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The Moravian Messenger is the official monthly news magazine for the Moravian Church in the British Province.
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This is a free publication for all congregation members and visitors.
We welcome contributions for the Messenger and these should reach the Editor by the 3rd day of the preceeding month.
Advertisements and all communications
concerning distribution and supply should be sent to the Moravian
Book Room, 5 Muswell Hill, London N10 3TJ, and please NOT to
the Editor. Or, you can use the contact
page on this site.
The Editor is:
Judith Ashton
Sunnybank, Raglan Road, Tintern,
Monmouthshire NP16 6TH
e-mail: judith.ashton@moravian.org.uk
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| This month's front page story... |
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A sermon preached by Kathryn Woolford at the 2007 Watchnight Service at Ockbrook
As we celebrate this past year and look forward
to 2008 it is ap-propriate that the New Testament text reminds
us that whatever hap-pens in our lives nothing can separate us
from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
When we look back at the history of the Moravian
Church dur-ing the 1460s we see how the people were already beginning
to be persecuted because of their beliefs and how difficult their
lives had be-come. J. E. Hutton in his book, The History of the Moravian
Church, wrote this:
"Meanwhile in 1461 the first persecution of
the Brethren had begun in deadly earnest.
King George Podiebrad was furious. He issued
an order that all his subjects were to join
either the Utraquists or the Roman Catholic
Church. He issued another order that all
the priests who conducted the communion in the blasphemous
manner of the Brethren should forthwith be
put to death. The priest, Old Michael, was
cast into a dungeon; four leading brethren
were burned alive; their peaceful home in
Kunwald was broken; and the Brethren fled
to the woods and mountains. For two full years they
lived the life of hunted deer in the forest.
As they durst not light a fire by day, they
cooked their meals by night; and then, while
the enemy dreamed and slept they read their
Bibles by the watch fire's glare, and prayed
until blood was dripping from their knees….
As they gathered around the fire they read
to each other the golden promise that where
two or three are gathered to-gether in his
name he would be in their midst and rejoiced
that they, the chosen of God, had been called
to suffer for the truth and the church that
was yet to be."
It is good that as this year ends when we
have been celebrating the founding of the Moravian Church in 1457
we should be reminded of the struggles of those early members and
of their strongly held belief that whatever happened to them, whether
it be persecution or whether it be the suffering caused by their
having to live away from their own villages, nothing could separate
them from the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. Sometimes I think
that we need to be reminded of that because we often feel that Christians
are in a minority in our country. We need to be reminded that nothing
can separate us from that love of God.
This year when we have also remembered the
abolition of the slave trade we should be reminded of the suffering
of those slaves in the West Indies when the first Moravian missionaries
went there in 1732. I spoke to you before about the life of one of
those slaves, Rebecca, and of the difficult life that she had when
she became a Christian, of her imprison-ment because of her preaching
and teaching the people about Jesus Christ, how she married Matthaus
and after his death she married Prot-ten and went to live with him
in Guinea, how her two daughters both died at a young age and yet
despite all of that her faith in God and in Jesus as her Saviour
remained strong and she knew that nothing would separate her from
that love of God. The slaves that she brought to God suffered greatly
for their faith and had tongues cut out for speaking against their
master, had hands chopped off for disobedience, and yet through all
of that their faith remained strong. When we read stories of events
like this it makes us realise that, in fact, we do have a very easy
life as we are able to practise our faith without fear and without
preju-dice.
Although we read stories of people suffering
for their faith we imagine that all of that is now finished, that
people everywhere are able to worship freely as we are, that people
are able to gather together to worship, to read their Bibles when
they want, to preach about their faith to others and yet that is
still not true. There are still people who suffer for their faith.
In many Middle Eastern countries where Christians are very much in
the minority there are people who are imprisoned for their faith,
people who are tortured for their faith and people who still die
for their faith. I remember a few years ago hearing the story of
some Chris-tians in Vietnam who feared for their lives because of
their faith.
They believed that they were being followed
as they went from village to village telling the people about Jesus
Christ. Because they feared for their lives they used to go to one
village, change their clothes, their motor bikes which was their
form of transport and so change their identity before they moved
on to another village. Even then they feared not just for their own
lives but for the lives of the people that they visited and in whose
homes they stayed. I am not talking about a long time ago; I am talking
about now. However those people know that whatever happens to them
because of their faith, nothing will separate them from the love
of God.
As we move forward into a new year we do
not have any idea what the new year will bring for each of us. What
we can be sure of is that it will be a year of happiness and of sadness,
that there will be ups and downs, that there will be times when we
wonder how are we going to cope with what life is throwing at us,
that there will be times when everything in the garden is rosy. I
often say that it is a good thing that we do not know what is going
to happen in the future and I certainly would not do anything to
try to even predict what the future holds for all of us in the year
to come. How-ever one thing that we can be absolutely certain of
is that, whatever does happen, God will be there to help and to guide
us and that nothing will be able to separate us from the love of
God.
Let us go forward into this new year in the
sure and certain knowl-edge that nothing is going to happen that,
with Jesus, we can not handle and that nothing, absolutely nothing,
will separate us from the love of God. I pray that for all of you
there may be more ups than downs, more happiness than sadness and
that 2008 will be a wonderful year for you all.
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| This month's editorial comment... |
One of the most disturbing and shocking
news stories of recent weeks has been that telling of the
deportation of Ama Sumani from Britain to her native Ghana.
This 39year old widow, suffering from terminal cancer, was
taken from a Cardiff hospital on January 8th by immigration
officers and put on a plane to Ghana. It is unlikely that
in Ghana she will be able to have the regular dialysis and
other treatments she needs to make her condition a little
easier, but even apart from that, the physical and mental
distress caused to a sick woman by such treatment does not
bear thinking about.
Legally, the immigration officers were
quite correct in what they did. We don’t condemn them as
individuals. They were carrying out orders based on the law of
the land. Mrs Sumani’s visa had been withdrawn some time
ago. She had no legal right to be here and a spokesman for the
Immigration Department claimed that “removals are always
carried out in the most sensitive possible way, treating those
being removed with courtesy and dignity.”
Maybe! But here was a woman suffering from
terminal illness. What of common humanity? In such a situation,
would we not expect a civilised country to go beyond the law and
to act with compassion and a wish to ease her suffering rather
than make it worse?
One journalist notes how a nurse stood
by the side of Mrs Sumani, stroking her arm, as the immigration
officers came to take her away. What a contrast between individual
caring and State indifference. It is often claimed that we are,
today, a more compassionate, caring society than in the past. Sadly,
stories like that of Ama Sumani give the lie to that claim. Is
part of the problem the failure of the Church to speak out more
strongly for those on the edge of society?
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