News of the World

A reflection prepared for a staff meeting, St Andrew’s Dawson Street LEP, Crook - 15^th July 2011

 I spent yesterday having lunch at St Catherine’s Community Centre, Crook. Over a cup of tea I joined in a conversation about who might have won the EuroMillion jackpot of £161m pounds. Well last night it was reported that the lucky ticket holder had come forward. Regardless of their identity, the winning person or syndicate will hold a fortune ranked just below David and Victoria Beckham’s estimated wealth of £165million. But one winner has come forward. Retired couple Fred and Doreen Smith from Washington. They won just under £2.5m share of the Lotto Rollover jackpot drawn last Saturday. Their photograph with fizzy champagne was literally splashed across yesterday’s Journal. Mike Ashley’s big share windfall to staff of Newcastle United was announced yesterday too. Some 2,000 staff will get a share payout worth almost £88m in total. It equates to an average of £40,000 each, but combined with a payout for meeting the previous year's target, their awards are now worth an average £43,860.

Although not a betting man myself I think these are really wonderful, cheerful stories in a week of gloomy news about phone hacking. I remember the day like yesterday, when training for the ministry, a Building Society cheque for £1000 was pushed through my letter box. I heard on the radio last week of a man who took pity on a rather dishevelled and forlorn artist who was going from town to town trying to sell his paintings with no success. Whenever he came to this particular town the man would offer him hospitality, and the artist used to give him a painting as a way of saying thank you. The host put them in the attic and forgot about them. Years later, after both men had died and the house was being cleared, someone looked at the canvases and discovered that the artist was L S Lowry and the paintings were worth a fortune.

But isn’t life like that? I don’t suppose anyone would quite put it the way Cecil Rhodes did in the nineteenth century when he said: “Being born an Englishman is winning the first prize in the lottery of life.” But in one sense life is a chance - it is a lottery – it is unpredictable – as the spectators at the Open Golf Championship at Sandwich are beginning to realise. A lottery because none of us chooses when and where to be born or what postcode we might end up living. A postcode that will give access to education, economic and medical opportunities – or not as the case maybe.

Into the cathedral bookshop on Monday came Amiel Osmaston. I recognised her straightaway. We last met 36 years ago in Kenya and then only briefly for a month; we met at a bible study group run by a couple of CMS Sudan missionaries who had left Juba during the civil war, being temporarily housed in Mombasa. We talked a lot about former times, our faith journeys - Amiel is a Canon of Carlisle Cathedral, diocesan ministry and development officer. We talked about how the face of Sudan is being changed into a new country - the Republic of South Sudan - born out of generations of conflict and suffering;  it is estimated that a million and a half people might have died in the civil war, and now some ten million people are now at risk across East Africa after the worst drought in sixty years.

It matters little how much we are worth in financial terms, with a lottery win, an inheritance, savings, what is stored in the attic. But it does matter to God how we use our wealth, our filthy lucre, our inheritance, for as we say in our prayers – “all things come from you and of your own to we give you.”  We can define our world as we will, shrink it to whatever excites, amuses or keeps us comfortable and exclude images which unsettle us. But as human beings we can also define our world with a leap of imagination and faith, to see the world from a very different perspective. According to the Bible, God offers the potential to discover it as it’s meant to be. He sets out his intention in Jesus, giving himself to make new beginnings possible in the most desperate of situations and for the unlikeliest of people, often with meagre resources. And he invites us as ministers of the kingdom to share in the process; he gives us the resources – sometimes money - to do so.

Those making significant sacrifices and changes to our community and our world are those who give their time and money, for example at St Catherine’s Community Centre across the road, who give small and substantial donations to humanitarian causes. And as often as it is not, it is the hidden legion of men and women of goodwill and peace who work quietly to bring the vision of the kingdom of God into being, like missionaries returning to work in the new country of the Southern Sudan, bringing it into reality, with all its future economic and humanitarian needs. Such efforts don’t usually make much of a tabloid splash. But I think this is the news of the world that really does matter. The building of the kingdom of God is the News of the World.

Psalm 125: Mark 12:13-17

Ray Anglesea is a self supporting minister working in St Andrew’s Dawson Street LEP, Crook and in the wider West Durham Methodist Circuit