Dear Friends,

I do hope that in the past few days news of my impending retirement has reached all of you through one channel or other. As I said in my letter, this has not been an easy decision but various factors make me feel it is the right one and the right moment.

The words that have been coming to my mind in recent days are those of the hymn - I suppose really a children's hymn - and a good one in times of change:

Dear Friends,

Greetings to you once more, one week after Easter Sunday.

This Sunday our reading takes us first to Easter Day, when Jesus rose and appeared to his disciples in an upper room in Jerusalem and blessed them with peace, and then to a week later when he appeared to them again in the same place and again greeted them with his peace. On the first occasion one of Jesus' disciples, Thomas, was not there and could not believe the other disciples' reports that they had seen the Lord.

Dear Friends,

Greetings to you as I write this letter on Good Friday, as Holy Week draws to a close and Easter Sunday approaches.

For Easter Sunday this year I have asked a number of people to record themselves on their phones, saying in between 1 and 5 words what Easter means to them. The result (I hope) will be a collage of brief testimonies as to the meaning of Easter which will form a part of our Easter morning Sunday service. I look forward to it!

Dear Friends,

Greetings to you once more as another week draws to an end, and as we are about to embark on a very special week indeed. Yes, Sunday is Palm Sunday, and then there follows the most important week of the Church's year, Holy Week, culminating with Easter Sunday. As ever, it will be very full, with much going on and some services being live-streamed from the church and some being pre-recorded.

Dear Friends,

It has been election week and the results are now in and I gather that it is good news for those who tend towards the right and less good news for those who lean more to the left - and bad news for the Green Party. You will all have your own thoughts about the results but it does seem to me that being in government and having political power at the moment is very difficult indeed, due to the sheer scale and complexity of the problems facing the world. COVID, of course, has presented huge challenges but so many other problems we wrestle with - justice, equality, peace, social cohesion - are intractable and neither the right, the left, the centre, or any coalition can easily sort them.

Dear Friends,

Last Monday March 8th, was International Women's Day and an opportunity for Christians to consider women in the Bible (whose stories too often are not known), and Christian women through the centuries who have made an impact. On Wednesday evening we had our usual Bible Study and we were looking at the 3rd chapter of John's Gospel, from which our reading this Sunday is taken. It's the story of a man called Nicodemus, a Pharisee and therefore a religious expert, who comes to Jesus at night. We were considering the significance of his coming at night: in John's Gospel darkness is the condition of the world which does not know or recognise Christ.

Dear Friends,

We had a meeting of our elders this week and, as is our custom, one elder began the meeting with a reading. He chose verses from the letter to the Ephesians, chapter 2, which also happens to include the passage that is set for this Sunday and so will be read in many churches (though we will not be considering it). The passage ends in chapter 2 verse 10, which says of the church, ‘we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works…’

Dear Friends,

Today a film crew were at our church – they were recording part of a big 30 hour-long documentary on Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation in the 2nd World War, and they wanted to feature our church. The producer is Steve McQueen, famous for his ’12 Years a Slave’ film. We were reminded of those terrible days of occupation and how the church was closed to its usual services and taken over by the Nazi garrison.

Dear Friends,

Here we are in the season of Lent, a time traditionally of fasting and when people ‘give things up’ – whether it’s chocolate or caffeine or some other ingredient of life which we enjoy. This year it seems a bit strange to be thinking in terms of giving up when so much has already been given up due to Covid-19. Life has been stripped enough of things that are pleasurable – we may be reluctant to give up more. The aim, however, of Lent is not just to give things up for the sake of it, but to try to draw a little closer to God – to deepen our spiritual life. And that is something that we can do, even in Covid.

Dear Friends,

Greetings to you and I hope you are enjoying the snow and ice and staying upright!

This coming week we embark on the season of Lent, the 6 week period that recalls Jesus’ time of testing in the wilderness and that leads up to holy Week and Easter.