[Home.]  [Special Events.]  [Services.]  [This Week.]  [Social Events.]  [What we do.]  [Where we are.]  [Vicar’s Welcome.]  [Contact Us.]

Lay Reader

Back

Dear Friends

 

And to the angel of the church in Vicarage Gate, write:

 

I know your works: I know of the welcome that you give to those who visit you, and the part that you play in the life of the community around you. You comfort the afflicted and encourage those who are on the way of the Lord. Your doors are always open, and you seek to remove the obstacles which are in the way of those who would follow me. You do not side with one faction or another, but welcome all who follow the Lord, and value the views they share. You proclaim a loving God who forgives, and not a wrathful God who punishes, and in doing so you embody the gospel of your Lord.

 

But I hold this against you, that your belief can be a gentle glow rather than a roaring flame. Your faith is sometimes a comfortable part of a respectable life, rather than a goad to your conscience that drives you to a transformed existence. The order and calm of your ritual can be a soporific, rather than a refreshment for the struggle ahead, and your easy acceptance can hide a lack of commitment.

 

In this time of the Lord’s passion, you must look on his wounds with steadfastness and not hide your face. See the crown of shame which he bore for you, and the stripes which laid open his back. See the marks in his hands and his feet and the gash in his side. See him raised on a cross before a jeering crowd. And then think what a raging love, what a fiery faith he must have in you if he is prepared to suffer this for your sake, when he could have chosen not to.

 

If you could feel even a hundredth, a thousandth, a millionth of that love, for your Lord and for your neighbours, if you could let that course through you and change you; if you could let that happen not just for a moment, not just for this season, but for weeks and months and years ahead until it became an essential and inseparable part of you, what would you then do? What injustices would you challenge, what wrongs would you right? How would your worship change, and how much deeper would your relationships be one with another? And how meaningless and small would some of the things that concern you now seem?

 

I cannot tell you how you would change, what you would do, how you would be one with another. That future is hidden from me. The only way for you to see it is to choose to make it happen.