I love the books written by the Yorkshire vet Alf Wight or “James Herriot” as we know him. I think that the man is a genius to have the idea of writing the stories of his experiences of working as a rural vet. I remember laughing when I first read them, I loved the film released in 1975 with Simon Ward playing James Herriot, then the TV series with Christopher Timothy, and I love the more recent Channel 5 version with Nicholas Ralph as the latest James. The format is very simple, a vet, telling of his day-to-day experiences.
When I came to work as a circuit minister, I found myself discovering in a similar way to Alf Wight the delight of working with people, and over the time I have worked with a variety of churches, from large town centre, to suburban and even village chapels, it has been a delight to experience the zany to the positively unbelievable. Over the years I have found myself in situations where, had I watched them on the Vicar of Dibley, I might have thought they were pushing the boundaries of credibility a bit too far.
I answered the telephone one day and was greeted by one of the lovely, sweet elderly ladies from one of my village chapels. She was clearly anxious and concerned “Jesus has gone missing!” she said. I wondered what on earth she was talking about and after a bit of tactful and delicate questioning I got to the bottom of the problem.
Fortunately, the church community hadn’t lost its faith, but it had lost a little wooden plaque like the one pictured above. The plaque had been gifted to the church by a past church member and normally had pride of place on the table in the entrance, it had been there on Sunday, but by Thursday when the church was open for the coffee morning it had disappeared. Thankfully, I had another phone call from the same dear lady a few days later “Jesus is back!” she exclaimed with delight. It turned out that a small child in a push chair had been to an event at the church and must have picked it up without his mother noticing and taken it home.
This whole experience made me think. We can sometimes get so absorbed in the politics of religion that we can sometimes lose sight of Jesus. Faced with difficult decisions, time consuming problems, conflicts between people, differences of opinion on how we should proceed, we lose sight of Jesus. We are church because we believe that this man Jesus is the Christ, God in the form of man and our duty, our calling as Christians is to follow his teaching and be his disciples in the world today. Let us ensure that we keep Jesus in the centre of everything we do.