Warning: if you are bird phobic, this PP is not for you.

When I was a kid, my dad had a bird book. It fascinated me. On the cover was a bullfinch with its magnificent red chest. Inside were all these wonderful birds, the most exciting of which was the hoopoe. Turns out this exotic creature was rarely seen in the UK, especially in Sheffield, but it set my heart aglow. I still have my father’s bird book and although I am definitely not a twitcher, I enjoy seeing birds and trying to identify them. One of the things that I promised myself in my new home was that I would a) have a garden b) have birdfeeders in it. And so, once I got my new flat, I set about buying different kinds of bird food and feeders, and placed a comfortable chair facing out into the garden, ready to enjoy seeing my feathered visitors arrive.

The garden already had some residents when I arrived – a pair of beautiful collared doves and a rather clumsy magpie that I have named ‘Random’. Blue tits and great tits soon found the feeders, tiny birds with beautiful blue and yellow colouring. A local family of jackdaws, nesting under the ridge tiles of a neighbour’s roof have become regular visitors. A jay has visited a couple of times – I have rarely seen these before and so that was a real treat. The delightful goldfinches have sat on the washing line – these are the birds that I most hoped would come and feed. I wondered how long it would be before the starlings turned up. Starlings are like the teenagers of the bird world, noisy but harmless. Sure enough, they soon found the feeders, squawking and quarrelling. One day I came home from work and gazed eagerly out of the window to see what was going on. And there. On the fence. Were 3 pigeons. Not wood pigeons with their gentle cooing. Ordinary, scruffy, like-you-get- in-town pigeons. This was not in the plan. These feeding stations are for the beautiful and lovely in the bird world, not the ordinary and scruffy. Ooooh, don’t you just hate it when you discover something unpleasant or unkind about yourself? Here is me, making judgements on BIRDS! I gave myself a good talking to and now make sure that there is bird food on the ground, for any birds, including ordinary pigeons, which might stop and need a feed.

At Northern Lights MCC and as the denomination Metropolitan Community Churches, we place great emphasis on God’s all inclusive love and we work hard to be an inclusive and welcoming church. This is all easy enough when the people we meet and greet are like us, or fit with our values and norms. It can be more challenging for us when someone arrives to be fed and nourished who doesn’t fit with what we expect. That’s when inclusive love really kicks in. May you feel God’s all inclusive love for you this week.

God bless,

Cecilia

Pastor's Posting

In February this year Malcolm Boyd died. He was an American Episcopal priest and a good friend to MCC. He had a rich and varied life - a privileged childhood destroyed by the Great Depression, from working in Hollywood to becoming a priest and supporting Martin Luther King www.malcolmboyd.com. In 1965, he published a book of prayers called “Are You Running with Me Jesus?” The prayer of the title describes how he wakes up each morning, needing to leap out of bed, wash, dress and charge into the day. The final line is “Now I’ve got to run. Are you running with me Jesus?”

This book of prayers changed lives. It was written in ordinary language about ordinary situations. There is a prayer about dealing with irritating work colleagues, the simple joy of cooking pasta, prayers about the homelessness and migrant workers. No ‘Thees’ or ‘Thous’, no ancient wordiness or pious emptiness, just prayers from the heart. This was revolutionary. People who struggled to pray, priests and pastors who couldn’t find the words they needed for the situations that they encountered in their ministry, all found expression in the prayers that Malcolm Boyd wrote. He famously read these prayers at a reading in a nightclub, and also performed them at a jazz festival, accompanied by the guitarist Charlie Byrd. Not only were the prayers new and direct, Malcolm Boyd found ways of taking them out of the confines of the church and into where ordinary people were. Boyd talked about his own change of attitude towards prayer “My idea of prayer changed when I realized it would no longer be offered to God up there, but to God here; it was to be natural and real, not phony or contrived; it was not about other things – but these things, however unattractive, jarring or even socially outcast they might sometimes appear to be.”

None of this may sound very remarkable to us, here and now. We have The Message, Greenbelt , YouTube, the Brick Bible (which tells bible stories through Lego  http://www.thebrickbible.com/) and so many other ways of expressing our faith. Boyd’s book was groundbreaking and would have been highly controversial or seen as disrespectful by some Christians at the time. It was a freeing and life changing experience for many though. It gave permission to communicate with God in a new, powerful, meaningful and deeply personal way. It took prayer out of the hands of the priests and into the voices of the people – just as Jesus had done.  As the Church today, we too need to make sure that we offer prayers that speak about the lives we live and make sense to those around us. We can’t bring light and hope if no-one understands what we are talking about!

God bless,

Cecilia

At the weekend I went to a pop concert. The young singer being given a career break as the warm up act told us ‘I love you all.’ I thought it was a rather curious thing to say to several thousand people, most of whom had never heard of him and could hardly be classed as devoted fans. Perhaps he really meant that he was grateful for our attention and polite applause. Perhaps he was high on the adrenalin of the moment and just wanted to say something heartfelt about all that he was experiencing. Whatever he might have meant, I felt myself muttering a perhaps old fashioned and ‘stiff upper lip’ English attitude to his declaration of affection – ‘As we have not yet been introduced, young man, I find this rather unlikely.’

Such declarations of love, kisses on the end of texts from people I don’t know, or only know in a professional capacity, Tshirts and bags with I ‘heart’ NY or whatever else, are displays of affection, which can feel odd or misplaced.  All over the place we find examples of how love can be displayed in a light hearted or even meaningless sense. For such a rich language, it is interesting that English only has one word for love. Perhaps it is not surprising that it gets overused or misused at times. In Latin, there are different words – ‘eros’ for sexual or erotic love and ‘caritas’ for compassionate love, or charity. There is also a Greek word, ‘agape’, which is used to describe Christian love or concern for one another.

The command in Micah 6:8, ‘To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.’ forms the basis of our worship theme this month. Loving mercy sounds like ‘caritas’ – loving-kindness. Love is a ‘doing’ word. We can tell someone all we like that we love them, but it is our actions and attitudes that give evidence of whether we actively love or not. We sang ‘And they’ll know we are Christians by our love’ in worship recently. People hopefully see something in how we live our lives, the values that we have and how we put them into practice that speaks to them of our faith. Obviously, there are many people of all faiths and none who show loving-kindness to those around them and strive to make the world a better place. As followers of Jesus, however, it should be a hallmark of who we are, not an added extra.

At the moment, Naomi is designing our T-shirts for Pride. The logo will read ‘God loves you’. If we want people to experience the love of God first hand, then we need to be the ones showing the love of God to them. We are called to show this love, just where we are, with the people that we are with, in the way that will make a difference. There will never be the perfect time or place, there is only ‘now’ and ‘here’.

God bless,

Cecilia

Yesterday was the day to vote for our next Government, and in some parts of the country, an opportunity to vote for our local councillors too. I find it delightfully quaint that our process for voting in the UK is so ‘low tech.’ No-one checks your ID when you go to the polling station. You give your name and it is crossed off the list. You go into a little wooden booth and use a chunky pencil, tied to a piece of string, to mark an X against the name of your chosen candidate. Your fold up your ballot paper and put it in a slot in a big box. That’s it – done. My one vote gets counted by hand and added to piles of other individual votes. One by one by one by one. Some people say that their vote doesn’t count, or doesn’t make a difference. But a party wins, or loses, vote by vote, by vote.

It is the combination of hundreds and thousands of individual ballot slips that add together to make a national decision. On its own, my vote may not have a great deal of power, but combined with others, it may make a meaningful difference. This is the power and the force of being in a community. We can and do achieve things on our own, but when we combine our strengths, talents and energies, we can really create or destroy something significant. When we look at different protest movements, we can often identify one individual who is credited with starting it all off. However, it is by sharing their ideas and values with other likeminded people that things start to happen. We might have been having the same thoughts for a while, but when we hear someone saying our thoughts out loud or taking some action, however small, that we have wanted to do, it gives us permission and courage to join in.

This month, our worship theme is ‘What does Yahweh require of you?’, which comes from the prophet Micah 6:8.  The answer is ‘To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.’ Throughout the month, we will be focussing on the many ways that we can do these things, and make a difference to those in need around us. At a local level, we are collecting for The People’s Kitchen – dried and tinned food, toiletries, underwear, socks and sanitary protection. Homeless people and others in need directly benefit from the items we donate. On Sunday, we mark the start of Christian Aid Week. Our donations from eating cake make a difference in countries where the basic needs for living are often not being met. A few years ago, the Christian Aid slogan for their campaign was ‘We believe in life before death’, reminding Christians that the ‘here-and-now’ matters as well as the ‘hereafter’. My cash donation, however small, helps people to move beyond survival towards having a life. We act justly and show mercy, pound by pound by pound.

God bless,

Cecilia