Pastoral Letter 167
Dear Members of St. Andrew’s Uniting Church, Friends and Adherents,
Grace and Peace to you all.
I hope you are all doing well.
I write these few lines from Narrabri, as some of us are enjoying the relaxing atmosphere of the town and driving around with good company and looking at the beautiful landscape of Northern NSW. Just to mention couple of examples will be the summit of Mount Kaputar and the Sawn Rocks.
This Sunday we celebrate Pentecost, on the 50th day after ty Resurrection and ten days after Ascension, the day when the Church was established by the coming of the Holy Spirit and the power of God, to represent and to be the body of Christ. We are the members of His body in this world until He comes back. Jesus instructed His disciples to wait and pray after He ascended until the Holy Spirit was given to them as He promised. With the coming of the Spirit, the era of Christian’s ministry started with the birth of the church of Christ.
Tomorrow our small group will worship with the Narrabri Uniting Church. I will lead the service and Bob Minton will deliver the message. The rest of you, will celebrate with St. Aidan’s Anglican Church. Please note that, tomorrow the Service at St. Aidan’s is at 9:00 am and not 10:00 am. But as I promised I am sending around my Pastoral Letter as usual, with the Order of Service that we will have with Narrabri Church, for those who will worship from home.
If you will not be able to be with us tomorrow morning Worship Service, please light a candle and join us following the attached Order of Service.
Be safe and well, continue to pray, remembering those who need care, support and love. Please let me know if you or anyone else has prayer points.
Here are some prayer points for this week:
- Pray for the people of Ukraine, Armenia and Artsakh.
- Pray for the Ainjar Church as they endeavour to restore their church building.
- Pray for the poor, the sick, the vulnerable, the struggling and the stressed.
- Pray for those who are unwell and struggling with different kinds of medical issues.
- Pray for those who are facing natural disasters causing death, loss and pain.
- Pray for world peace and ask for God’s blessings.
- Pray for our service in Narrabri and for our safe journey back home.
Please let me know if you or anyone else has prayer points.
Best Regards,
Krikor
MESSAGE
“God’s Gift”
Lord, we pray, speak in this place, in the calming of our minds and in the longing of our hearts, and in the thoughts that we form. Speak, O Lord, for Your servants listen. Amen!
Today is Pentecost, which is often called the ‘birthday of the church’.
Happy Birthday church!
On Pentecost, which literally means ‘50 days’, we remember how God’s Holy Spirit came among the disciples 50 days after Christ’s resurrection, and how the disciples then started their mission of sharing the good news of Christ’s life, death and resurrection with folks beyond their immediate circle – how they, in effect started a mission that eventually led to the development of the Christian church. And we just heard the story again. There is a mighty wind, there are tongues of fire, there’s action, people speaking of the great deeds of God in foreign languages. It is quite dramatic, to say the least. Every year we celebrate Pentecost the day when God poured out His Holy Spirit upon all flesh as He promised through the prophet Joel.
But it strikes me that for all our talk about the gift of the Spirit and how it creates, upholds, and sustains the church as a whole, we often miss the full significance of what God has given us. We miss it because we fail – in all our talk and in all our listening – to ask ourselves:
“How has God gifted me in particular?” –
“How has God gifted me as an individual…?”
The story is told of a man called Yates who during the depression of the 1930’s owned a sheep ranch in Texas. He did not have enough money to continue paying the mortgage – in fact, he was forced like many others, in those times, to live on government subsidies.
Each day as he tended his sheep, he worried about how he was going to pay his bills. Then one day a seismographic crew arrived on his land and said that there might be oil on his land and could they test drill.
After a period of detailed negotiations, a lease was signed, and the team went ahead and began drilling. At just over 1100 feet a huge oil reserve was struck –subsequent wells revealed even more oil than the first well revealed.
Mr. Yates owned it all. He had the oil and mineral rights. He had been living on government relief – yet now he was a millionaire.
Think of it – he owned all that oil with its tremendous potential, yet he did not realize it.
How often we are like this – we are poor and helpless – unaware of the extraordinary power that we have available to us – that which is lying just below the surface in our minds and in our hearts.
Each one of us here has been given by God our own special day of Pentecost – a day on which God imparted to us the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
Indeed, it is this indwelling, this personal day of Pentecost, which we pray for as a church over every believer when we lay hands upon them and with the sign of the cross – anoint their heads with water on the day of their baptism.
What God gives us when He gives us His Spirit is much more than strength and support and teaching and comfort, those things we normally identify with God’s presence, He too gives us more than joy, and peace, patience, and kindness, those things which we call the fruit of the Holy Spirit, He gives us as well a set of gifts – gifts designed for the building up of the body of the church, and for the individual ministries to which we are called, and for our spiritual life.
The prophet Joel, in his prophecy of the last days, as recorded in the 2nd chapter of the book of Joel, mentions some of the gifts that have been granted by God through His Spirit:
Gifts of vision and gifts of dreams gifts of prophecy poured out upon our sons and our daughters, poured upon our young and upon our old.
Peter, in his sermon on the day of Pentecost as recorded in Acts 2 – our reading this morning, speaks of the gift of tongues, of languages both angelic and human – to those assembled there so that they will not think the disciples are drunk or mad.
And Paul – who in the long run – was the most experienced of all the apostles with the working of the Holy Spirit in our lives, lists some of the gifts that God gives and explores with the Corinthian congregation in 1 Corinthians chapters 12 – 14, how those gifts can be used and abused.
A book I read recently, published by the Uniting Church, is called 27 Spiritual Gifts by Robert Hillman.
Some of the gifts listed are:
– the gift of teaching,
– the gift of discernment,
– the gift of exhortation
– the gift of hospitality
– the gift of intercession
– the gift of the word of wisdom
– the gift of prophecy
– the gift of faith
– the gift of administration
– the gift of helping
– and the gift of mercy.
Each of these gifts are spiritual gifts – to be distinguished from the natural talent we are born with – they are gifts of our second birth – our Pentecost and can transform an apparently untalented person into someone who has a remarkable ability to minister to others.
What gifts do you have?
What gift or set of gifts has God poured out upon you so that you might love and serve your God and your neighbour in the way God has intended especially for you?
I would like you to think about that – to try to identify within yourself what God has given to you – to use in His work.
It is a profitable exercise – because it forces us to think about what God wants to do through us – it forces us to pray and to read the scriptures and to think about what God has done through us in the past and where we feel He is leading us now.
And when we do that, we activate the Spirit within us – we bring its power to the forefront of our lives.
What gift or gifts has God given you for your second birth?
Discovering the answer to this question is so profitable an exercise that I suggest that as a way of honouring God you get together with four or five of your brothers and sisters in Christ and try a simple exercise:
Sit with a piece of paper and pen and have these people name to you one or more of your strengths – of your qualities – and write them down.
Let each person have a turn as the one in the spotlight.
I have done this – and I have helped others to do it – and it is a powerful experience – one in which you begin to see what God has done and is doing in your life.
That is kind of what happened with Mr. Yates – someone helped him to see what lay beneath the surface – and he discovered that he was a rich man – and his life of poverty and desperation was transformed into a life of abundance and of generosity.
He found what had always been there – and he used it – and it changed his life.
That is what the Holy Spirit is about, what the gifts are about.
They are there to be used in the work of God, a work to which we are all called, and which, when we all serve as we are intended – transforms us, our church, and our world – into what God intends us to be.
Amen!
Bob Minton