Dear Friends,
I am wading my way through the four and a half hours of the BBC’s coverage of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Pageant first shown live on Sunday 5th June, marking the final of four days of national and commonwealth celebration with an audience of over a billion people worldwide. Days like this make me proud to be British and we don’t half put on a great show! I confess that I did get a bit stressed as I attempted to get to my afternoon service on Sunday; it seemed as though everybody living in the estate behind our house was celebrating, negotiating my way through the dozens of parked cars and closed roads.
I hope that you enjoyed the events you attended, it was good to spend time with friends and strangers and I am reminded once again that we have lived through yet another key moment in history, during my life I have witnessed the moment Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, the investiture of Prince Charles as the Prince of Wales, I was there at the turn of the millennium and now I can say that I was there the day we marked the seventy years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.
What a privilege for us as Christians to mark this wonderful event on the day the Christian Church marks the events that happened at the feast of Pentecost when God poured out his Spirit on the early disciples, on the day that it felt as though the world was throwing the biggest party we have seen in years, the Church was also celebrating, what a wonderful weekend.
We are fast approaching the holiday season again and as we do the world feels to have been filled with gloom in the past two and a half years as we have learned to live with Covid, as we have witnessed conflicts in Ukraine, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine, and many others. We are living with a climate crisis, escalating energy costs affecting inflation around the world and if we aren’t careful all we can see is doom and gloom.
This weekend has not just given us a bit of respite, I hope that it has given us hope, I always look forward to the months of July and August, they are always associated with holidays, so I pray that as we now recover from the weekend of celebrations, that we can look forward to a summer of peace and hope.
With Best wishes
Derek