Saturday, January 16, 2010

Looking back from a new decade

We've very pleased with the new bed, which certainly gave me an improved night's sleep. Clare spent the morning trying to figure out how to put a flat pack wardrobe together, while I figured out what to preach tomorrow - my first sermon of the new decade. Clare, ever a great planner with good attention to detail spotted that there were anomalies in the layout of the pre-drilled holes, sufficient to suggest that a component of a similar wardrobe with a different internal layout had been packed in error. She emailed the company with corroborative photos. We'll see how long it takes to obtain a response and a correction.

What to preach tomorrow? A great Gospel - water into wine. I looked through my computer files to check when I'd last preached on this at St John's, and it seems that I hadn't. The only time since returning to Britain was in St James' in 2004. Where was I in 2007 on Epiphany 2? Still away in Switzerland on winter leave. I didn't need to hunt for an old diary. It was all there in the archive of this blog. How useful.

Browsing through old entries jogged my memory with the realisation that it's now three years since St John's City Parish in its present form was born by episcopal decree. Three years. That was already six months after demolition of city centre buildings was complete, when site clearance and excavation created the great red hole out of which the reconstruction sprang. I can go back and look at all the photos as well, and remind myself of the remarkable times in which I have been privileged to conduct my last commission in public ministry. Not so much water into wine as new wineskins for new wine - a public domain for meeting and trading fit for doing business in the second decade of the twenty-first century.

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