John Sherbourne
LMFS makes the news
As a result of its efforts to attract more furniture donations The Leeds and Moortown Furniture, which as many of you know started out here at MBC has been making the news.
First, North Leeds Life, a magazine that is distributed monthly in Rounday, Moortown, Alwoodley et al and which attracts upwards of 100,00 readers reported on LMFS’s participation in the Leeds Lent Prayer Diary launch and then, shortly after, a story in the Yorkshire Evening Post told how as the result of a successful grant bid to the Sir George Martin Trust the Store’s staff and volunteers were all being kitted out with smart new uniforms.
If you have furniture to donate please call 0113 2739727.
Or to watch a video about the Store visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2HTVHm3KLo
A word of thanks from PAFRAS – but please keep your donations coming
PAFRAS (Positive Action for Refugees & Asylum Seekers) works here in Leeds with refugees, asylum seekers and the wider community to counter the effects of enforced destitution on vulnerable migrants. Their work has three main strands: providing immediate humanitarian relief; long-term support, advice and advocacy aimed at assisting service users to make lasting improvements to their situations and raising awareness and campaigning locally and nationally on issues affecting our service users.
There is a donation box for food, toiletries etc for PAFRAS in our Meeting Area. However, if for some reason you can’t find it please speak with Hilary Willmer. Hilary who heads up MBC’s PAFRAS support team recently received this letter from PAFRAS which she would like to share.
A new start, a new life in Jesus – that was the message more than 300 children heard at Rewind to Easter 2019
There’s a lot you could write about MBC’s Rewind projects, both Easter and Christmas. However, this year I’m going to cut it back to some quite remarkable figures and a few nice snaps.
Three months of planning and prayer
344 Year 5 (that’s 9 and 10 year old) children
9 Primary Schools
30+ teachers and their support staff
23 amazing volunteers
One message – the love of God
To view a larger version of any or our gallery pictures simply click on the image
Tell me what is wrong with Rudyard Kipling’s Man, by Haddon Willmer
In 1995, Rudyard Kipling’s If was voted the most popular poem in England. Like much of this great writer’s work it is embarrassingly controversial. There are lines in this poem that make us say, That’s right – it would be good to be like that. There are others where we shake our heads, as a whisper warns us, Not that way.
As an example, I would be glad if I always achieved what he says right at the beginning:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you….
But I am not so sure about:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss….
There is a difference between courage and recklessness.
When we come to the core of what Kipling thinks will make his son ‘a Man’, we find it both alluring and alarming, truly human and yet dangerously inhuman:
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much…
Is this not a fanciful invitation to be impractical and radically untruthful: human beings cannot put themselves beyond being hurt? The attempt to be invulnerable leads a person to shrivel inside a hard protective shell, whose real message is not, ‘I cannot be hurt’, but ‘I will not let myself be hurt, even if it costs me my soul’.
The second line here is specially teasing. It is good to say, If all men (viz. ‘all people, everybody) count with you – if you respect everybody and aim to give them their true worth, though you can never do full justice to them. But then this is cut back by the ‘but none too much’. Is it not a goodly characteristic of human being that Others can and do come to count with us boundlessly, beyond our counting, beyond our measured control and protection of ourselves? Is that not one point where we get closer to our Father in heaven (Matthew 5.43-48, Romans 5.1-11)? Is this line miserly rather than generous?
And so to Kipling’s climactic promise, for the one who has fulfilled all the ‘Ifs’:
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
There is danger here: ‘What shall it profit anyone if he gain the whole world and lose his own life?’ (Mark 8.36). Is Kipling saying what Jesus said? His phrase, ‘which is more’, goes some way to reflect the scale of values Jesus gives us in the Sermon on the Mount: life is more than food, the body is more than clothing (Matthew 6.25). But the ambition to be a self-sufficient person, ‘possessing the earth and everything in it’ is hardly compatible with the Psalmist’s contention that ‘the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it’ (Psalm 24.1) and Jesus’ word and example of the meek inheriting the earth (Matthew 5. 5). Is Kipling’s Man meek?
Kipling’s ‘Man’ is not peculiarly British, or dated around 1900. Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew the temptation of Kipling’s Man, both as a noble ideal and in its perversion in Hitler’s Nazi culture. And as a disciple of Jesus, seeking to follow his Lord closely as he lived fully in his time and place, not running away from its complexity and pain, he came to spell out his own ‘If’ and ‘Then’. He wrote to Bethge, the day after the bomb plot failed on 20 July 1944, saying simply that he had learned faith through living fully in this world as it was. And key to this learning, was to ‘abandon completely trying to make something out of oneself’. Is that not what Kipling was exhorting his son to do? If he fulfilled the conditions set out in all the ‘Ifs’, the Earth would be his and he would be ‘a Man’. The Man would be the outcome of his self-making. But Bonhoeffer saw it quite differently:
Living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities… we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a human being, a Christian.
Well, that’s my reaction to Kipling’s great poem. What is yours? Tell me if you think I need to be corrected. But above all, think about it for your own sake.
And don’t let yourself be put off by Kipling’s ‘Man’. It’s easy to think ‘Woman’ all the way through – though it would spoil the rhythm to put the word ‘Woman’ into the final line. We are all human, and what this poem is getting at is the question of being human.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!
Ahead of a packed Communion Service our first Third Sunday Breakfast proves a big hit
The first of our Third Sunday Breakfasts proved really popular with more than 40 turning up for the 9.30am start.
It was particularly good to be able to welcome eight visitors from Romania, here in Leeds for 10 days or so and staying with Rod, Karen and Howard. Later, during our 10.45 Service the group presented us with some lovely gifts including a beautiful white cloth which from now on in will take pride of place on our Communion table.
Graham also took time out to thank and introduce the house group who had planned and prepared breakfast. Described purely for convenience as Phil and Suzanna Laws’ group it was great to see and pray for such a large group of people who quite spontaneously had started to meet together.
Following Communion the Service closed with John Sherbourne introducing a video about the work of the Leeds and Moortown Furniture Store. The Store started life here at MBC in 1986 and whilst over those three decades much has changed the mission statement drafted all those years ago and the links between it and our church remain the same.
Encouraging listeners to engage with the Store as “critical friends” i.e. people who when help was being sought in a particular area might offer their expertise John emphasised that the story of LMFS is as actually as much a story about people as it is about furniture.
If you weren’t with us on Sunday, or if you were and you would like to see it again there’s a link to John’s video here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2HTVHm3KLo
Bringing warmth and comfort to life on the streets
The ladies at Beacon Cast-offs have joined forces with Hookers and Clickers (do it for charity). We have one aim, to connect like-minded people in an attempt to make the world just a little bit better. We run short term, specific need projects across the UK and overseas for a variety of charities and are always open to suggestions for our next challenge.
So far we have supported Leeds Baby Bank in West Yorkshire, Moray Supports Refugees, Simon on the Streets, Sands, SSNAPS, Pilgrims Hospice, Four Fields care home, Wheatfields, Candlelighters & Outreach 4 Wolverhampton. Making the world a better place – one stitch at a time.”
Beacon Cast-offs is based at MBC. Hookers and Clickers began life at Armley Christchurch but both groups are spreading across Leeds and nationwide.
Our picture shows Kate Slater and Janis Armstrong handing over a whole load of knitted scarfs, gloves and socks to MBC’s Simon on the Streets link Alastair Bowie.
After eleven days and nearly as many excursions, it’s a fond farewell to our Romanian friends
As our Romanian friends fly home from Doncaster Airport Howard Dews has sent in some pictures taken during their visit. Venue’s visited by “Rod’s Tours” included a sixteen hour round trip to London, Filey (taking in the now traditional fish and chip lunch) the Yorkshire Dales, York, Whitby, Kirkstall Abbey and of course Primark.
On this eleven day visit our eight guests, none of whom had visited the UK before came from two different churches; four from Pastor Noemi’s village of Cserefalva and four are from the village of Bikafalva where Zsuzsi is pastor.
On their behalf let me say thank you to their hosts… Karen and Michael Ross, Rod Russell, Howard Dews and anyone else who provided support.
Haddon Willmer invites you to meet Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his poems from prison – 7.30pm, MBC, 9 April 2019
The Poems. In his ten prison poems, Dietrich Bonhoeffer breaks out of the disciplined reticence of a learned Prussian theologian, and comes into the light as a human being, struggling with loneliness and fear and anger, suffering as war and bad government and loss of faith and love destroyed humanity, all the while trusting in God, following Jesus, and being sustained in the good company of God’s grace.
If the theological letters only speak to a few, the poems are accessible to many.
In this talk, large parts of the poems will be read in English translation so that everyone has the opportunity hear Bonhoeffer for themselves.
Bonhoeffer is famous for his resistance to the Nazi regime, which cost him his life. And for some of his ideas which have been stirring up theologians, for and against, even to the present day. It is easy to lose the man in the fame and in the thousands of words of his prose that were smuggled out of his cell. But the human being can’t be missed in the poems. There, we can meet him, person to person.
The Season This talk is being given at 7.30pm on 9 April 2019, the anniversary of his being killed in Flossenburg concentration camp on 9 April 1945. He died just after Good Friday and Easter Day, which, that year, were on 30 March and 1 April. We will be reading his poems just a few days before Good Friday this year.
We can live this season together as Bonhoeffer lived it – with Jesus Christ. He loved life and looked for its fullness, in company with the Easter Lord and Giver of life. Keeping company with Jesus means staying with him in Gethsemane, and Bonhoeffer had for many years not evaded the dark Gethsemane he along with many others was called into.
He wrote about the ‘constant knowledge of death and resurrection’, which goes with ‘living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but the sufferings of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia, and that is how one becomes a man and a Christian (cf.Jer.45!).’
And in his final poem which is full of joy and love and hope, there is an unflinching yet peaceful reference to Gethsemane: ‘And should you give us the difficult cup, the bitterness of suffering, filled to the very brim, we will take it thankfully without trembling, from your good and beloved hand.’
Caring for God’s Creation… as our world changes it’s up to us to face up to our responsibilities
By John Sturges… “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good. Genesis, chapter 1, verse 31.
God was pleased with his creation, and He chose to share it with Mankind; Adam and Eve were installed in the Garden of Eden, showing us that God’s intention was that we should all enjoy the fruits of his creation since we are part of it. In Genesis chapters 2 and 3 we learn that we are disobedient, fallen and banished from the garden. Today, it is apparent to us that the natural world we live in is a beautiful place, but in truth it also contains ugliness and we must admit that this ugliness is of our doing. For thousands of years during the Holocene era, we managed to live in reasonable harmony with our world, in that the impacts of our activities, production of wastes etc. were able to be absorbed by the natural world, and our demands for resources of materials and energy did not place an excessive strain upon the Earth’s natural systems.
In the first two decades of the 18th century however, men made two developments that changed the course of history. These were the discovery of how to smelt iron using coke (a non-renewable resource) instead of charcoal (a renewable material) in Coalbrookdale in the Severn gorge, and the harnessing of steam power to enable deeper mining for coal. This was the Newcomen engine installed in the Earl of Dudley’s coal mines in Worcestershire, and these two events took place close together in time and barely 20 miles apart, making possible the Industrial Revolution. Before this time, we relied on renewable forms of energy and materials, and our global impact was very much smaller, at a level with which the Earth’s natural systems could cope. These industrial developments gave us the power to greatly increase our demands for resources. In the early 18th century, the world’s human population was under 1 billion souls, now it stands at more than 7.5 billion. By being created and placed in creation, God called us to be its stewards, but because we are weak and selfish, we have used the world for our own selfish ends and not cared for it with love.
Sir David Attenborough’s recent series of programmes, Blue Planet II, succeeded in raising public awareness of the serious problem posed by the accumulation of millions of tonnes of plastic waste in the world’s oceans, together with the horrible damage it does to fish, birds and sea-life generally. In the same episode ‘The Big Blue’, after showing the floating plastic, he showed the image of a floating, dead whale carcass. I believe he ‘missed a trick’ in that he could have contrasted the way that in about 3 decades, the 30 tonne whale carcass was completely cleared up and recycled by natural systems, i.e. animals and fish that were ultimately solar-powered. In other words, God’s creation is fully capable of sustaining itself naturally, whereas we humans create disorder which is not cleared up, but which despoils and harms our world. We consume the riches of this world for our own selfish ends, with no thought for the creator who gave it to us, and it is human actions that bring the ugliness into our world. Also, when we make serious mistakes, we fail to learn the lessons.
On 21 October 1966, the Aberfan disaster killed 116 children and 28 adults in the village school. A huge pile of colliery waste became liquefied in heavy rain, turning it into liquid slurry which engulfed the school. On 25 January of this year, the village of Brumadinho in Brazil was engulfed in liquid slurry from iron mining when the dam behind which it was held failed, causing 166 deaths. In both cases, the mining companies did not wish to spend some of their profits on the safe disposal of the waste they had created. These failures to properly dispose of the plastic and mining wastes are examples of ‘externalizing of costs’. It has ugly and lethal consequences.
In truth, we behave as if we were the lords of creation; taking whatever resources of materials and energy that we need with no thought or understanding of the consequences. We dishonour God by our spoiling and wanton destruction of His world. People increasingly refer to ‘saving the planet’, but these words are misleading; our planet Earth is in no real danger, what we are doing is putting in danger our future existence on the Earth, by threatening its capacity to sustain us. We ultimately depend on all of the other life forms on Earth, both plant and animal. Even vegetarians could not survive without the bird, animal and insect life that acts to pollinate crops and other plants. As humans, we are just a part of the world-wide web of life, the Earth’s ecosystems, and we could not survive without them. We are only now learning of the extent of our dependence on all of created life. We must recognise the fact that we do not ‘own’ our world, rather it has been entrusted to our stewardship for the duration of our lives, and that others, including our descendants will inherit the world and its stewardship after us. In depleting the world’s resources we are depriving our descendants of their inheritance. Finally, I am aware this piece has a serious tone, but it addresses a very serious situation that concerns every one of us.
What can we do to help?
- Take an interest in how our world works, and take time to think of the impact that our choices place upon it,
- Take care to correctly dispose of our waste materials,
- Keep in mind that we should not so consume the Earth’s resources today that we deprive our descendants of the means to enjoy a good quality of life in their turn,
- Avoid the mind-set that says ‘it’s someone else’s problem’, or ‘the government should do something’. We must all do what we can.do by taking individual responsibility for our care of creation.
j.sturges@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
March 2019