As the former Headteacher of All Saints' Chorley, I am thrilled to see what's going on in the church. 

Today it was an absolute privilege to have the first confirmation at All Saints church in 14 years, and to support the 9 candidates who were confirmed into the church of God! It was a special day of celebration, as it has been wonderful to watch them grow over the past few months; may God bless each of them in the years ahead. Thank you to all who came to support and cater for us, and to Bishop Philip for presiding. Thank you all

Fr Jordan

Don’t forget to join us in church for our ‘Little Saints’ Tots and Toddler group today for food, toys games and songs, as well as the chance to meet other young parents or guardians. Everyone is welcome!

Dear All,

Please find attached today's sermon and don't forget to join us this afternoon for our 'Closer' service at 4pm in church. Remember that our Little Saints tots and toddlers group resumed this Tuesday at 9am! It's been a fantastic week with a youth week away to Borwick and a Choral Evensong on Saturday night, and this week we look forward to confirmations on Wednesday evening at 7pm, with 9 people to be confirmed into the Church. What an exciting time it is for our parish! Keep praying for us and may you have a blessed week ahead of you.

This week's sermon:

Mark 2:27-28: Then he said to them, ‘The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.’

I’ve always been pretty bad with rules. The second somebody tells me not to open a cupboard it’s the first thing I want to do. When someone tells me you can’t play with that it’s not a toy, the first thing I want to do is take whatever it is and pretend it’s a toy. But there have been one or two moments in life when I’ve stopped and thought to myself “hmm. Perhaps that was a rule that I really should have followed.”

Like the time I electrocuted myself after playing with the fuse in a live plug. That gave me a ‘shock’… puns aside, I did hear my dad’s rule running through my head that I was to go nowhere near that plug and thought to myself, “I probably should have listened to that rule.”

You see, any good rule it there for a reason. Any ‘good’ rule is there to make your life better; whether that’s to make your life better because it’s safer, or to make things easier, or to make things fairer. The rules exist for you, to make life better.

And the exact same is true of the laws in the Old Testament. People sometimes come across some of the obscure rules in the Old Testament and treat them like they’re this laborious, hard to understand, irrelevant even, part of the Bible. But the laws were all given to us, at that time and in that context, to give us life. Whether that was by positioning the people of Israel at odds with the neighbouring empires which were rife with slavery and human sacrifice, or whether that was telling people how to form healthy relationships with each other, the rules were intended to give people a fuller, richer, better life.

And one of the laws which God gives his people to bring them life it through law that people should have a day off. That people should rest. What an obviously life giving law.

The idea of this day off, called the Sabbath, can be seen right back in the creation poem at the beginning of the Genesis. God spends his time making the world and making it beautifully and then he sets the example by having some time off. If God took a bit of a break – and he’s God so he didn’t need to he just recognised that breaks are good – then we definitely need breaks every now and again. Stop working yourself so hard!

The God gives his people the Sabbath day and makes it a law that you have to rest one day a week. It actually becomes one of the notable things about the people of Israel that they have this day of rest. And in our Old Testament reading today we get this law in plain, pretty clear language:

“Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your ox, your donkey or any of your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns, so that your male and female servants may rest, as you do. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day.”

So there we have it, this sensible law that God gives us that is clearly life giving. And yet. People took that life giving law and turned it into something else entirely.

This last week I went away with about 90 kids to Borwick hall with the diocese and you know it was a great time, they really grew and came on a lot in their faith and made friends. And one of the things that really tickled me was that one of the things we did was that the kids went off into groups and had to complete these mental challenges, how to get all the crates from A to B without touching the floor etc. But the problem was that my kids were too good, I was with all these streetwise kids from central Blackburn who kept finding loopholes. They were told not to touch the ground so they got a big stick. They were told not to let go of the crates to tied them together with socks. It was like being in McGuiver. And the poor instructor was just trying to teach them to work together as a team so kept having to invent more and more rules to keep the kids in order and at one point the rules just got too much and it was obvious that the game wasn’t really much fun anymore.

And that’s what people did with the Sabbath, they took a life-giving law to help us to rest, and they turned it into something difficult. They invented more and more laws to tell people exactly how they have to rest. You couldn’t pull a donkey out of a hole on the Sabbath, or pick up firewood or light a fire or prepare food. It got more and more complicated and Jesus makes fun of these rules at several points but here you can see the problem. People had taken the command that was meant to give life and instead it was taking away from their lives to the point that the disciples couldn’t even eat grains of corn and the sick were not even allowed to be healed on the Sabbath day.

So Jesus reminds those present of the point of the law. The law is not there for the sake of being the law, the law is there for us. “The Sabbath was made for people,” he says, “not people for the Sabbath.” In other words the law was meant to be created for our good, not for us to observe for the sake of it. The people had taken the law and made it about being legalists instead of applying to the law everyone’s good.

So what about us today? Well let us look at the gift we have been given. We have been told how to live in a way that is life giving. We’ve been given a lot of rules, love one another as yourself and love the Lord your God with all your being. We’ve been told to rest one day a week. We’ve been told to care for the least of us and to give away 10% of what we earn. But more important that any of that is remembering why we were told those things. We were told those things because God loves us and wants us to show his love to the world. He wants us to live lives of love because that is the better way to live. Lives that are healthy and whole. Lives of prayer and faith that are rooted in him.

Your job as a Christian is not to point at someone else and querey how well they have followed the law. Your job is not to look at someone and comment on whether they’ve stuck to the letter of the law. Yes, we can support each other in living healthy lives, but being faith legalists and gatekeepers is wrong. That’s not how Jesus saw the law. Our job is to try and live out the meaning of the law, which is to bring God’s kingdom to earth by living in ways that brings life to others. Of course, we all get it wrong sometimes, but the law is there to give life and rest and wholeness.

So why don’t you go out today and think of a way that you can work God’s law into your life, not by being a legalist to yourself, but by taking it one week at a time. Maybe you could go off and think about how you could work a pattern of rest into your life, not in a way that will detract from your life but in a way that will help you do serve God and love the people around you all the more.

Amen, and well done All Saints.