Churches June 2022

Thought for the Month

Going Home - with Rejoicing and Thanksgiving

At St Helen’s we are enormously grateful to everyone who has assisted in any away in enabling us to return to the church building. We were made very welcome and we were very comfortable in the side room of Longhorsley Mission, where we worshipped every Sunday for 10 months. Thank you to Ian Pagan and everyone who enabled us to be there.

When I told Ian the building could be reopened and worship resumed, he responded: You are GOING HOME! We have, indeed, gone home with much rejoicing and thanksgiving.

Home is so significant to us. It is the place, and, the people with whom we feel most comfortable and where we can throw off our outer clothes and shoes and BE ourselves.

In the Old Testament the Israelites yearned to go Home throughout their long exile in Egypt. Eventually when Pharaoh released them God parted the Red Sea to let them cross into their promised land. At last! They could re-take possession of their own place and future.

Home was very important too to Jesus and to his disciples. In the Gospels, we notice so often when they had finished a hard day’s work, they went ‘home’, to the hospitality of the place where they were staying. Jesus, who was brought up in a home with Joseph and Mary in Nazareth, never had another settled home. But his close friends, Mary, Martha and Lazarus provided a home from home for him.

During the Covid lockdowns we were so thankful for our homes and gardens, which gave us sanctuary and opportunities to grow new interests, indoors and outdoors. And we are thankful for being able now to go out, to enjoy ourselves and to meet friends.

Those experiences have perhaps sharpened our sensitivity to the plight of persons who are at present displaced from their own homes, among them the many refugees from Ukraine. On TV News one evening there were live pictures of a train slowly edging to a standstill at the main railway station in Berlin carrying 800 refugees, and of the many people waiting at the platform to assist them. So many lives, young and old, who do not know if or when they will be able to return to their country and place they call home.

Conscious of our own rejoicing and thanksgiving, welfare and comfort, we pray for them:

God of peace and justice,

we pray for the people of Ukraine today.

We pray for peace and the laying down of weapons.

We pray for all those who fear for tomorrow,

that your Spirit of comfort would draw near to them.

We pray for those with power over war or peace,

for wisdom, discernment and compassion

to guide their decisions.

Above all, we pray for all your precious children, at risk and in fear, that you would hold and protect them.

We pray in the name of Jesus, the Prince of Peace. Amen.

(From the Archbishops of Canterbury and York)

Reverend Audrey, St Helen’s

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