time@tyndale Programme Summer 2025
Join us on Wednesday evenings for refreshments at 7.30pm, with the main event beginning at 8pm.
23rd April 2025
I’ve just seen a miracle. A Herring Gull is riding on the wind blowing up from the Portishead beach: wings perfectly still, barely a feather twitching, it hangs with a poise no hang-glider could ever manage, then suddenly wheels round and back to exactly where it was before. A wonder to behold.
The dictionary says a miracle is ‘A surprising and welcome event that is not explained by natural or scientific laws and is therefore the work of a divine agency.’ This would exclude what I’ve just seen, because of course the gull’s airborne skill can be attributed to the combination of aeronautical laws and instinctive skills instilled into the bird by evolution and its genes. But ‘miracle’ comes from the Latin and old French words for ‘wonder’; and the gull’s flight, irrespective of scientific explanations, evokes my wonder for its sheer grace and beauty, offered as a gift to me. The Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a poem about, not a gull, but a Kestrel, ‘The Windhover’, hovering in the ecstasy of brilliant flight. He addressed his poem ‘To Christ our Lord’ whose mastery over all things he saw reflected in the bird’s airborne freedom.
There are two incomparable miracles. The first is the very existence of the world, created out of nothing. The second is the resurrection of Christ from the dead, new light out of darkness. No surprise that our world is full of wonders, for creation is itself a miracle, and the new creation has emerged at Easter. As Hopkins wrote in another poem, ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God.’ Watch out!
Keith Clements
Easter Day, 20th April 2025
Join us in person or online for a streaming service via Zoom at 10.30 am – check your email or contact us for the details.
The service includes communion.
A recording of the service is available here.
Good Friday, 18th April 2025
What to write on such a day in the Church’s calendar? Here I borrow heavily from a piece, kindly shared with me, in which the writer had set out what Easter means to them:
The first Easter feels like a pinnacle moment of history – like a great arch that puts everything that’s gone before in a new light and utterly transforms what lies ahead, somehow making sense of history and of the Bible, of the present, and the future.
The Bible opens and God brings light out of darkness and order out of chaos. That’s what God’s been doing ever since, and I believe it’s what God wants us to do too.
On Good Friday we follow Jesus again, experiencing terrible darkness and chaos. Falsely accused, utterly misunderstood and rejected by people of power, let down by His followers who melt away, convicted and sentenced to a cruel death. Then horror is turned into glory, grief and sadness into great joy.
Easter tells us that even when hitting rock-bottom – especially then – we can know that God is there loving us and understanding what we’re going through first-hand. He will bring light out of darkness. Whether your name is Herod or Hitler, you may be able to do unspeakably wicked things, but you won’t have the last word, because always God is working to bring justice and peace.
The Bible ends with a picture of God wiping away every tear, of glorious joy when every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, as they become aware of just how much they are loved and forgiven.
Ruth Allen
16th April 2025
Here we are, half way through Holy Week. We have celebrated Jesus’ spectacular arrival in Jerusalem, and tomorrow we will think of the Last Supper. The tragedy of Good Friday will soon be followed by the glorious miracle of the Resurrection on Easter Day.
But what about the days in between? What about Monday, Tuesday and today? For many of us this is a week of holiday, especially for school children and their teachers. We can relax as we await the forthcoming special days; already we can prepare to celebrate Easter, having marked Good Friday safe in the knowledge of the Resurrection which is to come (have you bought your Easter eggs yet?!).
But that’s not what it was like in Jerusalem then. The disciples did not know what was going to happen and when the crucifixion took place they didn’t know what would happen two days later. During those days between the entry into Jerusalem and the Last Supper Jesus was very busy and he must have kept the disciples busy too – so much so that while he was praying they went to sleep – exhausted with the busy schedule perhaps.
So maybe it’s rather inappropriate that Holy Week is a holiday period for many of us, when we can relax and look forward to Easter. Jesus certainly didn’t relax during those days – he knew what fate awaited him, even if he didn’t know exactly how it would happen, so he was anxious to do as much as he could while he was able to. So perhaps we should remember that the work of witnessing for Christ doesn’t stop between the special commemorations. There is still work to do!
David T Roberts
Palm Sunday, 13th April 2025
Join us in person or online for a streaming service via Zoom at 10.30 am – check your email or contact us for the details.
A recording of the service should be available here this afternoon.
11th April 2025
Palm Sunday is approaching. At Church we will (probably) sing “Ride on, ride on, in majesty” and will (probably) be given a palm cross – a precisely cut and folded piece of dried plant material, allegedly palm, which is to remind us of Christ’s crucifixion. (These seem mostly to be made ‘by Masai villagers of South Tanzania’ and I hope they are paid properly!)
We were once in Venice on Palm Sunday and went to St Mark’s Basilica. It was a long service in which the whole passion narrative from Matthew was read. (As it was in Italian I understood little but did realise how breathless Matthew is. He says “and then… and then…” so many times.) At the end we were each given a small piece of real palm – about 30 cm of green leaf. It was truly green and alive very recently.
On our way back to lunch we passed a parish church whose congregation was leaving. The children poured out each brandishing a whole bright green palm leaf. In many cases it was taller than they were. They were joyfully chasing each other, shouting, waving the palms or having mock fights with the palms.
It made me appreciate the story of the first Palm Sunday in a new way. The joy and hope of the crowd that day was real but it was about to be dashed and turned into the baying crowd of Good Friday, the desolation for the disciples and then the wonder of Easter Sunday. A roller-coaster of emotions for us to follow too each year.
Margaret Clements
9th April 2025
Last Sunday morning in the deacons’ prayer meeting – those few minutes before the service when the deacons pray for all who have gathered for worship – Sam was joking about how he has upset some of the ‘rules’ we cherish. For as long as anyone remembers, communion at Tyndale has been served by four deacons who sit in front of the congregation (feeling very self-conscious). But now there are usually only two deacons serving and, since we began holding communion in the round, we don’t even get to sit down!
This came to mind as I was reflecting on the New Testament lectionary reading for this week. In his letter to the Philippians (3.4-14), Paul recalls how he was brought up in a good religious home, followed all the rules, became a respected teacher of Judaism and zealously opposed an upstart preacher called Jesus who dared to challenge the status quo. I understand the old Paul (or rather, Saul) – rules give structure to life; familiarity is unthreatening; there is something ‘right’ about doing things as we have always done them.
But wait… Paul goes on to say that now he considers all those things to be rubbish (I’m told the original Greek puts it rather more crudely). Compared with knowing Christ Jesus, everything else fades into insignificance. To know Christ, to be found in him, to share in his resurrection – the words are flowing freely out of Paul’s pen as he tries to find a way of expressing just how much Jesus means to him.
Forget the safety of old rules, I want some of that joy.
Ian Waddington
Sunday 6th April 2025
Join us in person or online for a streaming service via Zoom at 10.30 am – check your email or contact us for the details.
This morning’s preacher is the Revd Karen Sethuraman, and includes communion.
A recording of the service should be available here this afternoon.
4th April 2025
EYE AND TOOTH.
Martin Luther King Jr is on record as saying ‘If we do an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, we will soon be a blind and toothless nation’ – a sobering thought where certain international events seem to embody two eyes and two teeth, and even more, for one! In the Mosaic Law the principle was simply to limit retaliation which was never to exceed the original hurt. Initially applied to individual relationships it had obvious implications for international conflict, seeking to limit the escalation of aggression.
By contrast, Jesus’ response in the Sermon on the Mount could not be more radical. Referring back to the Mosaic injunction, he counsels his hearers not to resist those who wrong them: if slapped on the right cheek they were to offer up the left, donate their cloak to the person who seized their shirt, if coerced into service for one mile to go two. In short the message was to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you [Matthew 5 38-44]. ‘Retaliation is binned, love and restoration are the only way forward’ [Steve Chalke].
The word ‘enemy’ derives from the Latin ‘in-imicus’, and thus an enemy is a person who is ‘not a friend’. Loving an enemy, therefore, begins by saying ‘Yes’ to their humanity, discovering common ground in their God-createdness, not so much that my enemy is opposed to me, but that together we are loved by God. Discovering this, the strong person is the one who cuts off the chain of hatred and evil, for hate not only harms the hated but simultaneously blights the hater. Thus whilst we usually think of what hate does to the individual or groups hated, the truth is even more tragic, for the hating process is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who does the hating.
In contrast to all this, is the power of love and forgiveness, for as Mark Twain was seen to observe, ‘Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it’, underlining poetically that quiet gentility and unassuming beauty have the potential to subdue or overcome even violent aggression.
John Briggs