to know, grow and show the love of God
Into the story comes a tiny, unnamed, Israelite slave girl.
She would have been on the bottom rung of society, if she was on the ladder at all. A slave, female, foreign and young. In modern parlance we’d say she’d been trafficked.
And that should bring us up short. It’s too easy to dismiss slavery as something which happened hundreds or thousands of years ago. Another time, another place.
But this still happens today. It should still make us uncomfortable.
The message from Nigel and I is: go, share your experience, tell about what you’ve seen, testify to what you know to be true.
Because whether you know it or not, or like it or not, you’re all preachers! You each have a story to tell, a testimony to give.
It can be over a cup of coffee or at the checkout or from a lectern or a pulpit. But go.
I am going to start my stopwatch…
I read an article recently that said in the year 2000, TV adverts had to grab a persons’ attention within 12 seconds or they weren’t effective.
By 2013 that had dropped to 8 seconds. The attention span of a goldfish is said to be 9 seconds. So, longer than humans now…
Stop the clock – 8.75 seconds. The goldfish are still with me but I’ve lost the rest of you!
My Mum’s family were very keen on taking and keeping photos. Her Dad wasn’t the greatest photographer though and most of them have the top of the heads chopped off, or half a person to one side, or a finger part-way over the lens. However, these photos were precious and kept in a box rather than thrown away.
And I have a family album kept by my mum’s great-grandparents. They are studio photos, some of which must have been taken not long after photography became commercially available in the mid to late 19th Century…
Can I ask an indelicate question? Who here is in their 80’s? Or 90’s? Anyone older?
Today we have that wonderful picture of the 3 visitors who come to bring startling news to Abraham and Sarah. Well, more to Sarah actually. The news is that within a year, the 89 year old Sarah will become pregnant and have that long-awaited, long-promised child.
I’ll just let that sink-in a moment…
We’re being asked to choose: What kind of people do you want to be?
“Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength”.
Moses says: is this how you want to be known? If so, you can do it. It’s within your grasp…