This Week |
||
Advent Quiet Day on John the Baptist Saturday 13 December at ElsieshieldsIntroductionThank you for offering your time at this busy period of the year to attend today’s Quiet Half-Day on John the Baptist. For some people who are here today the idea of a Quiet Day, or a time of a retreat, may be something you have not experienced up to now. If this is the case, then I hope you will just feel able to relax during this time we have taken out, especially to be attentive to God and to listen to what He is saying to us. Jesus, we learn from the Gospels, often rose early in the morning and went up alone into the hills surrounding the Sea of Galilee to pray to God, His Father and ours, and it was these prayerful, silent times with God which fed Him spiritually to continue his dynamic ministry of preaching and healing. Without these times of prayer the ceaseless demands of those who came out to Jesus from across the region would surely have dried up His spiritual resources. So what does this mean for us practically today? It means to open our hearts up to God as fully as we possibly can and to listen to what He says to us. The time involved is only a couple of hours at most, so what I would urge you to do to prepare yourself in this Advent/pre-Christmas season is to wait upon the Lord, and between the 2 talks I shall give, where we have space, to maintain the silence if you possibly can. If you have come with a spouse, then for some this will give both of you a short break from the normally helpful, communicative conversations you normally have, and be welcome! The structure of the day, then, is that I shall offer you 2 talks to set you reflecting and praying, in between which we will have a half hour break. We shall aim to finish our time shared together between 12.30 and 12.45. Those of you who would like to go then please feel free to leave, but for those who do have a little more time we can share in a conversation, and if you would like to give me any feedback on the way this event has gone, then Ann and myself would be very grateful. So, now to our theme for today - I have chosen the figure of John the Baptist because, whenever in the past I have preached about him, I have always felt that he is both a striking figure, and one who through his teaching and spirituality is surprisingly relevant to the contemporary situation. In this first talk, then, I would like to say a little bit first about John’s background, his teaching and the surprising way in which we find, if we look at him more closely, that he is relevant to the 21st century. My second talk focuses on the ministry of baptism that John inaugurated, and considers his spirituality and how his own take on Jesus can strengthen our discipleship. |