June Newsletter

Here Comes The Summer – And It’s No ‘Ordinary Time’!
I don’t know about you but I am just beginning to get a taste for the Summer: for hot, shirtsleeve days and long summer nights when the light stretches ever onward and it doesn’t really get dark until 9pm or 10pm. The hedgerows have burst into a profusion of colour and the light is fresh and bright. For many, the Summer is an expansive time of the year: the constraints of the winter can be forgotten and the cobwebs thrown off. Many people relish the opportunity of spending as much time as possible out of doors, whether it be gardening or bowling, walking or rowing, surfing or swimming. The Summer can be a freeing and renewing time of the year.
Sadly, in these Summer days , the Calendar of the Church Year does not reflect the Summer experience of exploration and discovery and designates these ‘extraordinary’ months of June - and many months hereafter (right up until November) - as ‘Ordinary Time’ ! Sundays are numbered after the rather arcane theological concept of the Trinity almost ad infinitum - I think there are ’21 Sundays After Trinity’ this year!
I am always disappointed that the Church should choose to designate the Summer months in this way. There has been all the preparation for the birth of Jesus in December in the Advent Season, the joy of Jesus’ Coming at Christmas, the revelation of the nature of the Christ at Epiphany, the 40-day preparation of Lent, and the study of Jesus’ mission and life-story in February and March, leading to the climatic events of Jesus’ Passion, Death and Resurrection in Holy Week, Good Friday and Easter, his Ascension in May and the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. After all this, the Church Year seems to go rather flat. By not entering into the ‘Spirit’ of the Season or the Summer, I think that the Church misses a trick at this time of year.
There is the whole next part of the story of God’s salvation to be told: the story of the birth and early beginnings of the Church to discover, contained in the final books of the New Testament: the Acts of the Apostles and the Letters to the emerging Christian Churches and first Christian communities. And we learn that they are as fractious, fragile and human as any Church is today. This June in Church we shall be reading from the Letter of St Paul to the Church in Galatia, and we shall hear St Paul trying to explain to Jews his credentials in being an apostle, his contentious mission to the non-Jewish peoples, the Gentiles, the relationship of the newly emerging Christian faith to the old Jewish Torah and law and how St Paul emphasises that loving Christian conduct flows naturally from faith in Christ.
The Holy Spirit had much to teach the early Church and has much to teach us today. The Holy Spirit gives us the power we need to live the Gospel and is our well-spring of peace and confidence, planting the seed of faith and devotion to God in our hearts.
I know there is a need for fallow times in the Christian year as in the farming year: times when the soils in the fields need to recover and fish stocks return to the seas but I do not think the Summertime of fruitfulness and harvest is a time for this. As Christians, there are no ‘Ordinary Times’ if we are followers of Jesus and live lives empowered by the Holy Spirit. I believe as Christians we are to reap the ‘Harvest’ and ‘fruits of the Spirit’ at this time of year. I prefer to call these Summer days ‘Sundays of the Holy Spirit’, because you never know where the wind of the Holy Spirit will blow next and whom the fire of the Holy Spirit will rest or alight upon next. Just as we make new discoveries and have new experiences in the freedom of the Summer days and nights, may we ‘expect the unexpected’ in our faith too and may the Summer also be a ‘Season of the Holy Spirit’, a time of deepening, having new adventures and making new discoveries in our faith and walk with God just as we do in the rest of our lives at this bounteous time of Year.
Revd Nigel Marns
Rector: Ludgvan, Marazion, Perranuthnoe & St Hilary
A Date For your Diary: Revd Nigel and Mrs Penny Marns warmly invite the Parishioners of the United Benefice to a Songs of Praise Service followed by some light refreshments in The Rectory Garden, Ludgvan (in Ludgvan Church, if wet) on Sunday June 27 at 4pm. All very welcome