A worship service was held at 10.30am in the church building on Sunday 14 June. The service was simultaneously broadcast on the Church Facebook page.  For the next four weeks, you can catch up here.

The Bible passage is Psalm 100, and Duncan MacPherson led and preached.  It was a joy to welcome Duncan back after his weeks away walking the Camino in Spain with his friend Robert – over 30 days of walking! He talked briefly about the journey and what it had meant to him.  His theme for reflection while away was ‘discipleship and growing in our relationship with Christ’.

He chose Psalm 100 to preach on this morning because of its focus on God, the greatness of God, and our profound thankfulness for all God is, for all God does, has done, will do. This is not, he said, to deny the darkness of the various crises the world is facing, or to deny our personal hardships and struggles. Rather ‘the focus in our lives is not on humanity or on the world, but rather with God…Joy comes from the Lord. God is our refuge and strength.’  We are to see the realities we’re facing in the light of the presence of a God who loves us.

Here’s the Psalm in The Message translation:

On your feet now—applaud God!
Bring a gift of laughter,
sing yourselves into his presence.

Know this: God is God, and God, God.
He made us; we didn’t make him.
We’re his people, his well-tended sheep.

 Enter with the password: “Thank you!”
Make yourselves at home, talking praise.
Thank him. Worship him.

For God is sheer beauty,
all-generous in love,
loyal always and ever.

Duncan showed us a photo of the starting point of his Camino at Seville Cathedral; he described the books and audio books he took to listen to him as he and Robert walked separately. He talked of the beauty of morning, watching the sun rising, hearing nature coming to life:  each new day a gift, full of promise.

He talked about the antiquity of the route he was walking – the way was originally built by the Romans, and many Roman structures partially survive. He mentioned persevering on the (few) days when the weather was wild.

He described the evening meals shared with other pilgrims of many nationalities.  He described listening to the BBC news one morning: how troubled the world is!  He talked about arriving at the finishing post in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

It was a kind of parable of aspects Christian discipleship, I suppose.  There’s the starting point, the point when we said ‘Yes!’ to Christ – different for each one of us, and perhaps some of us don’t know exactly when and where the journey began.

We walk alone, and yet together; we are nourished by the things we read and listen to, and also in the rejection of things which would not be beneficial to us.  We walk an old route, followed by millions since Jesus blazed the trail.

We are nourished by our experiences of the natural world, by the loveliness of things which reflects the loveliness of God.  Each day is a new day, full of gift, full of promises.  We have fellowship with other pilgrims, and are reminded that we are part of God’s great international community of believers. We grow together as we eat together.

We struggle with bad news, and the anxieties it prompts, we’re obsessed by our ubiquitous screens,  and fear that the spiritual land of our Camino seems a distant dream.  And yet, each day we do not give up, we get our boots on and we walk, whatever the weather, and we trust that the sun of God’s goodness will once again break over the horizon of our despairing.

And there is a finishing post, a place of joy and arrival. The sun setting signals the completion of another day in the journey, a milestone, but the most significant finishing post is where our pilgrimage transitions to another dimension. There we believe we will encounter in unclouded form the  loveliness of God. ‘For God is sheer beauty, all-generous in love, loyal always and ever’.

There’s a link below to a performance by the worship leader Lucy Grimble whom Duncan mentioned listening to, and here is a link to the BBC Sounds Daily Service page – again, Duncan mentioned the Daily Service this morning.