Update on Sunday Worship

Sunday 19th July

The Seventh Sunday After Trinity

Thank you for visiting the Tove Benefice website.

We are currently reviewing our approach to communications and would appreciate your feedback.  We would particularly like to know if this is your first visit or you are a regular visitor to the website.  It would also be helpful to understand what it was you were looking to find out.

Please contact us using the Your Comments page, by email to 360musafa@gmail.com, or by contacting the Tove Benefice Office.

Sunday
  9:15 am  Family Communion at St Lawrence, Towcester
10:15 am  Benefice Sunday Worship via Zoom 
11:15 am  Holy Communion at St Bartholomew's, Greens Norton


Subscribe to our weekly Newsletter here.

Our weekly news contains details of services for this and next weekend, as well as daily bible readings, prayer requests and notices for forthcoming events.  

Looking ahead to events and services that are happening please do look at the monthly calendar for July

Copies are available in churches for collecting especially for those who do not have emails. 



Dear all,

Empires rise and fall. As true today as it was in Biblical times.

There is a phrase, the arrogance of power, popularised by an American senator during the early 60s call William Fulbright. It was a critique of American foreign policy at the time but can be applied more generally to any nation that confuses power with virtue and assumes that the possession of power enables it to do anything it chooses.

The people of Israel and Judea experienced a series of empires conquering them and taking land and indeed people – but then being conquered by the next to rise in power. The Assyrian Empire conquered, followed by the Babylonian Empire and then the Persian – it was King Cyrus of Persia who released the Jewish exiles allowing them to return to rebuild the nation. Later came Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire and onwards through to the British Mandate a hundred years ago following the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

We were thinking about this on Wednesday when the first reading from the prophet Isaiah began, ‘Woe to Assyria, the rod of my anger— the club in their hands is my fury!  Against a godless nation I send him, and against the people of my wrath I command him’. (10: 5,6)  
The prophet is seeing that God is using Assyria to discipline Israel because of its faithlessness. The Assyrian king can’t recognise that he is serving God’s purpose and thinks it’s all down to his own strength and leadership. In verse 13 he says, ‘By the strength of my hand I have done it, and by my wisdom, for I have understanding; I have removed the boundaries of peoples and have plundered their treasures’.

The words of the king of Assyria are a particular example of the ‘arrogance of power’. He brags about how he has moved national boundaries, raided national treasures, removed other rulers, and seized the wealth of nations. He brags, yet he failed to realise that in his aggressions, he was only an instrument of the Lord's judgement on others. Now, the judgement would come upon him. He will learn that the real power is in God and from God. There are occasions when sometimes the Lord uses people or nations as an instrument of his peace and at other times an instrument of his justice and judgement.

Many empires have come and gone since the Assyrian empire. ( there is a good amount of Assyrian carving on great stone panels that are in the British Museum that were brought to London by ship from Assyrian palaces) History has witnessed the rise and fall of many empires -  Including our own. The invincibility and durability associated with the word ‘empire' now seems like arrogance - and not learning from history that empires eventually fall.

There is something very youthful and naïve about nations, who at the height of their power, imagine themselves to be immortal. It could be said - that one of the advantages of a belief in God is that it means that ultimate power, the power over life and death, does not belong to any human being, but is ascribed to God – that religion teaches us that we are not Gods.

The Christian life says that we are called to become like God – like Jesus who shows us what God is like.
Human empires discover, as they age, that they are not immortal. And like the young, they discover over time that they are creatures and that God is, indeed ultimately in charge.

The only empire that truly endures is the invisible empire of God's grace.

With every blessing,
Greg

Worship for this coming week