If you would like to book a tables these cost £5 each with a maximum of two per stall holder. Set up is from 9am and the sale is open to the public from 11am – 1pm.

As well as high quality secondhand clothes, books, toys, household items and gifts, our usual amazing refreshments will also be available!

Would stallholders please remember that electrical items may not be sold at our sales.

See you there!

Rev David Ford

Each sale the range and quality of goods gets better and better! So you are promised a fabulous array of gifts and goods to buy and a wonderful selection of cakes and refreshments too!

If you would to like to donate some items to us then please bring them to church on a Sunday morning between 11am and 12noon or telephone David Kellam on 0115 952 9382 to arrange collection.

But first we have the Last Supper.

Read any of the gospels – but especially the gospel of Mark – and one theme recurs: that of the disciples’ inability to understand the nature of Jesus, His mission and ministry. Time and again the disciples fail to grasp Jesus’ message, sometimes with spectacular results such as at the transfiguration or the argument between the disciples as to who is the greatest. “If anyone wants to be first”, says Jesus, “he must make himself last of all and servant of all.” Frequently, it is those outside Jesus’ circle of close friends who grasp Jesus’ significance – especially those he heals and restores to the community of faith. Time and again the healed go away rejoicing and praising God and tell all of what they have seen and heard. The disciples meanwhile are the ones who try to prevent the sick and those at dis-ease from reaching Jesus in the first place. It is a contrast not lost on those who are quick to highlight the shortcomings of Christians and the church today.

But let us return to that upper room.

Jesus knows his moment is coming. Time is running out for him to try and convince his followers as to his true identity and purpose. Somehow he has got to get his message home. He needs to do something that is never going to be forgotten.

So Jesus acts outrageously – so outrageous in fact that it makes his disciples angry and upset. He takes off his outer clothes and begins to wash his disciples’ feet.

From the beginning of His ministry Jesus has been turning the world on its head. His teaching and healing ministry is revealing Jesus to be the very opposite of the kind of leader most hoped he would be. And this continues to the very last meal Jesus shares with his disciples as he insists that the Kingdom of God is the mirror image of everything the world stands for and believes in. If you love God you must be the servant of all; love one another as I have loved you; it is by your love that others will recognise you as my disciples.

And still Jesus fears that they don’t get it.

So Jesus does something else too. He gives us Himself in the sacrament as Paul recalled in our second lesson.

Jesus takes, blesses, breaks, pours and shares bread and wine.  And as he does so, he draws the eyes of the disciples’ to His presence in the action itself. Do this as a way of remembering me, says Jesus, and in so doing you will participate in me also, and I in you.

There are, of course, manifold layers of meaning in the Eucharist. Here are three…

The breaking and outpouring remind us of the cost of discipleship that we are called to participate in – we too are to be broken and poured out for Christ. As you receive the Eucharist, ask yourself – how have I been broken for Christ this week?

The breaking and outpouring remind us that as we participate in God’s mission and ministry we do not do so alone but Christ is within and alongside us too. He is our strength, we achieve nothing by our own merits.

Finally, the breaking and outpouring remind us that Christianity is not an individual spiritual journey but a communal one; it is a journey that makes no sense outside of the active community of faith. You cannot be a Christian on your own. Here is one reason that makes home communion so important and why it is crucial that we gather together each week.

So on this night we recall the two great actions of Christ at The Last Supper – demonstrable servanthood for us to follow and imitate, and the gift of the Eucharist, through which we are eternally linked to Him, to one another and to God’s mission and ministry.

Like the disciples there is a yawning chasm between our intellectual understanding of Jesus and the daily pattern of our lives. Like the disciples, none of us have the strength to keep vigil with Christ through the night in the Garden that follows this service. That shameful weakness is a reminder of our total dependence on God.

And so it is right that we enter this night distraught at our own limitations, and it is right that we wake tomorrow committed to experiencing Good Friday with all its nightmarish memories. For unless we can connect with the reality and pain of Christ’s final hours – especially its loneliness and desolation – we will be denied a sense of resurrection on Easter morning. For life to come out of death for us, we too must experience the darkness.

So I invite you to go into this night with Christ at your heart. But let us go renewed in commitment through a reminder of our servanthood and strengthened by the gift of His sacrament. Amen.

Hucknall Academy, NG15 7DB

Sat 2^nd March, 2013, 10am for 10:30am start, until 3:30pm

Booking: Click here for more info and to book or contact Alison: 01636 814504 / alisonj@southwell.anglican.org (free & includes lunch – but you must book!).

Description: Helping young people (14-23’s) explore their calling in life. Featuring Lorraine Dixon (DJ, nightclub chaplain & vicar). Workshops include: ordination, secular work, children’s/youth/schools ministry, mission home & abroad, the arts, godly decisions and more.

Reconnecting with Confirmation

(with special guest: Pete Maidment)

John Godber Centre, Hucknall, NG15 7FQ

Wed 24^th April, 2013, 9:30am – 4pm

Booking: Contact Catriona on 01636 817232 / catriona@southwell.anglican.org.

Description: Why confirmation anyway?! Input, reflection, challenge and resources about confirmation, discipleship and nurture of young people in the Anglican Church. Pete Maidment is co-author (with Bishop Paul) of Living Your Confirmation & Youth Adviser for Winchester Diocese. Additional input from Bishop Paul, Bishop Tony and Angela Brymer-Haywood. Bishop Paul says, “A particularly important training event for our church leaders, children’s & youth workers. Please attend!”

To view our picture gallery from today, visit the St John’s Facebook page here.

For very many of us Christmas ushers in a few days break from normal routines. In fact, the unusual tends to take over. We might spend time with people we don’t see too often; we eat and drink things that we wouldn’t normally – a mince pie in August simply doesn’t make sense. Perhaps we will relax enough to play a few silly games; we might even forgo our vanity and put on a paper hat.

Conversation often turns to the year now ending and the new one soon to begin. How would you rate 2012? Well I can hear Len Goodman’s voice booming ‘seven’ but I suspect even that is too optimistic for many.

For many of us 2012 will go down as a year of struggle; some have faced the death of loved ones, or unemployment, or relationship or health
difficulties. Money is unbelievably tight. Demand for the food bank in Hucknall continues to grow. From my work at school I know how stressful family life is for very many in Hucknall and this translates itself onto the lives of our young people in the form of heightened anxiety which in turn manifests itself in poor behaviour and self-harm. Good news from abroad seems thin on the ground too if one remembers Syria and the Middle East, America’s obsession with guns or the innumerable stories of exploitation and suffering from around the world that can feel so overwhelming.

In general, your television screen tells a very different story. Seasonal jollity is everywhere, the adverts scream commercialism at us, hour after hour of repeats encourage us to think that back then was somehow different, more innocent perhaps. Mind you I believe The Railway Children is on again – and so, if a hankie is not too far away – I might just sneak a look. We all need a dose of sentimentality.

The media and retailers understand precisely how we are feeling, for that is why they continuously pump out desire; they know that we need to feel good about ourselves, we need to be loved, we want to show that love to others. And so those with an interest in our wallets, offer us innumerable temptations that provide illusory and temporary satisfaction. An alcohol-fuelled good night out or a sensational shopping expedition each provide a way to put today’s problems onto the back burner – and yet the hangover and the credit card bill are sure to follow.

God speaks into all of this through the birth of Jesus – an event, just like our Christmas, that threw all the normal routines and expectations up in the air. Life on earth has never been the same since.

In the birth of Jesus, God reveals himself as a God that is interested in truth, not illusion; reality, not pretence. Most significantly, in Jesus we see God taking sides, with a preferential interest in the suffering, the poor, the bereaved, the weak, the outsider.

For God bursts onto the world not in the form of a warrior King, self-important politician or media mogul – but in the form of a child, born to parents whose social standing was zilch, visited first by shepherds whose job probably came top of the ‘jobs you wouldn’t want your son or daughter to do list’, worshipped by foreign astrologers who didn’t understand but had the humility to try – but not to Jerusalem’s religious elite; a baby whose first outing into the world wasn’t a trip to the park but was straight into exile as a migrant, in order to escape Herod’s persecution of baby boys. There was not a celebrity in sight.

The Messiah could have arrived into the world like Simon Cowell getting out of his limo; but instead the King of Kings chooses vulnerability as the vehicle for his good news to the world.

And that should teach us a lot about God’s priorities and interests. The ordinary matters. Success in God’s eyes is not measured by material wealth, exam results, job status or any of the other modern mores of our society. Rather it is measured by our response to the calling of God upon
our lives, by the teaching of Jesus and how we reflect that teaching in practical ways onto those around us.

For a simple guide to God’s hopes and desires for us, we need look no further than the prayer of blessing with which this services ends.
In it we pray for…

the joy of the angels,

the eagerness of the shepherds,

the perseverance of the wise men,

the obedience of Joseph and Mary,

the peace of the Christ-child

These are God’s hopes for you this Christmas and onwards into 2013. May you know joy in the simple pleasures and loves of life; may you respond to the working of God in your life with eagerness; may you persevere through the journey of life with all its challenges, may you follow God’s calling upon your life with obedience, and may you know the innocent peace of a child – in your heart and amongst your friends and families. May your Christmas be blessed. Amen.