[This reflection by Martin Shorey was published in the weekly news bulletin of Horley Baptist Church, 18/Feb/2024]
Did you manage to have pancakes this Shrove Tuesday? As a family we enjoyed savoury pancakes followed by American style blueberry pancakes. Now, growing up we of course had pancakes, always with lemon juice and sugar, but there was never really any mention of Lent; the period of 40 days of abstinence leading up to Easter.
This was probably due to me being raised in a traditional Baptist church, where anything that whiffed of Catholicism was strictly avoided (during the 80s ecumenicalism was still a dirty word for many), therefore Lent got thrown out along with Mary worship and the papacy.
Now, my Baptist upbringing gave me a strong biblical foundation that I am very grateful for, but just maybe it wasn’t the well-rounded Christianity we thought it was. In some ways it lacked the heart and the heat of the Charismatic expressions of our faith that I was to experience in my late teens, nor did it have the Christ-centred mysticism found in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.
Perhaps the smorgasbord of churches we can experience in the UK gives us a much richer experience of Jesus, and yet too many of us view other denominations with suspense and disdain. I have known Christians who see Catholicism as the work of the devil, and do not believe there were any proper Christians before the advent of evangelicalism. I still remember whilst on a church trip to a Romanian Orthodox Church in Luton, the shocked and appalled members of the Baptist church who refused to join the queue of worshippers lining up to revere the beautiful life-sized icons of Christ and his saints.
Now, there are many faults in each expression of Christianity, and we shouldn’t shy away from pointing out errors where we see them, but too often we hide in our own churches and reject those who are different to us, even questioning whether or not their faith is real.
In last Sunday’s sermon we looked at the story of Jesus meeting the Samaritan woman at the well.[1] Samaritans claimed to be the true descendants of Abraham, but the Jews believed that only they were truly God’s people, and had the monopoly on God worship. Interestingly Jesus tells the woman that a time was coming when worship was much more about the ‘Who’ than the ‘How’ and ‘Where’.
If this truly is the case, is it possible for us to look beyond our traditions and listen openly to other Jesus worshippers, recognising that just maybe they might have something to offer that our particular tradition does not. By listening perhaps we can produce a fuller, rounder, and more attractive faith that will point more towards Jesus, than the necessity of any particular tradition?
Resources:
[1] Martin Shorey, Sermon, 11/Feb/2024
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Last week’s reflection: Sometimes ‘No’ To What We Want,
But Always ‘Yes’ To What We Need by David Makanjuola
Contributed by Martin Shorey; © Martin Shorey