Impact0418

Sunday March 25
Thursday March 29
Friday March 30
St Chad’s Church, Linden Avenue, W odseats
Church Office: Linden Avenue, Sheffield S8 0GA
Page 17
Tel: (0 14) 274 5086
Easter worship
at St Chad’s
PALM SUNDAY
MAUNDY THURSDAY
G OD FRIDAY
EASTER SUNDAY
9am Traditional Co munion Service
1am Lifted Family Service
10am Our w ekly service of Holy
Co munion
10am G od Friday Family Service
(especia for children)
1-3pm Meditations Around the Cro s
Sunday April 1
9am Easter Celebration with
Holy Co munion
1am Family Service with
Holy Co munion
Come and celebrate the risen Jesus!
email: office@stchads.org
website: ww.stchads.org
A
few years ago, whilst on holiday in Wales, I stopped
at a place that claimed to be the wettest place in
Britain (there are in fact quite a few places that
make that claim!). The name of it escapes me,
and I suspect that I couldn’t pronounce it even if
my memory was better, but I can remember it well. It was a
narrow valley leading to a river, and from top to bottom it was
green. Not green as in a lawn or even a well-stocked forest.
It was lusciously green – the leaves were green, the bark was
green and the stones were green. Whether or not it really was
the wettest place in Britain, it certainly did not lack for water.
It is odd that our national colours are red, white and blue
because really I think that we are a nation of green. We prize
our lawns; we enjoy our fi elds, we cherish our trees (particularly in
Sheffi eld….) and we can get very hot and bothered when our precious
greenbelt is threatened.
And yet our relationship with our countryside is such a perverse one.
As a nation we were among the fi rst to recognise that our landscape
could be beautiful as well as threatening. Yet whilst the Lake Poets were
rhapsodising about the sublime Cumbrian hills, not that far to the south
the sprawling conurbations and mills of Lancashire and Yorkshire were
consuming and polluting the countryside. Our capital city was one of the
fi rst to have large public parks planned within it (“the Lungs of London”)
and yet at the same time the River Thames was utterly dead. The
novels of Thomas Hardy and the paintings of John Constable continue
to hold the public imagination long after the bucolic idylls they described
have been torn up and replaced by mega-fi elds with their ubiquitous and
uniform crops of oil seed rape and sugar beet. Our Green and Pleasant
Land is part reality, part myth, part longing for another world that never
really existed.
It is that longing for another world that I think strikes the human heart
when we fi nd ourselves on one of those (rare) summer days in a park,
garden, hill or valley when the sun gently bathes the land and those
rather hackneyed words of Robert Browning seem almost true: “The
Lark’s on the wing, the snail’s on the thorn, God’s in his heaven and all’s
right with the world”. We know of course that all isn’t right in the world,
even in the little patch of heaven that we temporarily fi nd ourselves in,
but perhaps we momentarily get a glimpse of what it might be like if that
really was the case.
At its best these moments do point us to a truth about the
reality of heaven: a harmony of humanity and nature held
together by God. The Bible calls this the New Creation
– a world where human wrongdoing needs no longer
pollute or destroy God’s good world. The promise of the
Bible is that at the end of all things God will create a new
earth and that new creation begins in our lives whenever
we accept the love of God and allow his love to work
within us.
Rev Toby Hole, Vicar, St Chad’s, Woodseats
February/March 2018
Have a Go with your
FREE seeds
see page 12
Celebrate Easter with us at St Chad’s
Details of our services, events & activities inside
WOODSEATS • SHEFFIELD
This Green & Pleasant Land
St Chad’s Church, Linden Avenue, Woodseats
Church Offi ce: Linden Avenue, Sheffi eld S8 0GA
Tel: (0114) 274 5086
Page 3
email: offi ce@stchads.org
website: www.stchads.org