Arminghall

If you read this quite often it probably wouldn’t surprise you to know that some months it feels that there is something obvious to write, and other times a bit less so. You wouldn’t normally get away with not writing about Christmas in December, or Easter in the spring, so at least then you don’t have to decide on a theme, although you do have to work out how to say something a bit different from what you said in the 12 previous years!

Perhaps that’s part of why it is sometimes tricky: 12 ½ years or so, minus three months of sabbatical, adds up to about 150 of these articles, which is at least 60,000 words of content – the lower word limit for a PhD thesis. It’s a lot of ideas.

But maybe October is particularly tricky because sometimes in churches there is a bit less happening. It’s often after Harvest and before Remembrance and then Christmas, so it can feel a bit like normal service – if you can excuse the obvious and awful pun. And because of that, October is when the Church of England counts people. If you want to know who is there week in, week out, not just for special occasions, then October is apparently when to do it.

Some vicar friends and I were talking just the other day about counting. We get wary of it for lots of obvious reasons. Small numbers might make us feel depressed; big numbers might make us complacent: all the obvious things. Like lots of you, we don’t work for an organisation where numbers are the best way at all of measuring success, and most of us in Christian ministry don’t really think success is the best thing to be measuring anyway.

But - and those of you who for some reason have read 150 of these could hear this coming, couldn’t you? – there is a place for counting, I think. When Jesus gathers people – his disciples, or a bigger crowd, or somewhere in-between – the numbers are counted. In the Book of Acts, as we watch the exciting and explosive growth of the early church, someone was there keeping count. It wasn’t meant to be something for a special occasion; every day, every week, every month was supposed to be part of the church seeing God “adding daily to their number those who were being saved.” Even October.

So if you feel that this October might be the month that you want to be counted in that number, why don’t you get in touch and have chat with one of us? We’d love to find time to do it: it’s a quiet month, after all.

Yesterday I was pruning our big rose bush; it produces loads of little pink flowers and doesn’t take much looking after at all, which is very good news if you prefer low-maintenance gardening. But the one thing I do know about it, is that if I want the flowers to keep coming, I have to cut the old ones off as soon as they have finished, in order to encourage new growth. This year I have been a bit slower than I sometimes am, and there are quite a lot of rosehips starting to form already, using up potential flower energy.

As I was merrily snipping away at them, it occurred to me that what I was actually doing was cutting off the fruit. It doesn’t matter with a rose bush, of course, unless you are going to make syrup or jam or tea with the hips – or, as I think I recall from a childhood book, itching powder. But with plants which we grow for their fruit, like apples or pears or tomatoes or whatever, it would be madness to cut off the dead flowers in search of new ones; there would never be any fruit.

All of this got me thinking, like most things do, about being a follower of Jesus, and about making followers of Jesus. It struck me that it is fairly easy to make something look good, like a flower looks good, but that a lot more work, or energy, whether on the plant’s side or ours, is needed to produce fruit. And I wondered whether sometimes we can be so keen to chase after something that looks good, that we end up choosing that over the fruit that will take longer to grow, but will be so valuable in the end.

It is so exciting when someone becomes a follower of Jesus for the first time. It’s just like my rose bush bursting into flower. But that flower has to change into fruit, and that doesn’t happen straight away, or make a big show of it. The rosehips I was cutting back yesterday were green and boring compared to the lovely pink flowers, but slowly the potential for new life was forming – at least until my secateurs got in the way. When the bible talks about the Holy Spirit producing fruit from these first flowers of faith, it lists a lot of things which take time, and aren’t superficially impressive: patience, goodness, kindness, and so on. It strikes me that our social media age is one of flowers rather than fruit, and that maybe patience just doesn’t look so good on TikTok or Instagram. But when I sit at a table with my family and there is a vase of flowers and a bowl of fruit on there, I know which one is going to get eaten.

Oh well. Not for the first time, football hasn’t come home. The original 30 years of hurt have extended to 58, which doesn’t really fit the song so well, does it? In my case I remember back as far as Italia 90, which puts my personal years-of-hurt tally at 34. Some of you will go all the way back to 1966.*

Thinking the other Sunday about the amazing possibility that this time football might just come home got us thinking about ways that the Christian faith expresses the idea of coming home.

The most encouraging thing is that coming home is an absolute certainty. One day, football might just come home. Maybe, just maybe, this new manager we are now looking for will do the job for us. (At this point a pessimist would point out that no English manager has even won the Premier League in its 32-year history since going back to the summer of 1992, but I won’t go there.)

But as followers of Jesus, we are coming home. One day, all of us will come home to a place where there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will have passed away. One day, all of us will come to a place that has been prepared for us, a room amongst the countless rooms in the Father’s house for everyone who has come home to Jesus.

Jesus tells the story of a man who leaves his Father’s house, and goes out and wastes his inheritance. And one day, he decides he would be better off back where he came from. He realises that he should come home. Arriving at his Father’s house, he is astonished that where he expected to meet anger and judgment, he encounters someone who is so delighted at his return that he runs from the door to greet him as soon as he sees him coming. He can’t wait for him to get home.

But it isn’t just about us coming home. He brings us home. Fans of Les Miserables will know that song as well, sung by Jean Valjean as he prays over his friend Marius. Rescue him, Lord: bring him home.

When I was thinking about this song the other day, for the first time I pictured a conversation between Jesus and his Father as he prepared to come at Christmas time. Of course it wouldn’t have happened quite like this, but I imagine the Father looking down at the world with all its sin and mess and pain, looking down at you and me, and saying to Jesus, “Bring them home. Bring him home. Bring her home.”

So yes, if we follow Jesus we are coming home, but only because Jesus, faithful to his Father to the point of death, has done just as he was asked. He has brought us home.

*I am very aware that for the purposes of this article I have ignored the brilliant Lionesses’ win at Euro 2021. Three years of hurt doesn’t make the point quite so well, does it?

Like all parents of teenagers, I am a consistent source of weary amusement in our house, but recently I have been particularly laughable because of my attempts to make some sourdough bread. Before I get into this too much, I’d like to offer in my defence that I’m fairly sure Cathryn was the one who suggested first that we give this a try.

The main thing you are confronted with is that it takes ages. If you make the starter (which is what you use instead of yeast to make it rise) it takes days at least, but I was anxiously tending to mine for weeks before it seemed to grow in any significant way. Once there is enough yeast from the air in the jar to get it going, you have to remove some of the mixture and feed the rest regularly with more flour and water to keep it active. If you aren’t using the stuff you discard to make bread, you could give it to your friend as a present (this is genuinely Jamie Oliver’s suggestion), or I have found it makes nice pancakes.

Only after this can you start to make bread. This takes about 18 hours, from the point that you mix a load of your starter with more bread and water, to when you add the rest of the flour, leave it overnight in the fridge to prove, and then bake it in the morning. I have got to the stage where my family will happily eat it, but I do recognise that there are people in the village and in our church community who bake it for a living, and need to be clear that the stuff I have made definitely isn’t anywhere near as nice as the ones in the shops.

Am I just writing a baking column this month, you ask? Well, possibly. But the many hours I have spent not so much fiddling with this bread, as worrying about whether it will turn out ok, have given me some space to think about the process. I have got thinking about what Jesus says about how the kingdom of God is like yeast that a woman kneads into about sixty pounds (!) of dough. Now apart from what that says about her impressive kneading muscles, for the first time I have thought about how she wouldn’t have had superfast supermarket yeast, but something perhaps a bit more like sourdough, which needed time to work slowly and grow through the whole of the bread. It says to me that being transformed by God, so that you become more and more like Jesus, and can do more and more of the things Jesus does, will take time.

This is an important lesson if you are like me, and you feel that you would prefer to do something you see the impact of tomorrow, or not bother. And when I look around our churches, I see things happening now which look like the result of a very long process of kneading with (in my case) very feeble muscles over a long period of time. So if you are just at the point of making a first decision to follow Jesus, please celebrate if you feel you are growing really quickly, but equally please persevere if it feels like working a little yeast through a very big batch of dough. The growth and the change will happen, and the results will be amazing.

Did you hear the one about the supermarket that tried to put a tick on some hot cross buns?

Just before Easter this year, word got out that Iceland were going to do just that.

It could almost have been designed to cause outrage. People piled on to complain, all of them convinced it was another sign we were abandoning our Christian roots. It was bad enough when the National Trust did whatever they did with the Easter eggs, but this was a step too far.

The thing is, though, that it was designed to cause outrage. A survey suggested a few people would prefer “hot tick buns”, so Iceland made a small number, and aggressively marketed them so lots of other people would complain. Not just complain, either: customers bought 134% more of Iceland's traditional buns in the runup to this Easter. The bun people knew what they were doing.

Somewhere there has long been something a bit like a tick, of course, is on your Nike clothing. They might say it's a swoosh, but it looks like a tick to me. Whatever you call it, for over 50 years now the symbol has been appearing on their products, ever since it was originally designed to resemble the wings of the original Nike, the Greek goddess of victory.

These thoughts all started to come together for me the other week as I sat and listened to Lyn preach about "overcoming". I started to search through the bible, and realised that many of the times some translations use words like "victory" or "overcome", the original Greek word is the same one that Nike gets her name from.

One of the most famous examples of this is in Paul's amazing victory cry at the end of 1 Corinthians:

Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?’ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Of course this is most of all about life rather than death, because the resurrection of Jesus is the ultimate victory, but Easter only makes sense when we look across the whole weekend, and see the Sunday as the glorious completion of the victory that began on Good Friday, as Jesus bore the sting of death for all of us. In the end, the whole of Easter is a glorious victory.

And if that's true, then once again it looks like the bun people knew what they were doing after all.