Gibson Gazette - Christmas 2013

What a momentous year of change it's been for us poor, feet-haven't-touched-the-ground, don't know whether we're coming or going Gibsons!

The biggest change of all was the birth of little Isla Elisa on 14 February 2013. What great timing by Saara and Tom! So now we are about to celebrate our first Christmas as grandparents. And what a pleasure it is when she is so cuddly, beautiful, intelligent, cute and altogether lovely… I'll just have to leave you to imagine her as I gather it's not always a good idea to put pictures online - sorry.

               

 Next was moving to a new church, new community and new part of the world. After eleven years in Walsall the feeling was growing that the things God had calling us to do were largely done, that it was time to make way for new and perhaps younger leadership and fresh vision so that His wonderful people at St Matthew's could go on being renewed, growing and moving forward in Him. And we also needed to be closer to Saara, Tom and Isla, to mum in Brighton, and to my brothers.

It's just that it's been such a wrench. The homesickness really bit when we were sent photos of Ben and Izzie's wedding. There were so many of the people we loved, in a place that has come to mean so much to us, where God has blessed us in very many ways.

But alongside the pain of parting there's no doubt that it has been good to come to Horton and Wraysbury. It's been lovely to be welcomed by such a warm and friendly community, to be part of a loving church with great, prayerful people, and also to see more of my family. When Elisa and I sneak into church by ourselves of an evening to pray quietly we feel God has great things in store for His people and we are going to see Him moving here. But for the moment it's about getting to know people, finding out how everything works, setting up systems and general re-orientation.

A huge change for Elisa has been giving up work, which she did in April not long before we moved. She's built a lot of friendships in Walsall Manor Hospital and some are keeping in touch.

Ben's gap year with Youth With A Mission came to an end in August but not before we had been out to Bolivia to visit. We had an amazing but also exhausting time touring Bolivia and Peru with Ben and Kathryn, who had put together an itinerary for us based on the energy levels and resilience of 19 year olds! Ben and Kathryn are now studying at Redcliffe Bible College in Gloucester.

 We're very near Heathrow airport now so drop in and see us – contact details above.

Lots of love and our best wishes for 2014!

Colin and Elisa x x

Christmas in Finland

Well, as you might have expected with such an amazing programme, we had a great Christmas Tree Festival at St Andrew's (please see previous post). I can't believe it's so long since I last blogged - really getting into the Christmas rush now...

Anyway, one of the outstanding items was Elisa doing her presentation on Christmas in Finland. Some people who really wanted to see it missed it because of a change in the programme times, so here it is below. I ought to say my wife does it much better live than it appears in cold print.

__________________________

Good morning everyone. I'd like to tell you all about Christmas where I grew up in Finland. It's very important because Finland is the true home of Christmas. We have reindeer, and snow is guaranteed, but best of all, Finland, as you all should know, is where Father Christmas lives. We call him Joulupukki and he lives with his elves in a secret place called Korvatunturi.

There are many things the same about Christmas in Finland but many things are very different. For one thing, our Christmas seems to be much less commercial than yours in England. Maybe it's because I grew up on a farm but I don't remember the annual shopping frenzy!

Christmas Eve is the busiest day of the season. The whole house must be cleaned from top to bottom to welcome Christmas in. Not only that, but you have to be perfectly clean yourself, so everyone has a hot Christmas sauna.

Just the thing in those freezing Northern winters! If you are a bit mad, like my brother Antti, you can rush outside from the sauna to cool off with a nice refreshing roll in the snow – brrrr! Antti has even persuaded foolish visitors from England, such as my husband, that everyone does it and got them to join in!

Please note everyone in this picture in wearing a swimming costume of some kind!

Nature is never very far away in Finland. One of the loveliest traditions on our farm was to go out into our own forest, choose a tree and bring it fresh into the house on Christmas Eve. The children would get together to decorate it and the lovely smell of the freshly cut tree would fill the house.

Next there would be a very important visitor! In Finland, Father Christmas always comes in person. He is in his own country and he takes his time. He doesn't zoom down chimneys. He comes and knocks on the door and the children have to welcome him in. You can imagine the excitement at my home. There were seven children, me, my five sisters and my brother all desperately waiting for Father Christmas to come!

And when he does arrive, the children have to entertain him. Finnish children sing traditional songs for Father Christmas, and do dances in a ring for him. And then he gives them their presents!

For some reason dad always went out to feed our horse just before Father Christmas came. It happened the same every Christmas! He was always so disappointed when he came back and found he had missed Father Christmas yet again!

Then it's time for Christmas dinner. We don't have turkey for Christmas in Finland, we usually have a great big joint of ham. There are lots of traditional dishes to go with it, like rossoli which is made from beetroot and lantulaatikko which is sort of stewed swede – it's much nicer than it sounds! We also have rice porridge which we think is a great delicacy.

On Christmas Eve we Finns all go to the churchyard to remember people we used to share Christmas with in times past but who are no longer with us. There is a special service where everyone lights candles and puts them by their family graves. The churchyard looks very beautiful and mysterious with the candles flickering in the darkness.

Christmas day itself is much quieter than Christmas Eve – a day to enjoy that pleasant full-up feeling and play with your new gifts. Hopefully also to remember Jesus, God's gift of love to the world.

Do you know, it was at Christmas that I first came to England? God spoke to me very powerfully that I should come here and the only berth I could get was on a ship sailing at Christmas. By that time, I had asked Jesus into my life and I had decided to follow him, wherever He might lead me – and He brought me here! I'll gladly tell you the story later if you ask me. But I think the real meaning of Christmas is when Jesus comes into your heart. That's why He came to earth in the first place, and that's true whether you live in Finland, or England, or anywhere in the world.

I'm going to finish by teaching you to say Happy Christmas in Finnish. After all, if you ever meet Father Christmas, you can greet him in his own language!

Let's try it  - 

Hyvää Joulua!

Christmas Tree Festival Programme

Please come along to the amazing Christmas Tree Festival to be held at this week at St Andrew's Wraysbury on Friday 29 and Saturday 30 November. Emily tells me there are now 68 entries so our church will turn into a Narnian land of mystery and beauty.

As well as viewing the trees and voting for your favourites, there's lots more to do, including delicious cakes and preserves to buy, delightful children's activities (thank you Becky and Jenny) and a programme of exciting special events each day. We believe that our deputy Mayor and Mayoress will also be making a visit.

Friday's programme is organised by the school, and the pupils will be doing all kinds of fun performances through the day. The day will run from 12 noon until 6pm. Programmes will be available on the day.

Saturday's programme is organised by the church and we have some really exciting events lined up. There will be a Christmas special (with some surprises!), puppet shows with Tony and Stan, Christmas in Finland and of course our very own St Andrew's choir singing Christmas carols. To help you choose when to turn up, here's the complete schedule of events for Saturday 30th:

10.00               welcome and opening                         
Reverend Colin

10.30               Bells                                                  
St Andrew's bellringers *                   

11.00               puppets                                             
Tony Hermes and Surendra Chahal

11.30               Christmas in Finland                           
Elisa Gibson

12.00               carols                                                
St Andrew's Choir

12.30               Christmas special                                
Reverend Colin

[Lunch break 12.40 – 1.30]

1.30                 puppets                                              
Tony Hermes and Surendra Chahal

2.00                 auctions, awards and prizes
PTFA

3.00                 close

* if there is a shortage of bellringers then this item will be replaced be a Christmas Special matinee performance with Reverend Colin

All this, and yet admission is free! What a great way to start your Christmas - see you there.

Love Colin x x

A Society that hates people?

Does our society really want people any more? As I listen to the news of changes to the London Underground, which mean fewer people are wanted because there are more machines, I gloomily ponder how many more of our enterprises and institutions have gone the same way...

• The steel industry where I used to live in Sheffield still makes loads of steel - but it doesn't want more than a few people to press buttons. The rest have all gone.
• Your bank has put in cash machines because it doesn't want to pay people to help you organise your money.
• Your supermarket has put in automated tills so that they don't have to employ people either.
• Any firm you ring about anything has endless automated messages - so they don't have to have people to talk to you. Annoying, isn't it?
• Robots are apparently being brought in in Japan to care for old people - so even the elderly will have machines instead of the hated humans to care for them.
• huge numbers of lower middle class workers, who used to do all the adding up and copying and filing by hand, have been replaced by computers.
• Driverless trains... online goods... online sex (whatever that is - I'm a vicar after all)... algorithmic stock trading... virtual friendships...

Somehow in my dull brain I still want to cling to the absurd and dated idea that "society" means what happens when people get together. But we seem to be creating a society which doesn't need people. How can that possibly work? I mean even in economic terms, when nobody's got any work because it's all done by machines, how will anyone earn anything? For I have no doubt that even human machine minders will be replaced by machines that can mind other machines better than we can. What will the economy mean when it's just lots of computers firing strings of digits at each other?

And who will this brave new society actually function for? Presumably only an ultra rich super class who design or make or own and hire out the machines and the stuff they run on will actually have money. But in the end if nobody but them earns anything, there'll be nobody to buy the goods and services their machines provide, will there? Then they too must go bust, surely? Surely even they will then be forced to admit that there is some mutuality in the world? When there is no-one left to buy then there can be no sellers either - can there?

As you can tell, I just don't get it. But at least we can still form a society, through choice even if not through economics much longer. We can privately and personally seek out a human interaction which we can no longer find in the factory or office. One of the great things about coming to Horton and Wraysbury is the enormous extent to which people set enthusiastically about this through all the various clubs and societies that we have here.

Christmas is coming up. It's a reminder that people matter. God values humanity so much that He came and shared in it. The divine life was incarnated in human laughter and tears, human work and play, human friendship and struggle. So let's not have a mechanical world, pitiless and pointless. That world is both godless and inhumane. Let's choose people instead.

Colin x x

A familiar face

It was a pleasure to come across a familiar face in my new Diocese this week. As a newcomer - 25 years in ministry but just started in Oxford Diocese - I attended an orientation day on Thursday and one of the first speakers was the Diocesan Registrar, John Rees.

John is now a very distinguished lawyer indeed, with roles in the Church of England generally including legal adviser to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Registrar to the entire Province. He was made The Times' Lawyer of the Week earlier this year. And he's looking great. I can't say he hasn't changed a bit because it's over thirty years now and I know I've aged in that time too. But he's bright, smart and twinkly-eyed. You can see him on the back of the latest Diocesan magazine, Door.

John was leading the Church Youth Group at the time I first started coming and set out on the road to following Jesus. A callow, confused, embarrassed and embarrassing young man I certainly was at the time, lonely, socially inept and silly, but I was welcomed and wanted anyway. And I was so desperate to find God and get some peace. John and that Youth Group showed me where to look for both, in Jesus, The Way.

Some years later John read me an extract from the journal he kept back then - perhaps he still does. I don't remember the exact words, but it said something like this: "a new person, Colin, came to Youth Group today. Told him about Jesus. Felt as though I was giving too much bread to a starving man."

I am so grateful that John and others took the time to share with me and nurture me. I feel I owe it to them as well as to the Lord to look out for those who may be as lonely or confused or spiritually desperate as I was back then, and to share Living Bread with them as best I can, just as I myself received it.

So Thank You John for what you did for me. I'm sorry the programme was so busy we had no time to talk. But perhaps we'll have time to rectify that as time goes on and I put down roots in the Diocese.

And as for you, reader - share a bit of bread with someone soon.

Colin x x

In Remembrance: 10 November 2013

Thank you Wraysbury for inspiring and moving Remembrance Service today. People told me that there is strong attendance every year, and they weren't wrong! It was particularly poignant to see so many children taking part and placing poppies round the Millenium Stone. We all long and hope that our children will never need to face the same terrors of war that our mothers and fathers endured. 

I'm told the service up at Horton went well today too. Sorry I couldn't be with you on such an important day - vicars have many strange powers but they don't include being in two places at once. I know you were not short changed as you were led by my trusty colleague Beryl, who I know is a blessing to everyone in the parish.

Some people were kind enough to say nice things about the sermon today, so I promised to put it on the blog. And here it is...

I wonder who or what you think about during that two minutes' silence on Remembrance Sunday? I often think of my grandfather, Albert Taylor. Granddad was born into a very poor family. They were farm labourers in Norfolk with lots of kids. To survive, my granddad learned to live off the land. He knew which leaves and wild roots you could eat, and if there was a pheasant or rabbit anywhere in the landscape, he knew it was there. Ray Mears had nothing on him!

When he was only 16 Albert signed up to fight in the First World War. At the Battle of Cambrai, after initial British success, a German counter-offensive broke through. A small detachment was thrown forward to slow down the enemy so the rest of the troops could pull back to safety. This was called a sacrifice party – they put their lives on the line so their comrades could be saved. Only my granddad and one or two others from that party of over a hundred survived. Everyone else was killed.

Albert was taken prisoner and endured conditions of great hardship. Because of the British naval blockade, the Germans did not have enough food for their own people, let alone their prisoners. Granddad was assigned to an agricultural party, going into the fields to work the soil, as so many of the German men were at the front. One day he managed to escape, slipping away into the countryside. There he lived off the land, as he knew so well to do - those survival skills stood him in good stead. Moving by night and hiding up by day, he made his way to neutral Holland. There he was interned as a combatant for the rest of the war.

A sacrifice party… sacrifice is a universal human practice. The Old Testament Hebrews sacrificed, as did the surrounding pagans and classical Greece and Rome. There were the ghastly human sacrifices of the Aztecs and other South American peoples, but lest we think we Europeans are any better there were the mysterious sacrifices of the bog people in Europe. In China ritual sacrifices of burned paper objects are made to ancestors. Animists still offer sacrifices to placate angry gods and demons. Muslims were recently sacrificing sheep or goats at Eid.

Sacrifice is still alive in modern secular life. Athletes sacrifice a normal life to train: they would never have won all those medals in the London 2012 Olympics without huge sacrifices. Volunteers sacrifice their own comforts to help the poor - my own son Ben sacrificed a year of his young life to work with street kids in Bolivia last year. Leaders sacrifice their private lives for their goals… Business men risk their personal wealth and work all hours for their careers...

Closer to home, newlyweds sacrifice their way of life to adapt to their partner's. Parents sacrifice time, effort and money to bring up their kids, and later in life children do the same for their parents. Carers give up future prospects for those they love. Our churches would not continue without the sacrifices of the people who for love of God and His people give of their time, energy and money. Has any worthwhile thing ever been achieved without sacrifice? A world where no-one made sacrifices for others would be a diminished world full of petty people.

Sacrifice is everywhere! Why?

Christians believe it is because that is the way God is. "God is love," says the Bible. Then it tells us that His love is supremely demonstrated in the sacrifice Jesus made for us on the Cross. God is the kind of God who sacrifices Himself for those He loves – and He has made us in His image. No wonder sacrifice appeals to us, inspires us and moves us. It is the great theme of so many of our songs and stories. It fires our imagination and motivates our actions. It is at the heart of life.

In 1917 my granddad Albert laid his life on the line so that his comrades could be saved. And on the night before he died, Jesus shared a last meal together with his disciples. In words that have been used every Remembrance Sunday since it began, he said to them, "Greater love has no-one than this, to lay down his life for his friends." Then he made the Great Sacrifice: he went out to suffer and die on the cross. Jesus laid his own life on the line, so that we his friends could be saved...

Is your God too small?

Last Sunday's reading bowled a bit of a googly for us unfortunate preachers. It was the parable of the Unjust Judge from Luke 18. Here's what Jesus said:

"In a certain town there was a judge who feared neither God nor man. There was also a widow who kept coming to him with her plea, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent!’ For a while he refused. But finally he thought, ‘Although I fear neither God nor man, yet because this widow keeps on bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so she doesn’t wear me out in the end!’” Then the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. So won't God bring justice to his chosen people, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and soon!" 

But Jesus' point in this story is not that God is like the unjust judge. In fact He's as unlike him as can possibly be! Jesus says, "If even the unjust judge will finally crumble under the power of your nagging, how much more will your heavenly Father listen to you?"

So the underlying issue in the story is, what is our image of God?

• Perhaps we have a judgmental God, angrily waiting for us to go wrong so he can condemn us?
• Do we see God as an impersonal force, not really bothered with the ups and downs of human life? Like some of the more out of touch members of our judiciary?
• Maybe we see God as an old grandad who's a bit hard of hearing: we need to keep on and on at him to get our way? Like a judge who falls asleep during the trial?
• Too many of us think we have to earn God's love - if only I could do enough religious rituals or church going or self-denying or dutiful service I can make him love me...

Well, we had a great time at St Andrew's in the New Life Service, drawing pictures to represent how we see God. There were some deep thoughts there, and some pretty astute theology. The children's contributions were particularly meaningful. There's a great story about a little girl who was drawing a picture in her class at school. The teacher asked who she was drawing and she said, "God." "Don't be silly, dear - nobody knows what God looks like." So the little girl holds up her picture and says, "They do now!"

In fact the Bible has a prohibition about creating images of God, at least for use as objects of worship. This is because any image of God, however brilliant, inevitably falls short of the Infinite. Our tiny minds simply cannot grasp the fullness of His majesty, glory, holiness and endless love... And our negative images of God will seriously damage our relationship with Him. They should have health warnings!

• If we see God as weak or uncaring we won't bother to pray.
• If we have a disapproving, judgmental view of God it will destroy our self-confidence.
• If we have a God who is a kindly old duffer, who will put up with anything, our faith will end up so bland that it is not worth bothering with. I sometimes wonder if this is the kind of God Western Christians spent most of the 20th century proclaiming and whether that is why so few British people bother with him in the 21st Century.

But our positive images of God can have amazing results!

• If we see God as great and powerful, we will be motivated to pray to him.
• If we see him as the one who loves us, our self-confidence will blossom.
• If we see him as a God of justice, it will start to matter what we believe and what we do.
• If our God is alive and active in the world then we will be full of courage and adventure.

So is your God too small? And if He is, how can you restore your image of Him? The Bible's answer is to look at Jesus. Our children knew this on Sunday and time and again drew Jesus as their image of God. They quite stole the punchline of my talk! Because Jesus said, "If you have seen me, you have seen the Father (John 14:9). He is also called the image of the invisible God in Colossians 1.

Jesus is God made known in a human form that we can know and understand and relate to. And when we give Him our full attention that lets the image of God in Him start to shape our own lives too. That's God's project for us: He wants us to grow more like Jesus, in love and mercy and peace and joy.

Because we too are supposed to be created in the image of God. Jesus then is like a master picture restorer, peeling back the layers of grubbiness and wear and tear and grime so that the beauty beneath can shine through...

Now there's a challenge! When people look at us, what do they see?  Is there a picture of what God is like in the way we live?