Dear Friends
Corpus Christi: being “us”
The Feast of Corpus Christi fell on 30 May 2013 and marked
our 32nd Birthday as a Parish! We celebrated as a community on
Sunday 2 June, with a Family Service and a traditional “English Breakfast”. The
children were particularly interactive during the sermon as we explored aspects
of party, being family and Jesus feeding of the 5,000 (which we could easily
have done during the breakfast!). We explored how, as Christ’s Body, we are
taken by God, consecrated with thanksgiving, broken, and given to the world to
be about the business of God. There were even a few instant Latin Scholars in
our children’s midst who helped us work out that “Corpus Christi” means “Body
of Christ”!
What are the implications of being taken, consecrated,
broken and given? For that is what happens to the body of Christ, and as a
community we carry that name. What does it say about who we are, our purpose
and our vision?
We have agreed that our mission is to be role-models and
responsible risk-takers for Christ where we live, work and worship; and we now
remind ourselves of this each time we gather for worship as we say the
Declaration together. We are consecrated, strengthened by God to be about our
mission. Being role-models opens us up to criticism and being risk-takers opens
us to ridicule and often leads to our breaking as we seek to be available to
God and his purposes in the world, where we live and work. We gather in worship
to ask God’s forgiveness for the moments we have failed to be good role-models,
where we have been too scared to take risks for God. We gather to find God’s
healing, to be renewed that we may live our purpose and bring reality to our
vision.
At the end of our worship together we are given, we are sent.
We are sent to live our vision and bring it to reality. We affirm that we are
passionate disciples of Christ – committed, willing, disciplined, equipped –
living our Faith in daily life. It is in gathering together that we affirm our
commitment, our willingness to be available to God and to the purposes of God’s
Kingdom. It is in immersing ourselves in the Word of God that we hear our
purpose affirmed, and in prayer we look forward to actioning our vision. It is
where we explore what it is to be disciplined. It is where we are equipped.
As we leave our time of worship together we state that we
are equipped for the challenges that lie before us as we go out to live our
Faith in daily life. We have been equipped in that we have gathered and shared
in hearing God’s Word, we have reminded each other that God’s peace is a gift
to undergird our lives. We have been equipped in that we have received the body
of Christ, the blood of Christ: the body of Christ to sustain us, the blood of
Christ to protect us. But we may need to be equipped in other ways?
What are the Faith-challenges that you face in your home, at
work, with friends? How can we as Parish, your place of Worship, your Christian
community, help equip you to meet these challenges more fully and more
effectively?
Blessings
Mark
