Corstorphine Craigsbank Church
Worship centres for Corstorphine Old and New Church
Well, the work was all worth it and now the daffodils are up and providing a gorgeous show for all who visit. Take a walk to see them before it is too late. They are with us all too briefly.
Bulb Planting – The ECO Group met at 2.00pm at Craigievar Park (just off Craigs Road) on Wednesday 23 November to plant Spring bulbs with the Park Ranger and staff from CEC. We look forward to seeing the results when the soil warms up and the days get longer.
Contact Anne Currie for more info.
If you would like to consider this question then can we invite you to join any one or more of the BOOK DISCUSSIONS planned for this year?
During 2023 our minister, Alan Childs, invites anyone who would like to join in a monthly book discussion group with a PROGRESSIVE theological inclination.
If you would like to develop and refresh your understanding of God, the Bible, faith, the church and your life as a Christian, and be challenged in the process, then please consider joining the group for a monthly, in person, conversation about one book at a time.
Here are the books that form the reading list, divided into two parts for the year. The books are available through any of the online bookstores (including Bookshop.org which feeds profit back to independent bookshops), many high street bookshops, or from the authors themselves.
February to May (4pm on the last Sunday of the month at Craigsbank Church hall)
1 – What Is the Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything by Rob Bell (26 February) NOTE THIS ONE SESSION WILL START AT 5pm
2 – Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence by Diana Butler-Bass (26 March)
3 – Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church by Rachel Held Evans (30 April)
4 – Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People by Nadia Bolz-Weber (28 May)
August to November (4pm on the last Sunday of the month at East Craigs Community Centre)
1 – Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again by Rachel Held Evans (27 August)
2 – Jesus Unexpected: Ending the End Times to Become the Second Coming by Keith Giles (24 September)
3 – Faith after Doubt: Why Your Beliefs Stopped Working and What to Do about It by Brian D. McLaren (29 October)
4 – The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne (26 November)
Each book’s discussion will be held late on a Sunday afternoon over a glass of wine or a mug of coffee (your choice). Send us a message if you would like to notify us of your interest … but you are also welcome to simply drop in on the day.
The organisations, Everyday Plastics and City to Sea are calling for all UK supermarkets to remove plastic packaging from five top-selling fruit & veg products –– potatoes, apples, bananas, carrots and onions –– so we can fight the plastic problem, reduce food waste and save money.
It is estimated that selling these five items loose (unpackaged) would:
The organisation have joined forces to launch a petition and our Eco group are encouraging as many people as possible to sign it.
You may have seen the upsetting images from Turkey and Syria, showing the devastation caused by the earthquakes.
The Disasters Emergency Committee has launched an urgent appeal to provide vital lifesaving aid to those in need. Please donate, if you can, either through Christian Aid or direct to DEC by clicking here for the DEC appeal.
On 27 January 1945, the Red Army arrived at the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau to liberate the camp. Since 2005, this date has been remembered as International Holocaust Remembrance Day and every year, ceremonies mark the anniversary across Europe and the wider world.
Throughout these seventy-eight years survivors of the camp have spoken out about their experience and the need for remembrance. They have retold and recreated the most painful of memories and have done so with great dignity. They have taken school children by the hand and looked world leaders in the eye and they have pricked the conscience of the world again and again as they spoke of the unspeakable. They have done so in the name of those who did not survive.
Many of these survivors are now elderly and a high percentage have died since the last major anniversary. It is now up to others to tell the stories of those who died and those who survived but who are no longer here to speak for themselves.
This then is a fitting date on which to remember the life of Jane Haining, a remarkable Scots woman who died in Auschwitz just a few months before the liberation of the camp. Recognised in 1997 as Righteous Amongst the Nations for her part in protecting Jewish school children and their families, Jane Haining was born and raised a country girl in Dunscore, Dumfriesshire. She trained as a Church of Scotland missionary and was posted to Budapest as matron to the Church of Scotland School there. Against all advice, she refused to leave when the war drew closer to the city. She knew that the children needed her ‘in their darkest hour’ and she fought to keep them out of the camps. She made the ultimate sacrifice. She herself was eventually charged with working amongst Jews and was taken to Auschwitz where she died aged 47.
Our annual Burns Supper took place on 21 January 2023 in Craigsbank Church Hall. It was a superb occasion. All who attended were rewarded with a relaxed evening of great cheer with an outstanding meal, readings, traditional addresses, highland dancing, music and song. Grateful thanks go out to all involved, in particular those on the Hospitality Team who prepared and served the meal.
Used stamps are still being collected throughout the year – boxes at both church centres – but especially just now. Do bring them with you next time you come.
Wee request – Please ensure that you leave a visible surround of the paper from which the stamp has been cut all round the stamp. Last year some had to be discarded as the edge of the stamp had been cut rendering it invalid. This year money raised is hoping to fund a Pastor for a year to support projects in Lebanon.
Craigsbank Parish Church and the Old Parish Church are partnering on a project with our local Craigmount High School and Christian youth workers from Young Life International to offer a very affordable lunch option in a welcoming environment to the pupils. We are now offering this on Thursday afternoons over the school’s lunch break.
A similar project has developed over a few years as the ‘Liberton Northfield Toastie Tuesday’ lunch club, which serves toasties, a cookie and a drinks can to schoolchildren for £1 every Tuesday of term time. They have served more than 100,000 toasties since they started a few years ago. An outcome from the project is a well-established youth ministry amongst the local churches.
We will be running a similar project on Thursdays from this week, 27 October. The price of the lunch is £1.50, with free fruit if we can. The main aim is to offer Christian hospitality to the children in the parish high school. The catchphrase for the Toastie Tuesdays at present is ‘The best welcome of the week’.
We need your prayers and a few volunteers to help in the kitchen and ‘front of house’ – welcoming, chatting and serving the food. We plan to use the Craigsbank kitchen and large hall, recognising that it will be tweaked and improved as the weeks progress. There was a very successful training and first public session held on Thursday 13 October, when we served some 30 pupils.
Craigmount has two 40 minute-long lunchtimes, juniors at 12:20 and seniors at 13:10. If we offer it for both lunchtimes it will practically mean starting preparation around 11.00am and closing up at around 2.00pm. The pilot scheme will run through the autumn school term and then we will review it for 2023.
If you are interested or would like to volunteer (even if just once or twice a month) then please contact Alan Childs or the church office.
‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge’
This was an ancient saying, an idiom that was well-known in the ancient near east amongst the nation of Judah, some 2500 years ago. And you might be wondering what on earth does it have to do with us, here, today and what does it mean anyway. Let’s start with the meaning first and then get to why its meaningful for us.
A lot of Biblical and ancient scholars have studied the possible meaning of this idiom and not everyone agrees on the exact meaning. Which often happens with idioms that use symbolic language and are particular to a certain place and time and culture. I am sure that we can share some idioms with one another that we heard our grandparents use, that, if we use it today with our children or grandchildren we will have to explain the meaning of is. And this is within the same language and culture and even family. So imagine how meaning can be lost over centuries, cultures and geographical distance.
What most scholars agree on is that it has to do with the impact of one’s actions, and more particularly that although others often have to bear the consequences of your actions, you have to take responsibility for your own actions. So actions, consequences and responsibilities. And all of this is set within the parameters of the passing of time.
Whatever I do now, I must take responsibility for now… and later, but the consequences might actually only come into effect, possibly even over subsequent generations.
‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’
Allow me to use a pressing contemporary example:
If this generation, you and I, through our actions of consumption and production continue to produce the same levels of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere as we currently do whilst continuing to lessen and deplete the biosphere’s ability to process the carbon dioxide back into oxygen, say through the continued destruction of the Amazon and Indonesian rainforests, then the consequences will include a crossing of the biosphere’s ability to stabilise the weather patterns and the oceans’ ability to maintain its function as thermostat and carbon capture sink. This in turn will lead to the continued loss of biodiversity and increase of droughts, runaway fires and floods which in turn will increase the number of climate refugees and societal socio-political breakdown across the world. So who will then be responsible for the collapse of social stability, health care systems, and water supplies? The current and future refugees? Or the current and previous mass consumers?
Who is ultimately responsible for the increasing level instability of mass people movement across borders? Whether legal or illegal. The wealthy industrialised countries who have for generations been producing cheap consumables and consuming natural resources in the process or the pre-industrialised countries whose rivers have consequently run dry, whose crops are failing and whose island houses are being submerged by rising sea levels… only to have to flee to neighbouring countries who themselves are struggling to keep their lights on?
‘The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’
Now please do not think that I intend to have us feel all guilty for living our 9 to 5 everyday jobs of earning and income, paying our taxes and enjoying the necessities and luxuries of life. The purpose of this reflection is not to take us all on a guilt trip.
The purpose of this reflection is rather two-fold.
On the one hand it is to say that we have agency, especially into the future. We are able and capable of making the world a better place. Admittedly also a worse place, but hopefully we will aspire and work toward making the future better for the next generation, and the next one after that, and subsequent generations.
Like some scientists did when they developed cures and solutions that have benefitted subsequent generations. Curing polio, developing X-rays, figuring out how the human and biospherical systems work. Or social innovators like Martin Luther King, or Emmeline Pankhurst, or everyone who stood up for the disenfranchised, however small their intervention was at the start – the consequences would have rippled out over the pond of time. We are able and capable of making the world a better place.
Acts of kindness and care and treating others with dignity can and will have effects that will keep making the world better. Consequences of actions.
But what if we don’t – what if we live lives of selfishness? Of shortermism. What if we only care about the next quarter’s profitability, what if we only care about our comfort or our immediate needs being met – but never consider the future? Never stop to think what the effect would be over time.
In our local community magazine, the Corstorphine Grapevine, one of the thought-pieces refer to something the local council did, like so many other councils across Britain of late – the irresponsible dumping of sewerage waste hundreds of time per year into our river systems. It might make sense to someone somewhere, but the eventual knock-on effect is the deterioration, even the eventual complete destruction of complete ecosystems. But at least the water company executives will say their bottom-line profits are looking good.
Who will hold irresponsible decision makers to account?
In the words of this former MP writing in the Grapevine: ‘The lack of planning for the future is getting worse each year, and whilst it might not effect the older generation much, we must all make sure that our politicians, planners and those responsible, take much more action to protect the next generations in a way they (and I would say we) have failed to do for many years.’
Another shocking example this month has been the millions of people in the UK who collectively had billions of pounds of value destroyed from out of their pension funds by the selfish, ill-thought through, shortermist decisions of a few leaders in power. Ironically the burden to try to fix the problem has been laid on subsequent generations who have now been indebted through the borrowing that was necessitated to stabilise the market.
The children’s teeth are at risk from the parent’s grape eating.
Who will hold irresponsible leaders to account?
And is there even anything that can be done about such injustices?
There is a group, a federation of native Americans, first nations people, who are based around the north-east of the North-American continent, called the Iroquois. They have a guiding life principles that they expect their leadership, their elders to abide by, called the Seven Generations principle. The principle states that what we do must not harm subsequent generations. What we do should have positive effects many generations to come. Some people understand this principle to mean you and I are benefitting from three generations before ours, in other words our great grandparents. Some of us might even have been blessed enough to have known one or more of our great grandparents. So three generations previous to us have left us the legacy, the life, the society we find ourselves in. We, similarly, are building, erecting or destroying, the generation that three generations hence will be experiencing, possibly even in our very lifetime. Some of us might be blessed enough to hold our great grandchildren in our arms. The world we are busy influencing, shaping, is the one we give them to grow up in.
Is the air we leave our great-grandchildren cleaner? Are human rights more dignified? Is the biodiversity more secure or more depleted? Is the state of marriage as a valued societal institution more revered or more disregarded? Are strangers safer in our communities or less so?
If at this point you might say, Alan, it’s somewhat overwhelming to take responsibility for future generations. I am struggling just to keep things together for my own.
Which brings us close to the rest of the meaning of today’s prophetic Scripture from Jeremiah.
When the old Testament prophet Jeremiah was speaking to his people, it was to a group of exiles who were down and out, thinking they will always be held captive to the irresponsible actions of their parents and ancestors. That the predicament they were finding themselves in will never improve.
But that is when the prophet says, God is doing a new thing. God will guide you to do the right thing. God will bind his nation into a new covenant that will inspire them to know right from wrong.
Jesus years later probably has this very promise in mind when He refers to this new covenant when He inaugurates the very first communion saying that the cup of wine He is holding is a sign of the new covenant God is making with his children.
I can appreciate that it can be overwhelming trying to figure out what the right thing is to do – but that is where our faith in God really does play a not insignificant role.
When making decisions, when taking actions, when forming habits – we are invited by the prophet Jeremiah, by Jesus Christ, by the very spirit of God to pause, and to discern intellectually, spiritually, with our whole being – what is the right thing to do.
Because whatever we decide, whatever we do, will have consequences and we will have to take ownership, responsibility, of our decisions, of our actions.
In today’s word God promises we will have the word of God written in our very hearts – I invite you to take the time, the effort, the joy of discerning the word of God in your very spirit as you go through life, and if you obey the Spirit of God you will be a blessing to the next generation and onto the next generation.
Amen
Rev Alan Childs, October 2022
The Fellowship Group has resumed. The next meeting is on Thursday 10 November at 2.30pm at East Craigs. Tea and coffee and blethers, with a bit of music, open to everyone. The group will then meet again every fortnight thereafter through November. Contact Julie Wilkinson for more information