25th October, 2020.
​
My dear friends,

We have just changed the clocks from British Summer Time back to Greenwich Mean Time. I can’t say I am a great fan of changing the clocks twice a year – I rather wish we could choose one or other and stick with it throughout the year – but it is an annual sign that Autumn is finally upon us.

In Essex, changing the clocks usually coincides with the School Autumn half term holiday. May I wish all our Badgers and Cadets a very happy half term break. Because of the Coronavirus regulations, it is not possible to do all that we might usually like in half term, but there is still much we can still do and enjoy. I am a great fan of trees: we might perhaps go for a walk during half term and enjoy all the different colours of the leaves in Autumn.

The television news this week has featured many concerning reports about young people in Great Britain not getting enough to eat. I am pleased to say that there has been a very encouraging  response to my appeal in aid of our collection at St Mary’s Church, Great Bardfield, for Braintree foodbank. Could I appeal to all readers to donate something to a local foodbank. Many supermarkets have collecting boxes near the exit where goods may be left for a nearby foodbank. Our donation may make all the difference to someone’s life.

​Monday 2nd November is All Souls Day, when the Church commemorates the faithful departed. Do please let me have the names of anyone from St John who has died in the past year and I will see they are included in the prayers at Holy Communion.


With continued prayers and kindest regards,

The Rev. Dr ROBERT BEAKEN, County Chaplain
LAST SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY – 25th OCTOBER 2020.
​
Gospel: St Matthew, chapter 22, verses 34-46
Men and women, I regret to say, have an inveterate tendency to create rules and regulations about all sorts of things. Ask a doctor or a teacher: they will tell you that what drives them mad are ever-changing rules and regulations. All they want to do is to care for the sick or to teach, and they spend far too much of their time grappling with forms and questionnaires. The Church of England is the just the same: the General Synod, bishops, archdeacons and diocesan offices churn out e-mails, paperwork and red tape. Most of us find it a dreadful bore, but some people love it. For six years I served on the Chelmsford Diocesan Synod: not one of the more scintillating experiences of my ministry. There were some Synod members who, I swore, used to read the standing orders for synodical government every night in bed before they went to sleep. They loved the Synod, and would ask all sorts of complicated questions about procedure, precedent, clauses, paragraphs and sub-sections, and so forth, while the rest of us waited impatiently to get on with something that actually mattered.
​
            It was a bit like this in Judaism at the time of Christ. As well as the Ten Commandments, the Jews, and especially that group of them known to us as the Pharisees, had developed all sorts of rules and regulations, known collectively as the Law. Now, I am sure that they originally meant well; but in reality they had come to codify their religion. For them, the expression of religious faith meant obeying over four hundred rules. Not surprisingly, there was a lot of guilt, but also a degree of spiritual pride: something which we know concerned Jesus.

            Now, amongst the Jews with their four hundred regulations, there was a regular debate about the Law: was any one regulation more important than another? Jesus was in the Temple in Jerusalem one day when a Pharisee came up and asked him: ‘Teacher, which commandment in the Law is the greatest?’ Biblical scholars are divided over the man’s motives. Some think he was trying to trip Jesus up, so that he said something to incriminate himself; others think that he genuinely wanted to know the answer.

            The answer Christ gave is most interesting. He fused together two pieces of Scripture from Deuteronomy and Leviticus.
 
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment.
 
Now, there was nothing here that anyone could object to; the rabbis had been saying such things for a long time. The difference was that Christ added a few words of his own at the end, ‘love ... with all your mind.’ Jesus was perhaps rebuking the Pharisees for their unthinking and unreflective approach. They were so concerned with keeping all the rules that they missed the spiritual point behind them.

There is a message here for us about using our minds in God’s service. This means we must nourish our Christian faith by reading the Bible and spiritual books, and think about our faith. I must say, I have been to some churches where I rather suspect some of the congregation leave their critical faculties in the car outside. Christ calls us to worship God with all that we are as human beings, including our brains.

            Secondly, Jesus told the Pharisee:
 
You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.
 
Again, this is not quite what it seems. The Jews would commonly have understood their neighbours to be their fellow-Jews and not really anyone else from the tribes and nations that surrounded them. Through parables such as that of the Good Samaritan, Christ, suggested that all men and women are our neighbours, irrespective of their nationality or religious beliefs. In a sentence, Jesus taught the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man. We are all sons and daughters of the same Heavenly Father, though we might not know it. Christ calls us to care for others, whatever they believe.

            There is a very moving sentence from St John’s Gospel in the 1662 Prayer Book which I sometimes use at the offertory. It seems to echo this beautifully:
 
Whoso hath this world’s goods, and seeth his brother in need, and shutteth up his compassion from him: how dwelleth the love of God in him?
 
Whatever rules and regulations may emerge from the General Synod and so on, Christianity is not a religion of laws. All churches need some rules and regulations for smooth running, to avoid chaos and to promote consistency, but there it stops. We do not find Jesus Christ in rules and regulations. Rather, we find him in the Sacraments and especially in his Real Presence in the Eucharist, in Holy Scripture, in prayer, and, he would tell us in today’s Gospel, in one another.

At the heart of Christianity, we encounter love. The wonderful inexpressible love of God Almighty, who could not bear to see mankind go wrong and be destroyed by sin, so he sent his only Son into the world to love us and save us.

We Christians are called upon to open our hearts every day to God’s great love and let it flow in and fill us. Then, we are to let God’s love guide and inspire us, to live and work to help other people.  

Christian faith is about trusting Jesus Christ and allowing him to change our lives