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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.

 

Complaining!

God hears us, God is with us.

 

Context

When will the VAR debate ever end?  With a heavy inevitability, and as autumn starts to erode our summer holiday memories, the football league gets into full swing along with a raging debate about Video Assistant Referees.

Last week’s match between the two Manchester teams ignited the debate again following a controversial decision to award a Manchester City goal via VAR initially ruled out by the officials on the pitch. This one was particularly interesting in that after the game, won by City due to that goal, the VAR officials themselves admitted that they had probably made the wrong decision as they failed to take into consideration other players who may have transgressed the rules leading up to the goal.

It’s all fiendishly complicated and everyone has an opinion - just have a listen to the second half of Nicky Campbell’s phone-in show for a flavour of the reaction, passion and opinions of the Great British public! It’s a technology debate that triggers the nation!

But the fact is that we now live in a world of enormous and complex technology debates: Is AI going to kill us all? What about the rapid development of sinister weaponry thanks to wars raging around the world. Can we develop technology quickly enough to deal with the climate collapse? Many of us might feel lost when we look at the big picture here. It’s hard to understand what’s happening and we can feel very disempowered in the face of technological advances that seem out of control or the reluctance of governments and corporations to tackle world problems that are impacting all of us. So perhaps, in the face of this, quibbling, moaning or complaining about VAR decisions is a low-level tech debate that we can all engage in.

And there’s a strange parallel to the story of the Israelites in the desert with Moses. Their world was equally frightening. They were worried about the big picture. Were they all going to die in the desert? Who was in control? Why did they leave Egypt in the first place – what was the plan? Perhaps for them the world felt out of control, perhaps they felt disempowered, and so they take to collectively quibbling, moaning and complaining about an issue they can all engage with - food. Perhaps if they had had the chance to call Nicky Campbell on this one you would have heard their reactions, passion, and opinions on a debate that was triggering all of them.

For the Israelites, God heard their complaints and stepped in with a solution. He provided for their immediate needs whilst they worked their way through the complexities of their world. He was with them even though they were to be in that desert for years to come.

Now I don’t think we will have a heavenly solution to the VAR debate. But God does hear our cries and our complaints. He knows what impacts us and is with us through it all – the small and immediate to the huge and global.

Like the Israelites we don’t know what’s going to happen next, or how long we will be in ‘the desert’, but we do know God is in it all with us, big and small.

 

Prayer idea:

Use a football to pray for things that are important to you. Either:

Throw the football around the church. When people catch it pause and pray together for that person.

Or:

Take a football and write different prayer points into each panel with a marker pen. Stand in a circle and throw the ball across it. When someone catches the ball they should read out one of the prayer points. The group will then pause to pray. Repeat until all the prayer points have been covered.

Fiona is a freelance leadership consultant and mediator.

 

 

Check-in

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

“Recreate this image as though it was genuinely photographed in 1984, rather than digitally edited today.”

Prompts like these have gone viral recently as millions of people have turned to ChatGPT to turn their photos into ones that could have come straight from the 1980’s. It might sound like harmless fun but all these requests asked so close together puts a large amount of pressure on the servers that create them and that, in turn, creates a huge negative environmental impact.

The effect is so big that many people are crying out that enough is enough, with many social media users not only speaking out about this impact, but also offering alternative ways to explore the same question, such as making your own 80s clothes, asking parents to see their photographs, and giving real-life make-up tips to recreate the looks IRL.

The issue is not the request itself, but where the request is being directed to. It is not too dissimilar to our Bible passage today, with a whole community of people directing their questions in the wrong place.

By learning to put our trust in God, and discerning the questions we should ask, we can work out our steps through life, and maybe learn how to navigate trends!

Lindsay Wright is a freelance writer and designer from Lancashire - www.startswithabrew.co.uk

 

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