asking.”  “I’m dancing.”

                  Some of you will know the following piece of personal information:  others will not and for some it will come as a very great surprise. For a short time I was a dancer;  a contemporary dancer.  In fact I am able to say that Anne and I went on a dance tour of the East Coast of the US.  (I have to say that carefully since so often people assume I meant a darts tour).   Among the place that we performed was the New York School of performing Arts (remember the school in Fame?) and one lunchtime in the lobby of the World Trade Centre (the twin towers).  I confess that by then my talent had been exposed and I was third reserve as a dancer and responsible for stage management – but I had danced!  I had had that experience of control over my body; of discipline in movement;  of feeling and not  just hearing the music.  I had danced.  If only for a short time, I had danced.

2.              Perhaps that’s why I dance almost every Sunday morning.  In my mind.  I have shared before that as we gather for worship and during our opening hymn, I often imagine myself as a child in the streets of old Jerusalem, the warm sun on my shoulders, dancing, skipping, twirling my way up to the old Temple in worship.  Welcome to my world!

3.              There of course is the link to today’s prophet, Zechariah.  The Temple.  I am grateful to Simon whose sermon last week explained the historic situation in which both Haggai (on whom he spoke) and Zechariah found themselves.  The two prophets lived at the same time:  both began their prophetic ministries in the second year of the reign of the Persian king, Darius;  and both were in Jerusalem among the refugees from the Babylonian exile who had returned.  It had been the decree of a Babylonian emperor, Cyrus, that had permitted the return and had encouraged the reconstruction of the decimated Temple.  Civil war had then (as now) dominated the region and work on the Temple had stopped and only now, under the new Persian regime of Darius, could it restart.  Simon explained last week how Haggai had encouraged the people to make the rebuilding their priority – to put God at the centre of their lives. 

4.              Haggai’s message was brief – just 2 chapters.  Zechariah’s is longer and on first reading, much, much weirder!  I should be interested if anyone here has studied the prophet before?  One thing that is obvious quite soon is the variety of forms that the prophecy takes:  it is as if Zechariah knew that the time for prophecy was almost at a close, that the 400 years of silence from God that marked the period between the last of the books in our Old Testament and the birth of Christ was almost upon them – so that he was determined to include every form of prophetic messaging in what he had to say.  So for example we have the traditional prophecies against neighbouring countries, we have promises of blessing on Jerusalem and its occupants, we have the prophecy of the Day of the Lord, we have (and this is an important theme illustrated by our reading today) the promise of a messiah, and we have dreams.  Zechariah’s dreams take up the first 6 chapters and, because they are different, it is on them, I want to concentrate this morning.

5.              Zechariah’s dreams all come in one night.  He experiences seven visions:  he starts by speaking to a man on a red horse among myrtle trees;  then he sees fours horns and four craftsmen;  then a man with a measuring line measuring the city; then the high priest as an accused man in a court room being dressed in new garments;  then two olive trees and a seven-branch lampstand; and then things get really interesting as he sees a huge flying scroll;  which is followed by a woman in a basket  being carried away by angels;  and lastly four chariots racing out  between bronze mountains.  Quite a night!

                  What is it all about?  Zechariah’s message is one of comfort.  His dreams have taken him outside this world to somewhere that might be heaven and they have shown him that God is in control.  He has seen that in the heavenly places the script is already written and the story is a good one for God’s people.  The first horsemen receives the news that “we have gone throughout the earth and found the whole world at rest and in peace”:  but that peace  is not God’s peace and it will be upset – those horns and the craftsmen will do that – while the man with the measuring line is designing the City of God to be without boundaries, to hold everyone;  and in the courtroom scene, the community while  guilty is forgiven, is clothed in white and the olive trees show the religious and the politicians working in harmony while the scroll and the basket concern the removal of lying and wickedness from the City.

                  A prophet dreaming dreams;  understanding and explaining  that God is in charge whatever immediate circumstances.  Makes you want to dance?  “Am I asking?”

6.              This week the PCC considered and endorsed a paper which has its share of prophetic  content for us in our places right here right now.  It was the report of the Milkwood/Discovery Working Party.  You may remember having contributed to its thinking by participating in the Celebration Sunday, by being part of the discussion at the Parish Weekend and by completing or delivering postcards saying what you thought would make our area a better place?  As one member of the group I am proud of the work that has been done and I am proud with our recommendations which in summary are a challenge to the whole Parish to engage more strongly with our communities.  We recommend the creation of (another) group, a Community Action Group, charged with continuing the research into need and opportunity and driving the process of engagement forward in Parish life.  More will be heard of this in the weeks and months to come.

                  For today I want to emphasise one element of the process we adopted:  for several weeks we “dreamed dreams”.  For several weeks we danced.  For several weeks we dreamed about how our area might be.  Will you come with me and join our dream?

Are you dancing?  I am asking

“Muslim, Rastafarian, healthy, sick - all connected; respect for each other; respect for place; ... young people invite their friends here because it is a good place to be. Church and schools much more connected ... People share their skills, expertise and time. Nobody worries about shopping lists because we all share. ...  people ... feel at home. Houses still affordable, keep a cultural mix. People are on the streets – and that is great; mothers walking children in their prams and singing. Nobody needs drugs... .

Youth club, farmers market and ladies’ cricket club in the park. Coffee and chat. Needlecraft in the park, teaching cookery ... . Arts and plays in the park theatre. Harvesting ... . The elderly at St Saviour’s for a slap-up lunch. A fashion show and fundraiser, a bake-off, food and culture shared and swapped; more food, a monthly food festival, a carnival. Social enterprises – enterprise and employment spreading out. Enablement training, to grow a new generation of community leaders.

Café opening onto the park – an awning, people relax. Local web forum – ... . A community health centre. ... . A welcome pack for everyone coming into the community.

Smooth pavements, clean streets. More greenery, birds and butterflies. The zip wire zips, the swings swing.

....

7.              Zechariah dreamed and learned that God was in charge and that the plan was already written. 

                  Are you dancing?

Amen

Sermon 6th July 2014

Today, one of our Lay Readers, Simon Brindley, continues our study of the Minor Prophets. This week it is Haggai. 

God’s priorities

[St Saviour’s: As I do the reading, from the Old Testament Book of Haggai, I want you to see if you can work out the answer to this question: “How many days did it take before the message got through and they actually got started?” But if you get it, please do not tell anyone! I shall ask you all shortly…]

[St Paul’s: Thankyou to Greg for the first reading from the Old Testament Book of Haggai, which is mainly what I am going to be speaking on this morning. Without calling out please, I wonder if anyone picked up the answer to this question as they listened:  “How many days did it take before the message got through and they actually got started?” I shall ask you all again shortly…]

I was up in Northumberland 2 weekends ago visiting my parents. They live in Rothbury, in the beautiful Coquet valley. They are quite elderly and not in great health but they still get to the parish church whenever they can make it. One of the things I enjoy about Rothbury Parish Church is that I will often meet people – perhaps people who have retired there or maybe even just visiting for the weekend - who knew me as a child – I lived in that part of the world until I was 12 - and one of those is a man called Jack Tulley. Jack is nearly 90 years old now but still going strong and he is steeped in the culture and life of the North East of England. His family still runs a shop in the village but his father was a coalminer and his grandfather a blacksmith. He grew up in a pit village, long since demolished in the decline of the mining industry, called Benton Square in the coalfields just north of Newcastle. He’s a bit gruff is Jack, never quite as positive about things as you might imagine, but he’s kindly. He gave me and my brother a swing that his daughter had grown out of when we were about 3 years old. I can still remember it. But it’s his grandfather, the blacksmith, who is relevant to today’s Bible reading. We’ll come back to Jack’s grandfather in a few minutes….

The book of Haggai in the Old Testament is very short, just two chapters, and it’s a very interesting little book. I hope you will forgive me if I admit that before I started preparing for this morning, if you had asked me what the book of Haggai was about I would have forgotten. I hope I don’t forget again because it is really quite important….

Even if you don’t remember all the details and all the complexities you will probably remember that there was a time in Jewish history when the Jews were taken off into exile in Babylon and the great Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem was destroyed. They must have felt that their entire identity and their faith in the one Creator God Yahweh, was under threat.  Well, they and their faith survived the trauma of exile and many decades later in 538 BC a new King of the Babylonians called Cyrus passed a law allowing the Jewish exiles to return to Jerusalem, which they did, partly under the leadership of two of those characters in our reading, Zerubbabel and Joshua, leading figures in the life of the returning nation.

It must have been a great time for the people who returned, back to their homeland and to a re-possession of their Jewish identity including in their main city, Jerusalem. They would have been able without fear to eat and to pray together, to practice their customs, to plan for the future for them and their children, to plant crops and hope that again the nation could thrive. And of course they could build or rebuild their homes and their streets, those that had not been totally destroyed decades before still bearing the scars, I imagine, of the Babylonian devastation.

There seems to have been plenty of material around to build with and they seem to have done a pretty fine job. “Paneled houses” it says that they had. I don’t know about you but that sounds pretty fine to me. I am going to guess they were far from stone shacks or worse, they were grand homes with wooden panels lining the insides for warmth and to give a sense of status and grandeur and self worth. At least that is the picture it conjures up for me..

“We are the returning ones! The fathers and mothers of the new nation, the start of the hope for the future. We deserve the best, and we want the best for our families, so fine wooden paneled rooms are now the order of the day for us!!” Let us show everyone around what this Jewish nation is really like! And when we have finished putting in the paneling maybe we’ll get it finely painted, with murals or maybe we’ll build an extension or a maybe a sunken bath or put on an extra floor. There is always something that can be done to improve our home sand give any visitors a true indication of our new status and the proud future that surely now must be ours…!

But overall things were actually not going well at all….the houses looked great but it seems that much of what the people had hoped for was ending in disappointment. Drought and poor harvest. But not just that, things seemed to be somehow out of alignment. They earned wages alright but they didn’t seem to go as far as they should, as if their purses were full of holes.  Food and drink did not seem to satisfy…There seems to have been in reality a deep sense of dissatisfaction. “We have tried to rebuild our lives, our homes look really great, but we do not seem to have got it right.”

But until the prophet Haggai speaks up for the first time, it does not seem to have occurred to them what might be wrong. History suggests that an early group of returning exiles had done some work on the foundations of the Temple but it still lay in complete ruins. Perhaps they thought it was just too big a job. Perhaps they had become sidetracked away from God, thinking they could do all the rebuilding for the future themselves.

So God leads Haggai to confront them and speak back to them though their leaders what he hears all the time. And the prophet speaks, on the first day of the sixth month:

This is what I hear the people saying, day after day, “ Oh….the time has not yet come for the Lord’s house to be built…”

What were they thinking these people, that they had better get their own places in order first and thinking really seriously about all that God stuff can wait? Oh, put it on the back burner….anyway just look at the size of the task. Too much for us for now! We are just the remnant of the former fine nation. We need to expand our numbers first.  We have only just come back from exile after all. You can’t expect too much too soon, for goodness sake. The Temple will have to wait a while! Only a few more years….

So now the prophet gives it to them straight and he just puts it to them: “Do you really think it is OK for you to be living in your fine houses while God’s house remains a ruin? No wonder the rest of your lives are unsatisfactory and your efforts not bearing fruit, do you not realize you have got your priorities all wrong. No wonder things feel out of alignment. Get God back at the centre of your lives and get the Temple rebuilt…

And they did. They started  to rebuild. And now God inspired all of them:  Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, Joshua son of Jehozadak the High Priest and the whole remnant of the people and they began to work on the Temple on the [twenty fourth] day of the sixth month?

So how long did it take for the message to get through?

So, what do we think this passage might be saying to us today? Is it saying we must put our church buildings above everything else? That maybe buildings are more important than people? No, I don’t think that is it.

That is not to say however that buildings are not really important. I was reminded as I was preparing for this morning about a major new housing development that Jennie and I drove through earlier this year on the way to the Kent coast. We were looking for a road through and took a wrong turning and got a bit trapped in this huge, new and what looked to be fairly luxurious estate of beautiful house after beautiful house, of all different designs and sizes,  terraced, semi and detached, two storey, three storey, roundabouts for the cars everywhere, road after road, turning after turning (I am not naming it just in case you know someone who lives there!) but after 5 or 10 minutes, apart from getting lost I realized that we had not seen any evidence at all of any places where people could come together, no shops, no green spaces that I could see, no obvious community, certainly no church that I could see. Just lots of individual homes, like beautiful boxes to hide away in from everyone else. I may of course have got it wrong and taken all the wrong turnings, but that is what it felt like to me.

And I contrast that with another new development I spotted a few weeks ago when out cycling. I don’t mind naming this one. It is on the edge of Edenbridge in Kent and it is called, fittingly perhaps, the Eden Centre. It has a doctor’s surgery and a library and a place for young people to meet and for toddler groups to meet and a Citizens Advice Bureau if people need help…and it has a church.

I can almost see the prophet Haggai smiling! (Just try for a moment and see if you can conjure up a picture of an Old Testament prophet smiling!)

Yes, buildings and how we build them are really important. We have been powerfully reminded this year of just how important our church buildings are with the reopening of two of our own main parish buildings. So we truly delight that St Paul’s has gone from an OK, sort of a bit tired, typical church building to its new magnificence and for those of us privileged to have been at the reopening of St Johns Lowden Road recently under the new ownership of the Ghanaian Seventh Day Adventist church, we truly rejoice that that building has been beautifully restored and modernized, to the glory of God.

So is that it then, did the prophet Haggai want the people to rebuild the Temple magnificently? Is the magnificence of a building of faith its true measure and its most important feature? No, important though I think it is that our buildings look and feel like good and beautiful places to be, I think what we are hearing today is that that is not all that God desires.

I think back to that wonderful reopening ceremony at St Johns Lowden Road, where one of the regional leaders of the Seventh day Adventist Church, a modern day prophet perhaps, spoke powerfully to the people assembled in great numbers. Do not make this beautiful building he said, just a place for your choirs and a place that annoys the neighbours because there is no place left to park on a Saturday, what they know as the Sabbath. Get out into the streets round about, get to know them and their concerns and be Jesus to the people of this community. Serve those who might otherwise be annoyed by you and show them what your faith really means. It was a powerful and a highly relevant message…

And what about St Paul’s? Who can doubt that the time was right for us to rebuild when we see the building so wonderfully used not just on Sundays but as a place to come together to weep at the Thanksgiving Service for Nicky Tinegate and a place to come together to rejoice, at the wonderful and warm-hearted and inclusive wedding of Emma Peebles and her husband Chris.

I think the prophet Haggai would have approved..

Because what I think lay behind the message from the prophet Haggai to the returning Jewish exiles was this. You need to put God back at the centre of your lives and the heart of your community. And for them without a doubt, in the culture of the day that had to start with the Temple, the symbolic heart of their centuries old faith. Then and only then will things be in proper balance, whatever life may bring.

For us, in our Christian faith the challenge in the words we know well and say often in our churches, is to bring Jesus to the centre of our lives and the heart of our community.  And thank God that sometimes the best way to do that will be to develop our buildings to make them fit for that purpose.  But it is Jesus at the heart that is the challenge for us. But I would have to say that it is my experience that then, whatever life may throw at you, both good and bad, things will be in the right order and you will find the strength to get through. In fact I would go as far as to say that I do not understand how anyone can get through the whole of life, from its very beginning to its very end, whenever that may be, with all the intensities of its incredible highs and its incredibly challenging and persistent lows without God at the centre in His rightful place. That is my experience anyway and I pray that it will be yours…

Ah yes, I was going to tell you about Jack’s Granddad. Well he was the blacksmith in the coal mining community of Benton Square some time in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. This was well before nationalization of the mining industry and safety standards were not what you would expect today. Life would have been very dangerous in the mines and very tough for the men underground and the women and children at home above. They would have had very little money. Jack told me two weeks ago that there was no church in the village and the people had to walk a mile or more to the next village called Killingworth on Sundays. And that was a long way for those people, especially in bad weather.  We tend to forget it in our relatively comfortable times but in those days not everyone had shoes to wear and enough clothes to keep them warm. So the coalminers and the whole community, Including Jack Tulley’s Granddad, used as they were to hard physical labour in rock, wood and iron, built themselves a church in the village of Benton Square.

I think the prophet Haggai would have smiled down on them at that time too…

Amen