SUNDAY WORSHIP online
August 16 - Trinity 10
Sunday worship podcasts
Morning Worship Morning service sheet Hymn words (both services)
Evensong Evensong service sheet
From this Sunday onwards, I will be using the same readings and hymns for morning and evening services, to simplify the work of producing the podcasts. I hope you will understand the need to reduce my workload a bit, so that I can maintain the online “offering” alongside the three services each Sunday in the church and churchyard each Sunday! It will mean, however that I will also be able to include the sermon in the Evensong podcast.
In Seal Church
Please note – face coverings are mandatory in church unless you are exempt.
10 am Holy Communion in church
4pm Outdoor Church in the churchyard (weather permitting - this is currently going ahead today, but the ground is very wet, so you may want to bring something to sit on!)
6.30pm Breathing Space Holy Communion in church
Monday 11 am Private funeral: Kathleen Johnson Wednesday 9.15 am Morning Prayer Friday 10.30 am Friday Group on Seal Recreation Ground in groups of six, socially distanced.
Sunday Aug 23 in Seal Church
10 am Holy Communion in church
4pm Outdoor Church
6.30pm Evensong
On Zoom this week
Zoffee – Zoom chat at 11.15 am (note the later time)
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88918062932?pwd=ZnRUTDFSMGI5VVVPTkdiS3NaZW9MQT09
Meeting ID: 889 1806 2932
Passcode: 842159
Wednesday Zoom Church 11 am
Zoom Children’s Choirs: Wed 5pm and Thurs 4pm
email sealpandp@gmail.com for links
Wednesday at 7.15 pm Adult Choir on Zoom
email philiplebas@gmail.com for link
Trinity 7
 Today’s Gospel reading is a puzzling one, in which a woman comes to Jesus to ask for healing for her daughter. Jesus is in the district of Tyre and Sidon, a coastal district to the north of Galilee, modern day Lebanon –foreign territory for Jesus, in other words – but home for this woman. This was an area which had been inhabited for thousands of years by Canaanites, also known as Phoenicians, who had lived here since before the Israelites had settled the land to the south, driving them out of that land. The Phoenicians were famous seagoers, importing and exporting through the ports of Tyre and Sidon, and founding many colonies around the Mediterranean including Carthage in North Africa, parts of Sardinia and Sicily and the southern tip of Spain. Valuable exports included the purple dye made from the tiny murex sea-shell, which was reserved for the ruling classes of the ancient world (and is why purple is still regarded as a somewhat luxurious colour – think of the Cadbury’s chocolate wrapper if you don’t believe me!). The Phoenicians produced one of the earliest known alphabets – long distance traders need ways of communicating efficiently with people they can’t talk to face to face, and another Phoenecian port, Byblos, specialised in the import of papyrus made in Egypt, on which the earliest books were written. That’s why the Greek word for book is Biblos, plural Biblia, which is where we get the word Bible from (and bibliography, bibliophine and everything else to do with books!)
But along with this history of thriving industry and invention, these Phoenician territories had a seedier side, at least according to the Bible, which is often suspicious of what goes on in them. This is probably partly rooted in fact. Archaeologists have found evidence that they practiced infant sacrifice, which the Bible castigates them for, and those seaport towns are likely to have been rackety places, with a lot of people coming and going, wheeling and dealing. There would have been sailors from all over the world, far from home and living by their own rules, out on the razzle after long weeks at sea, maybe with a “girl in every port”. I wonder whether the woman in today’s Gospel story might have been one of those women, abandoned by her lover with a child to raise, as there seems to be no man to speak for her or defend her, which would have been unusual in the culture of Jesus’ time. Phoenician women had a bad reputation in the Bible, embodied in the stories of Jezebel, the Phoenician princess who had married Israel’s King Ahab. Even if people know nothing about the Bible, they know what a “Jezebel” is – her name has become shorthand for a temptress, a woman who is up to no good somehow.
The first puzzle then is why on earth Jesus went to Tyre and Sidon. If he wanted to get away from the rising tensions around his ministry in Galilee, to take a break, to have time to ponder and pray, this was hardly the place for a devout Jew to do that. It seems to me that it was a deliberate decision to go somewhere where he knew he would be challenged, faced with things which would stretch even his tolerance, expanding his vision of God’s love. If that is the case, it is certainly what happened when this woman came to him, demanding help.
The second puzzle is why he seems intent on turning her away at first, quite rudely… It seems that even for Jesus, this woman is, at first, a bridge too far. In today’s sermon, I ponder what might have been going on, and why this story might matter to us. - Have you ever been somewhere, or found yourself in a situation, which feels so “foreign” to you that you have had trouble dealing with it? What happened?
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The Old Testament reading for today comes from the book of the prophet Jeremiah, a man whose name has become shorthand for someone who is moaning all the time. That’s a bit unfair, because he had plenty to moan about. Not only did he live through the destruction of his home city of Jerusalem and the exile of many of its people to Babylon, he was the one called by God to try to warn and prepare its residents for the catastrophe. It was an apparently futile effort. No one wanted to listen and he was savagely persecuted for his efforts. In this picture, by the French painter Horace Vernet (1844), Jeremiah sits amidst the ruins of Jerusalem holding a scroll in his hands which he is writing on. It may be intended to represent his prophecies, or the book of Lamentations, which is also ascribed to him, but it could be the letter (Jeremiah 29) he wrote to those who had been taken into exile, which contained powerful words of encouragement. “Surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope”.
I share this prayer with some trepidation. It was one of two we had to learn by heart at my secondary school back in the 1970’s (the other was the Lord’s Prayer, of course) It was a girl’s direct grant school with a long history of turning out young women with a sense of duty and seriousness of purpose as well as academic achievements. Our rather formidable headmistress was also a magistrate, and it sometimes showed – her disapproval was all the more searing because of the restraint with which she expressed it. You knew if you had let her down! The prayer is a stirring and inspiring one, but it can also be a bit dangerous. A wise nun to whom I used to go for spiritual advice told me she thought no one under 40 should be allowed to pray it. There are times when we need to keep going, “not heeding the wounds” not “seeking for rest”, but to do so can be a recipe for burn out if we aren’t also “refueling” spiritually, physically and emotionally.
The theme which connects today’s readings is Rock, often a symbol in the Bible for all that is trustworthy and solid. God is described as a Rock in the Old Testament (Deut 32.4, 1 Samuel 2.2, Psalm 18.2) and in the New Testament, the same imagery is used of Jesus, (1 Corinthians 10.4). Stone was, and still is, an important building material in Israel; it is a stony, rocky landscape, its hills peppered with caves, natural or made by humans. The most impressive stone building that most people at the time of Jesus would have known was the Temple – Its stones represented the permanence of God’s commitment to his people, and when the Temple was destroyed, first by the Babylonians in 586 BC and then by the Romans in 70AD. Its destruction provoked massive spiritual and political crises on both occasions, and the only accessible remaining section of wall is still a place of prayer and longing for the Jewish people, who welcome those of other faiths to pray alongside them there, as Philip and I discovered last year. The early Christians, though, saw Jesus as the Cornerstone of a new Temple, built with Living Stones, his followers. In Christ, and in the community that met in his name, God could be encountered even if the old place of encounter, that beautiful Temple in Jerusalem, was ruined.
It was written by William Cowper (pronounced Cooper), 1731-1800, a prolific hymn writer and Romantic poet. His life was not easy, dogged by mental health problems from his teenage years, which often manifested itself in a belief that God was angry with him or had rejected him, not helped by the rather grim Calvinist theology of the religious circles in which he moved, which placed a heavy emphasis on sin and damnation. He had originally intended to be a lawyer, but his dread of the public examination he would have to take triggered a profound depression which led him to attempt suicide several times. He was hospitalised on a number of occasions, but eventually found some peace and support when he went to live in Olney, whose curate was John Newton, the former slave trader who wrote “Amazing Grace”. Cowper became an ardent and vocal opponent of the slave trade, along with Newton and his ballad poem 
