One of the advantages of being a minister in the East Anglia Methodist District is that every other year we are gifted with a Minister’s Retreat. We go away together for about forty-eight hours, we learn together, we relax together, share fellowship, and eat together, and it is an opportunity to withdraw from our everyday lives and re charge the batteries. I value these periods when I can engage with colleagues across the district and spend time in solitude away from the phone and the computer and the business of life. This year we had a couple of days at the beautiful Sizewell Hall, which is located on the Suffolk coast between the picturesque village of Thorpness and the Sizewell B Nuclear Power Station. The house is an amazing place and as I sat all on my own early one morning in the library, this old house made me think what a wonderful place it would be for one of those murder mystery weekends.
I love a good “whodunnit” and have a whole collection of crime novels and I thoroughly enjoy a good crime drama on television, trying to figure out who the culprit is. I think that a lot of this stems back to my childhood memories of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, Secret Seven, and other mystery books, many of which still sit of my bookshelves. How I would have loved to move a particular book in the library at Sizewell Hall, only to witness the bookcase slide to one side revealing a secret passage. Unlike my childhood heroes, I guess that I would be too much of a coward to explore it.
This whole experience got me thinking about my chosen vocation. Week by week and I prepare to lead people in worship, I study Old Testament texts, the wonderful letters of the New Testament and the Gospel Story. I lead people along a journey passing familiar sights along the way, living the story once again all the way through from the expectation of Advent, the Christmas story, the teachings of Jesus, the journey through Lent, to Holy Week and Easter Day, past the ascension, the events of Pentecost, and everything leads up to this Sunday, today, Sunday 26th November 2023. Next Sunday is Advent Sunday and we start the whole process again, we go back to the beginning, but today, like my retreat, we stop, and we savour the great revelation. Imagine the great detective, having reviewed all the clues, listened to the witnesses, weighing up all the evidence, and now standing in front of the suspects ready to reveal the perpetrator of the heinous crime, and we all wait in eager anticipation to discover whodunnit. Today is the great reveal for us as Christians. As Jeremy Bowen the BBC journalist put it at the end of the amazing Son of God TV series over twenty years ago “there is sufficient documented evidence to be as certain as we can be that a man named Jesus had a significant impact on the people of Palestine, of that we can be sure, but was he the Son of God? that is a matter of faith” for me, as I reach this Sunday each year, I have sufficient faith to believe that Jesus is the Christ, God in the form of a human being, and today is a day to celebrate that belief “Jesus Christ is King!”