Sunday 3rd November – Communion Service led by Tony Alderman
Perhaps it’s having been away on holiday for a couple of weeks, but it seems to me that our church has a special place where we keep Tony (not just in our hearts) and recently he’s been escaping more frequently from it to lead our worship – always a pleasure!
Tony’s “Chat” was about refugees. We traded names of refugees, or children of refugees, who had made great contributions to our national life (and sometimes that of the world) but he stumped us when he tried to steer us towards that most important of refugees.
Our clue. Well, he died on the cross for us. Jesus was a refugee.
And then a dip into politics. The focus on the boat people – just 40,000 out of the something like 600,000 people entering the country as legal immigrants. The papers were full of the boat people, as though they were not human beings. Tony noted the desperation that led them to risk their lives on the trip across the English Channel and the role of organised crime in stimulating, encouraging, and facilitating the movement of people seeking a new life. They might arrive through criminal activity but many, many people arrived with the intention of working hard for a better life.
And there was no greater example of that than Jesus, who was shipped over to Egypt as a refugee, returned and died for us.
The readings from Ruth 1 and Mark 12 were both about love. The first was about Elimelech, a man from Judah, his wife Naomi, and their 2 sons. Famine had forced them to leave home and seek refuge in Moab, where the sons had married local women, Orpah and Ruth. But then Elimelech and later both his sons had died, leaving Naomi and her 2 daughters-in-law in precarious situations. Naomi decided to return to Judah, urging Orpah and Ruth to find new husbands and security. Ruth, however, had refused, vowing to stay with Naomi and to follow her God.
Ruth stood out as someone who willingly became a refugee as she remained loyal and faithful to her mother-in-law. But there were many aspects of love in the story to explore. It began with love felt inwardly and painfully as grief. Then the complexity of love when big decisions had to be made. In different ways. Naomi, Orpah, and Ruth were all presented as acting lovingly. Will and emotion were both powerfully present. And then the willingness of Ruth to enter a different culture for the sake of Naomi. It was on one level a simple story of love within a family, but it was also a particular expression of self-giving, sacrificial, Christ-like love.
In the discussion of the Great Commandments read from Mark, it was clear that love was for all. There was no “charity begins at home” mentality – or Britain, or any other nation first. If there was any bias, it was one in favour of the other.
So it was not “who is my neighbour?”, but “to whom can I be a neighbour!”
The texts provided an opportunity to explore how we loved those in need and remind ourselves that the love at the heart of the story of Ruth and the love that washed through the pages of the New Testament were fundamentally about choices we could make.
Tony reminded us of the film Love Actually where the voiceover reads. “Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow”. Despite the general opinion that we live in a world of hatred and greed, he didn’t see like that. It seemed to him that love was everywhere. Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. If we looked for it, we’d find that ’love actually’ was all around.
The loyalty and devotion of Bobby, the dog that kept vigil for 14 years by the grave of his owner John Grey in 19th century Edinburgh humbled us. It was this real expression of love that Jesus called us to. Not just in our own homes and families, or with friends, or with colleagues, Jesus’s call for faithful love involved welcoming the stranger in our midst. It required us to break down barriers and put aside any fears and prejudices we might have lingering in our hearts or in our heads. Love for our neighbour required hard work, to try and step into the shoes of our neighbour and seek to see the world through their eyes.
The love we had for our children and our grandchildren was the love that Jesus said he wanted for the whole world. As Jesus reminded the scribe who came to ask him the most important of questions, loving God is demonstrated in our love for our neighbour. When we loved God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, it followed that we would desire not to just love him, but to love like him – to love in that same way with all that we were and all that we did. And that love was demonstrated in how we responded to the powerless, the poor, the unloved, and the unlovely. That was who Jesus had come to redeem. And that was who he also called us to serve.
Potters Bar United Reformed Church 