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In the daily(weekly) round of shopping, you may have noticed last week everywhere was stocked up with the ingredients for pancakes. The observant shopper will also have noticed that for some weeks now you have been being tempted to complete your shopping basket with a Cadbury’s Cream Egg or six! At my local Co-op for the two-week that we are in the midst of as I write, all their good bearing the Fair Trade mark are being discounted by 20%. This presents us all with a chance to re-try Fair Trade coffee and realise that it is a very acceptable product. Now regular readers of this will not be surprised to know that these three retail therapy observations are linked, well at least in my mind.
Pancakes, do they go back to the Jewish community and their preparations for remembering the journey out of Egypt, led by Moses – unleavened bread? Certainly they fit in the Christian calendar on Shrove Tuesday, when we use up all the rich ingredients in the ladder in preparation for the Lent Fast. Well I do know a few Christians who will fast through each day in Lent, only eating a light evening meal each day. Others will have given something up, coffee, chocolate, cakes – and others will have taken something on(try reading thoughtfully through Mark’s Gospel). Remember in all this, like the Boy Scout and his good deed, it only counts if you are not found out.
Two asides:
- It is interesting that in the Bible ‘forty days and forty nights’ seeking the will of God are found in the stories of Moses, Elijah and Jesus, but what about the same period of the flood does that add Noah to the list or was it a forty days that change the order of God’s priorities. In Genesis 9 certainly it is God who makes the promises and makes a rainbow.
- If you struggle with your Lenten fast take Sundays out – always a feast day in Celebration of Easter.
That brings me neatly to those cream eggs, associated with Easter (12th April this year) when the Christian community celebrates it’s most significant feast/festival. Resurrection, Jesus alive, new life for all of the world. Well that will do for headlines. If you take up the challenge of reading Mark’s Gospel you will be reminded, even discover, that Jesus come to this moment by way of a journey in which his very life is required of him. Read about it, and then ask yourself what have these Fair Trade products to do with it all?
I hope that those of you who take the Methodist Recorder will have read about the conference held at Swanwick in February, ‘Holiness and Risk’. If you have not and you are reading this on line, a swift visit to the Methodist Church Website will lead you to fine out more.
Yours in love,
Bill Anderson
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