God's Word in God's World at Highbury: So much to pass on

It was a very special day at Highbury today as we welcomed 101 year old Lawrence Squires back to church.

Lawrence had been minister at Highbury during the fifties and sixties and had helped plant the Congregational Church in Warden Hill in Cheltenham.

I had prepared a scroll with the words from the end of 1 Corinthians 13, These three remain, faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love. It was bound with red ribbon. We read words from 1 Corinthians 9 in which Paul spoke of approaching his Christian life with all the discipline an athlete brings to running a race - but we have before us a far greater prize.

I got the youngsters at church and those young at heart, twenty in all, to stand in a circle around the church.

We then timed how long it would take to pass the baton on.

The last to receive the baton was in church at Highbury for the first time, his name was Barnaby ... and he was just 11 months old.

With a big smile he passed the baton to me, I unrolled it and passed it to Lawrence.

An 11 month old passing the message on to a 100 year old.

Maybe it should have been the other way round!!!

No matter, it's a startling thought that it's just 20 people with a gap of 100 years in their ages that takes us right back to the time of Christ!

It's a quirk of mine that when I preside at communion I use the words of institution that I first heard when I received communion for the first time 45 years ago, from my father. I know he had received those words fifty odd years before from the Rev Ben Davies in Abersychan. He had received those words something like 40 odd years before from someone else. Back through the generations people have received what they have in turn passed on. And someone received it from Paul.

And Paul says that he has received it, albeit at one remove, from the Lord Jesus Christ.

"I have received of the Lord that which also I have handed on to you."

It is a wonderful thought in communion that we stand in that chain.

Paul uses those words in 1 Corinthians 11.

In 1 Corinthians 15 he uses them again.

This time he says that he has received what he also passed on - that Christ Jesus died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that on the third day he rose again from the dead according to the Scriptures ... and appeared first to Peter, then to 500 then to a number of others and last of all, as to one untimely born, to Paul. "I am who I am," Paul goes on to say simply by the grace of God.

Those two great statements of what Paul had received and what he passed on stand as bookends. They go to the heart of the faith.

And what stands between those two bookends.

In the middle between chapters 11 and 15 of 1 Corinthians is chapter 13.

The great chapter on love.

And it ends with those wonderful words.

These three remain: faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is love.

That too is at the heart of the faith!

But that love is no good unless we put it into action.

It had been wonderful to welcome Lawrence's daughter, Rosamond, and her husband Ian, who as it happened had met at Highbury 50 years ago this year, and another daughter, Heather.

Rosamond had recently spent three months as an Ecumenical Accompanier with the Ecumenical Accompanier Programme in Palestine and Israel run by the World Council of Churches.

She spoke of her experiences in the hills around Hebron and of the call of the Palestinian churches in the Kairos Palestine document to the churches of the rest of the world to join them for justice and peace for the Palestinian people, and for an end to the occupation of their land.

Following the service, Rosamond spoke of her work and challenged us to do something to give our support to the people and the churches of Palestine, in pursuit of that peace that both the people of Israel and the people of Palestine long for.

It was good also to hear greetings once again from Lawrence.