Brookside
Methodist Church Gunthorpe Road Gunthorpe Peterborough PE4 7TG Phone (General): 01733-328192 Phone (Office): 01733-572911 Email: brooksidemc@surefish.co.uk Website: www.brooksidemc.org.uk Our Calling from God is to prayerfully live out our discipleship and mission through: hWorshiphLearning
& Caring hServicehEvangelism
April & May 2008
Dear Friends,
This magazine will appear around the third week of Easter when we will still be celebrating the shock of the Resurrection of Jesus. We will be spending time with his first disciples as they begin to explore the earth-shaking implications of their encounters with Jesus after he had been killed by the state.
But as I write this, it is not even Holy Week! So it feels very strange and hard to put myself in the frame of mind to write something that will be in the mood of celebration of the Easter season. Also as I write, because of recent or looming bereavement, uncertainty people face in the work place, or for other reasons, as you read this some people are not, and will not, be feeling much like celebrating. And there is all the changes and uncertainty that are coming, for the Church and Circuits, and for us as a family.
Yet these may not be so discordant with the Easter season after all. For Easter is not only about wild celebration, it is also an incredibly strange time. Jesus, followers did not make it up just to feel good or to deny Jesus, death. The Resurrection of Jesus on Easter Morning was an astounding initiative of God that left them reeling and dumbfounded! Just look at the honesty in the (most likely) ending of Mark,s Gospel: ,,They entered the tomb... and a young man, sitting... Said, ,He has risen! He is going ahead of you to Gallillee,... Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. ,, (Mark 16.6-8) And also at the end of Matthew,s Gospel, when the risen Jesus gives his disciples the great commission, he tells us that ,,they worshipped him, but some doubted. ,, (Matthew 28.17)
The Resurrection of Jesus is a mystery, as much as anything is in life and death. It is not something we can ,,get our heads round,,. It is God ,, going ahead of us,, and us scrambling to catch up. The Resurrection of Jesus kept the first Christians faithful, loving, and ultimately hope-full when they were being rejected, persecuted and even murdered. The Resurrection of Jesus did not keep them from any of that. In fact it caused it! But the faith, hope and love of God that underpinned the Resurrection also underpins all of the created Universe as life unfolded for the first Christians, just as they underpin life as it unfolds for us.
So there really is nothing in all Creation, nothing at all, that need separate us in our daily lives from living in the faith, hope and love of God in Christ Jesus who reconciles us to God and each other, bringing new life from all disaster, including death. Amen!
Dave Haseldine:-)