St. Joseph’s Church, Merry Hill, Wolverhampton

The Calendar should be up to date with this week’s events – please let me know if not!

Given a little time I’m sure I could put this more lucidly but in the meantime here we go.

I’ve been wondering recently about whether popular culture can teach us anything about sacrifice. Before we get on to that though I should say that sacrifice is a bit of Big Thing and is very different to many other behaviours that we see as being “goodness”. For example, I’ve had to remonstrate with a friend of mine recently that donating something to the charity she’s collecting for from my Charities Aid Foundation – cafonline.org – account really is no sacrifice at all. The account is fed from a Give As You Earn stream so I never see the money, it’s gross of tax, and BT adds another large chunk every year too. So £50 is neither here nor there. The only sacrifice is an opportunity cost – by giving it to X rather than Y charity, Y loses out. I’ve given nothing of substance, surely? It might be Good to give it, but that’s not the same as giving something up.

So if sacrifice is to mean something, how is it shown in popular culture? Take The Prestige. (Major spoiler alert.) If you’ve seen this, then you’ll know that in the denouement we find that he gives his life every night for the purposes of doing an impossible trick. But does he really sacrifice anything? He, or his copy, lives to do the trick again another day. Is that a sacrifice? For anything at all, let alone the mundane acclaim of the public?

It’s another interesting point to digest that the soldiers in The Hurt Locker explicitly say they’re not there for the people of Iraq. They sacrifice themselves – but do they do so selflessly? How does this compare with Chief Warrant Officer Miller in Green Zone who is there just for the truth, and will do almost anything to get to it?

What do you sacrifice each day? Facebook keeps impressive statistics about how popular it is. But if you spin this round you’ll see how much time is spent – if 150 million people update their status every day, then what are they giving up to find time to do this? “Never enough time” is a common refrain – so what do we sacrifice to find time for these things? And if we didn’t find time for this kind of interaction, who would lose? It’s a genuinely open question – no matter what has happened in my own life around the destructive power of facebook, I have to be reconciled to the positive power of interaction. How great is it to see a friend with a “Jesus is Lord” statement in his religious info?

So here’s a real sacrifice: Jesus gave up his life for our sins. His perfect life gave him faith in an eternal life. But it was a sacrifice – he was giving up his humanity, and God was giving up a his only Son that could live as Man, and all that that means. His sacrifice was once and for all, never to be repeated, never able to be replicated, and as both a fulfilment of prophesy and as a victory over our sin. And his resurrection was our resurrection from our sins, our washing clean.

Do I hear a response?

After listening hard I’ve finally got over my personal difficulties[*] around how social networking websites can be used for His purposes. So I’ll be adding all kinds of features to saintjosephs.co.uk to better integrate it with facebook, twitter, and so on – things like being able to put a post up on facebook et al easily. Ideas please!

[*] It’s complicated, to use the facebook relationship status.

I’ve added a new little “widget” to saintjosephs.co.uk – a calendar that appears as “upcoming events” on the right-hand side of the screen.

Maintaining this will be the fun bit. So far I’ve added the Sunday services as weekly events, and the social calendar as one-off items, but need to know what the recurrence scheme is for Weds services and Circle, and may be able to do a better job of the 6.30pm services if they follow a monthly pattern. And I’m sure I’m missing loads of events. And DCC. And PCC. And so on. Please send me your events – or if you’ve got permission to post articles to the website, or want to be able to add events, then you should be able to do so anyway. Just go to the “site admin” screen and then look at the “Calendar” section on the left-hand side.

I’ve finally, after months of procrastination and waiting for all the versions of software[*] to join up and testing it basically works, upgraded the Wordpress software that drives http://saintjosephs.co.uk.  This brings a bunch of changes behind the scenes which make it easier to post articles (including easier posting of video and podcasts and pasting from Word, easier image uploads, and so on), removes my custom-coding stuff so makes future upgrades easier, and removes security holes and so on. There are lots of new features in the background too that I haven’t fully explored yet.

You’ll notice the site looks slightly different because of this, but everything should work properly. As with all upgrades it’s possible something has gone wrong somewhere. Do let me know if you spot anything bust and of course if you hate the changed look then let me know too. As an aside the changes have made it easy for me to make the website wider and I’ve done this – which gives us room for more top-level menus – in line with most other sites.

This change was also one of the things I wanted to get done before doing a general website workshop because it looks very different behind the scenes, as those that have ever posted articles will see. But I’d now like to get such a thing scheduled – presumably one evening.

In the meantime if you’d like to get more involved with content then it is easier than it was – make sure you’re registered on saintjosephs.co.uk as a user, and then if you want to post stuff up then just let me know and I’ll give your user ID the necessary permissions. See the Help pages for more info – from the top menu on the website.

[*] The site uses Wordpress, the Freshy theme, and eight or nine plug-ins to add things like podcasting support, video, automatic database backups, better user registration, and so on and so forth. The main problem was with the Freshy theme, which was always out of step with the current Wordpress version. Then once it came into line I put together everything into a Linux virtual machine running on my home PC, pretending to be the internet server, and checked it worked. And then because I had to bite the bullet and do the upgrade – which involves deleting hundreds of files from the real internet server and then installing new versions. Not as hard as it sounds but as it was a bit of a manual process it wasn’t 100% that it would work – which made putting it off easy!

Ness speaks on Matthew 16:24-28, where Jesus predicts his death – her theme is “Why did Jesus set the bar so high?”.

Listen here…or pick it up on iTunes. (Please also see the Help page on this site about this.)

Holy Ground   – Sunday 21st March

Our next Presence event takes us on a reflective journey where we can encounter God in a fresh and contemplative way, At various times in our lifes we encounter many different things which can have an effect on us, and those around us. The Christian walk is an incredible journey, and I don’t know about you, but sometimes it is just so hard and at times quite painful. Singing the following words don’t come easy, it’s about choice, about surrender, its about allowing the master to take control.

Purify my heart
Let me be as gold and precious silver
Purify my heart
Let me be as gold, pure gold
Refiner’s fire
My heart’s one desire
Is to be holy
Set apart for You, Lord
I choose to be holy
Set apart for You, my Master
Ready to do Your will

Being a follower of Jesus can be a real struggle, and often we become casualties of the things going on around us. The great thing about Presence is that it is a safe place where you can be YOU. It’s designed with you in mind and can be just what you need to take time out. How do you cope with pressure? Do you find life can be stressful? Do you wish you could just run away from it all?

You are not alone! Come and join us at Presence  – it might just be what you need. You may not feel Holy, you may not feel like praising, hey dont worry, the coffee is good too!

 Presence …..refreshingly different.

I’ll be doing a proper page for these Real Soon Now but before I lose the piece of paper from Hazel in the wash, here’s the vital stuff that you need to know:

8/5/10: Quiz night, 7pm until 9.30pm, featuring our ever-popular quizmaster Andy Bennett and the more popular fish and chips from over the road. Probably £5 but will depend on the price of fish!

3/10/10: Harvest lunch after the 10.30am service – bring and share.

4/12/10: Victorian fair, 11am until 2pm.

11/12/10: Church family party, 7pm to 9.30pm.

In August there will also be a summer walk with a stop-off at a pub, or perhaps more for those of us with a thirst.

Krish speaks on Mark 12:1-11, The Parable of the Tenants.

Listen here…or pick it up on iTunes. (Please also see the Help page on this site about this.)