Thought for the Week - 5th June 2022

Dear Friends, 

For the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012 I was at my previous church in Sheffield (we moved later that year to Beckenham), and I have been re-reading the article I wrote on that occasion for the church magazine, part of which said, ‘60 Glorious Years! The month of June marks the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations with a whole host of activities, parties, get-togethers and pomp and ceremony to mark this truly once-in-a-lifetime achievement. Only one other monarch has reached this milestone in their reign and that was Queen Victoria in 1897, and we will probably have to wait a very long time for another Diamond Jubilee – it will not be in our lifetime, so we had better make the most of it!’ I guess what I didn’t foresee then was that a Platinum Jubilee would follow with the same outpouring of gratitude and thanksgiving for the Queen’s life and 70-year reign, together with street parties, activities and pomp and ceremony just like ten years ago. I was interested to read this week that the Queen’s Coronation in 1953 was the first major national television broadcast with over 20 million people watching the grainy, black and white images coming from Westminster Abbey. What the TV audience did not see was the most sacred moment of the service when the Queen was anointed with oil, symbolically setting her apart for service and duty, empowered by the Holy Spirit. In a book entitled the Little Book of Private Devotions, written by the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, to help the Queen prepare for the coronation, he invited her to pray, ‘that my heart may be ready to receive Christ in humility and godly fear. Come Holy Spirit, and daily increase in all of us, and in me thy humble servant, thy manifold gifts of grace; the spirit of wisdom and understanding; the spirit of counsel and ghostly strength; the spirit of knowledge and true godliness, and fill us, O Lord, with the spirit of thy holy fear, now and for ever. Amen.’ Sunday 5th June is the celebration of the Day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit came upon the followers of Jesus in a most powerful and dramatic way and the church was born. The above prayer, even though written for a 25-year-old queen at the beginning of her reign, is also a prayer that we can all pray, that we too might know the strength and power of God in our lives as we seek to serve him with the gifts he has bestowed upon us. 

Grace and peace,

Neil

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