SUMMER 2023 PASTORAL LETTER
What we are all longing for
As a student in St Andrews, no more than 20 years of age, I took ill. This was headline news in a life otherwise marked by robust good health. I came down with something which laid me low for a couple of weeks. The illness led me to introduce myself to a stranger called ‘The University Doctor’, who explained that I had been struck by some kind of virus (That’s a medical term for ‘Don’t know what’s wrong with you, can’t do anything for you’). I found myself utterly exhausted, the least exertion leaving me helplessly fatigued.
When my parents heard of this, they made haste to visit the following Saturday. After a week spent confined to my room, I was left feeling somewhat miserable, made worse by a growing anxiety at being behind in my studies. My parents duly whisked me away down the Fife coast, where I remember walking on the beach, enjoying the fresh air, listening to the sound of the sea and enjoying a meal out. I remember this very vividly as a turning point. In every way, I felt considerably better. The experience of the beauty and sounds of nature at the sea shore seemed to neutralise my anxieties and, above all, the kindness and unconditional love of my parents left me feeling strengthened to return to St Andrews and get on with life.
I am sure you will have had a similar experience. You are haunted by fears but then someone’s encouragement, their unconditional love for you, helps you through it all. Or in the midst of suffering, the gentle compassion and love of someone helps you face and deal with that suffering. Or time spent quietly in the beauty of the world around helps still a troubled heart. This tells us something about our humanity and the healing goodness of experiencing unconditional love, of enjoying beauty in what someone else has made or what God has made in the world around us.
Let me now turn your attention to worship. This seems like changing the channel, but in fact it isn’t. In worshipping together, we are coming into the presence of the one who is certainly the Almighty and Holy Creator of all things; but he is also the shepherd of his people who displays the most exquisite unconditional love for us in Jesus. Meeting the Lord in worshipping him is exactly what we were made for.
The Christian church worldwide recently lost one of God’s great gifts to us in the minister and writer Timothy Keller, who died after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. He once wrote
‘worship is a preview of the thing that all of our hearts are longing for, whether we know it or not. We seek it in art, in romance, in the arms of our lovers, in our family.’ Keller then goes on to quote C.S. Lewis from a famous essay entitled ‘the weight of glory’
‘The sense that in this universe we are treated as strangers, the longing to be acknowledged, to meet with some response, to bridge some chasm that yawns between us and reality, is part of our inconsolable secret. And surely from this point of view the promise of glory becomes highly relevant to our deepest desire. For glory means good (rapport) with God, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things. The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last …. Then our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy but the truest index of our real situation … At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door … but all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Someday, God willing, we shall get IN.’
I suspect that there are believers who think that the essence of being a Christian is about no more than having declared faith. It is certainly not less than that and, of course, believers declare Christ to be their Saviour and Lord. When people profess faith, they give their assent to key beliefs and commitments. However, the implication of that profession moves from what goes on in our heads, and what we say with our lips, into what we experience as human beings in worship. In worship we ought to anticipate (and pray for!) that sense of the presence of the Lord enveloping our lives. In itself this is a foretaste of what Lewis insists we are all longing for; and what we long for is the ‘very face and embrace of God.’ (Keller)
When we worship, we can experience the touch of God on our lives, experience afresh his unconditional love, sense anew the great blessings we have in him and glimpse again something of what awaits us beyond resurrection. Above all the Holy Spirit probes the Word of God into the farthest reaches of our beings, accomplishing transformation which is the progress of new life.
Looking forward to seeing you in worship.
Your minister,
Martin
New members
We are delighted to welcome new members to the fellowship. Okezi and Eucharia join us, having moved from Nigeria with their girls Ruvie and Kovie.
Funerals
28/4/23 : Margaret Aird : Lynn Cottage
5/5/23 : Kay Boreland : West Kirklands Place
11/5/23 : Joe Smith : Thistle Knowe Care Home
(formerly Vennel Street)
16/5/23 : Mary Steele Friars Lawn, Kilwinning