Pastoral letters 2009

From Revd Chris Stark

JOURNEYS

We recently had a friend to stay who had undertaken a sponsored walk in the Sinai Desert. The terrain & weather conditions, made it a pretty arduous journey by all accounts. Our friend confided that he well understood how it took the Israelites 40 years to get out of there! His guides had the benefit of mobile phones, although Moses I suppose, did have a divine forerunner of the SatNav!

The biggest surprise for our friend & his party was a torrential thunderstorm, not quite what they had expected in the desert. They arrived cold, hungry & exhausted at the rough stone hut that was to be there resting place. The roof had holes in it which they had to patch with plastic bags to keep themselves dry! That night, their frugal food seemed like a banquet and the bare stone hut like a 5 star hotel. It made them realise how little you actually need to survive. Food, water, shelter, clothing and friends meant they had all that they needed at that point in time.

There are many sorts of journeys to be undertaken in life, moving house, going on holiday, visiting hospital etc., some more demanding than others, but the journey of life is the toughest one of all. Living in a society that is so materially wealthy and whose whole ethos is so much about the here and now, it is hard to grasp the idea that our journey is a pilgrimage, whose ultimate destination is beyond this world. Because we have so much materially, it is easy to have little enthusiasm for seeking first the Kingdom of Heaven. Sadly nothing is simple when you have a mass of materially possessions. Where your treasure is, there your heart is! Finance, security,
 communications, transport, housing, employment, dying, almost anything you care to think of doing, becomes incredibly difficult & complex. There are no simple solutions, in fact I doubt if there any solutions at all in a totally materialistic society.

If we are really on a journey to heaven, then importance we attach to material possessions is plainly wrong. This is not an argument about technology, for whether that is good or bad depends on how it is used and for what it is used. No, we need to live more simply for our own sanity and eternal well being and for the well being of everyone on the planet. Some of you may have watched the TV series, "Blood, Sweat & Takeaways", which quite graphically portrays how the demands of our lifestyle, impacts on the rest of the world. Jesus was bom into a very different age from our own, but there were very rich people & material temptations then & his words need to heard & heeded by us. If all our investment in life is in material things, then it is destined to decay eventually, but through the love of God in Christ, we are offered a life that is eternal, where our investments are secured not by fallible investment banks & stock markets, but by the Cross of Christ.

Perhaps we all need to think about where we are going on our journey of life. Is it time for a change of direction?