The Green Chalice by Mark Coleman

Are you ready for the festivities ?! I have been taken this year with the adverts for sparkling jewellery. Swaroski. Should I shouldn’t I ?  All the advertising is playing on our anxieties about getting everything ready for Christmas. We don’t want to let anyone down, it has to be a perfect Christmas. Be prepared. Fill up the fridge, buy all the shopping, ….surprise, delight your guests. (Perhaps at the back of our minds there’s compete too…) So much of our economy runs on exploiting anxiety. Marketing creating needs that we can only satisfy by buying something. We know it’s wrong, and we know it doesn’t really brings happiness, but we do it anyway. Unlike commercial Christmas froth Advent is a time of preparation for something profound. But what are we going to get ready for? How do we get ready for Christmas, for the arrival of the baby Jesus? Each year we re-enact the drama. We pretend Jesus hasn’t arrived. It’s a very good practice because it means we ha...

What are people like ? Some are saints, some are sinners...you may say. Perhaps in the current age we would say : “Some are celebrities, some are scroungers” We do have a way - don't we - of putting things into binaries, black and white, yes and no, good and bad, this and that. It works for computer code but I don't know if it works for human beings made in the image of God..... Perhaps now more than in previous ages and certainly since the economics of the Thatcher era arrived, the neoliberal economics that makes the market its God, we have so many stories that make people other than ourselves...and so make it possible to cut their wages, to implement austerity. We have heard the stories about those who are poor and how they are to blame for their property because of the lack of initiative, laziness, fecklessness etc.  In today’s Rochdale Observer the story about poor children not being ready for primary school can be told to us as poor parenting causing t...

I had half an hour spare in Rochdale Town Centre yesterday and so I dropped into Touchstones local history library. The very helpful librarians gave me a folder on "the Parish Church" and so I skimmed some pamphlets of Dr Molesworth's sermons. I was very struck in reading about this Vicar of Rochdale that the parishioners wanted him to publish his sermons. So much so that 15 of them, all men, including one Churchwarden, had written him a letter on 10th December 1849 demanding that he publish his sermon from the 2nd Sunday of Advent. This sermon, the letter tells us would "dispel some of the fallacies" around and that "it was an excellent exposition" of the task of the Church in "holy education." Rather than talk about the disputes and contentions that gave rise to this letter, I want to reflect on communication. Dr Molesworth published a number of pamphlets in his time. There was one reflecting on the salvation of a Rochdale horse steale...

Bangladesh and Rochdale Rochdale has a large Bangladeshi heritage population. Many came in the 1960s to Rochdale to work in the mills and although that generation have got older, retired or departed, their children are part of a young and growing community, and connections with family in Bangladesh are strong. I have been several times to Wardleworth Community centre to break the fast during Ramadan at events organised by the Rochdale-Sylhet link . (Sylhet is the city in north eastern Bangladesh where many of our community have roots). Money is raised for projects and Bangladeshi Rochdalians keep in touch with the place and people. Riverside Boxing Day 2016 The previous MP of Rochdale Simon Danczuk famously said that money should be spent on UK flood defences and not on Bangladesh. Bangladesh has suffered from 18 major floods in the 20th Century, some of catastrophic consequences. The 1987 flood inundated 40% of the country . Whether or not this was right, or goo...

In Matthew 5.13 Jesus tells his disciples that they are they salt of the earth, and that they should not lose their saltiness. If they have lost it, they need to become salty again, or risk being thrown out. Salt ... well perhaps you remember all about it from school. It's sodium chloride. It's present in seawater with about 35 grams per litre -  that's about 3.5 %. Salt is essential for our lives, you find it in our bodies, it's essential for tissues. Salting is used in food preservation. How is salt produced - from salt mines or by the evaporation of seawater. Salt has important place in religion. The ancient Greeks and Romans invoked their gods with offerings of salt and water. In our own faith, we learn that there are 35 verses which mention salt. Lot's wife was turned to salt as she looked back at the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Paul encourages us to let our conversation be always full of grace and seasoned with salt (Colossians 4.6) But for us, what may it m...

Ash Wednesday 2017 Sermon preached at St Mary’s in the Baum on 1 st March 2017 There’s not too much dust here in this Church. It’s kept pretty clean and tidy. But there is dust everywhere… of course. Today in our liturgy of Ash Wednesday we shall hear the words: “Dust you are and to dust you shall return” Dust is seen as the enemy of the house proud, it gets everywhere. Are you wining your battle with dust ? Do you have a Dust Buster – one of those little Hoovers or.. have you given up. Perhaps you only dust when family or the Vicar visits ! Dust and Soil have many ingredients. These include animal, vegetable, organic, inorganic. Dust has a lot of pollution bits in. Smoke particles. We are not just thinking about house dust, we are thinking about soil. Soil is again something that develops from waste, rotted matter. One day we shall return to the soil. One way or the other we shall be pushing up the daisies. I don't use that term flippantly – we shall play our part in the next phas...