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In touch

Up-to-the-minute jumping-off points for sermons, linking the reading to the latest news and global issues.

 

Are you ready?

God calls us in surprising and challenging ways. Are we ready to respond with a yes to the future God is asking us to share in building? (Genesis 24:58)

 

Context

At the People’s History Museum in Manchester, Andy Burnham began to outline his hopes for the future: Imagine…imagine…imagine a future filled with hope.

Hope is powerful as inspiration to participate in the new and some people would argue is key to making change happen. Can we find it in politics again?

Some voices are urging investment in future generations - in itself an act of faith.

Building the future requires us to think big and act small: sweating the small stuff and accepting we may not know the outcome but knowing that our part in it can make a difference. Anyone who plants, farms or gardens knows the lived experience of having faith in a future that cannot yet be seen.

 

Reflection

Shortly after the end of Andy Burnham’s vision statement, members of opposition parties were quick to say ‘it won’t work’ or ‘we have tried it already’. How often are we guilty of a failure of collective imagination in our church communities that limits God’s possibilities?

Rebekah had a day’s notice to leave home to go and marry Isaac. She saw immediately that God was active in the situation. What could have prepared her to say yes in that moment and to believe the future to which she was being called by God?

The Genesis passage tells us a very human story in which God’s promises work through human lives and very human choices. We often overlook Rebekah and yet the future of a whole people rests on her and her actions. God’s new future depends on us. Are we ready to embrace it? What might we need to let go of and what do we need in order to be ready?

We might think that the task is onerous or too big for us or that our resources are too small. That is a story that is told all too frequently in scripture. But today Rebekah shows us a free and generous response and an in-the-moment recognition that God is present and active in the circumstances of the everyday and reliant on her ‘yes’.

Jesus knows how afraid we may be of the challenges ahead and tells us ‘my yoke is easy and my burden is light.’ It is not about exhausting ourselves with a legalistic approach to living but the freedom of responding from the heart, knowing we are called in love and supported by love. Jesus shares the burden of the task with us - present with us in the small and big stuff of building God’s future.

 

Questions

1. What spiritual practices might help us to discern the part we are each called to play in building God’s future?
2. What spiritual practices might help us to ensure that we can serve others from the centre of our being and vocation remains a joy and not a burden?
3. Rebekah receives a blessing from her father and her mother (Genesis 24:60). It turns out to be prophetic. Are we taking time to discern vocation in others, calling and commissioning each other in new adventures of faith and encouraging each other along the way?
4. Imagining a future filled with hope should be in our church DNA. If we reframed our discussions around ‘what if’ rather than ‘yes but’ and planned with faith that people will come up with the goods when needed, how might this transform our leadership meetings?
5. Are we practising steps of faith in small things so that we can be ready for the bigger things God may ask of us?

For a reminder of spiritual practices see this leaflet from a Moravian Church in the US. 

Diane Craven is currently a trainer and education and spirituality consultant based in the Diocese of York.

See also:

 

Check-in

Connecting faith with everyday, real-life issues for young people

Whoever becomes the next Prime Minister will be our seventh in the last ten years.

Frequent changes in leadership do not offer the markets stability or send a positive message to our overseas partners and investors. Whatever gifts the next Prime Minister brings into the role, or the flaws of previous incumbents, I am left asking how these frequent changes benefit people, especially those struggling in our current economic climate.

I wonder, did any of the people involved with these changes invite God into the process. Or were these decisions based on their own desires? How often do we take decisions based on what we want to do, rather than following God’s way?

In the story today, the sign from God reflects the servant’s search for a kind and generous wife for Isaac. In our own lives how might we know that a sign is from God?

 

For discussion with the group

• Share a personal experience of praying about a decision in your life. How did you know the sign was from God? Invite the group to share their experiences.
• How would you know a sign is not from God?
• Compare this with Gideon and the fleece, Judges 6:25-40. Gideon asks God for a sign on his own terms. Have the group done this? Does this change the outcome? How?
• Why is it good to ask God for help in our choices?

Victoria Etherington is University and Young Adult Chaplain in the York Methodist Circuit.

 

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