Video for 5th March, 2026
Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s video
I’m recording this from the New Wine Leaders Conference in Harrogate. I always find it an inspiring occasion, not least because of the youth and enthusiasm of the leaders, lay and ordained who gather here. There are plenty of stories of God at work in our country and encouraging signs of people coming to living faith in Jesus Christ. Whatever our tradition, we often associate such occasions with the presence of God. That might be a Walsingham pilgrimage, a Contemplative Fire gathering or August Bank holiday weekend in a tent at Greenbelt. There is something about a large group of Christians gathering that inspires and encourages us. I’m sad that joint benefice services are often used as an excuse for a Sunday off. I’d have thought it would be a lot more encouraging to sing rousing hymns with 50 or 60 people than the normal 10! Its one of the reasons why our Youth Hub project is seeking to create places of Christian belonging for young people with a critical mass. They will frequently find themselves the only Christian in their class at school. I well remember how difficult it was to hold to faith as a new Christian at school. They need all the help they can get.
However, the scriptures teach us that God is not simply to be found in large gatherings. Jesus said where two or three are gathered there he would be in the midst. The one thing I suspect many will agree on is that its hard to sense the presence of God in the midst of suffering. That is where questions of whether God is real become their most intense. And yet both Jesus and John the Baptist had intense experiences of Gods reality in the wilderness. This is a theme that emerges frequently from several Biblical sources. Psalm 84: 5-6 says, “Blessed are those whose strength is in you, whose heart is set on pilgrimage. As they pass through the Valley of Baka, they make it a place of springs”. Peter, in his first letter chapter 1 verse 6 says, “In all this (the this is persecution) you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that the proven genuineness of your faith – of greater worth than gold, which perishes even through refined by fire – may result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed”. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”.
I am not a Hebrew or Greek scholar by any means, but I do know that neither had punctuation in the way we would use it in the original documents. I was intrigued by Pete Greig’s suggestion in the Lectio 365 app on Shrove Tuesday that we put a comma in the wrong place in Isaiah 40: 3, “A voice of one calling: in the wilderness prepare the way for the Lord”. I’ve always read this geographically in the same way as translations of the same phrase do in Chapter 1 of John’s Gospel. The voice is geographically located in the wilderness; the message is prepare the way of the Lord. However, if you change the comma, the geographical location of the speaker becomes immaterial. The message becomes, “in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord”. This coheres more closely with the verses I quoted earlier. Its in the place of isolation and lack that false attachments are stripped away and we can encounter God most profoundly.
As a young priest walking with people through bereavement and illness, I often (and still do) felt inadequate to the task. Who was I to share these truths with people amid suffering when my life had been pretty comfortable and incident free? And yet this is the heart of Christian hope. I’m writing this with two things in my mind. A good friend has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer and most likely has weeks to live at best. This is also just after the 25th anniversary of the first diagnosed case of Foot and Mouth disease on the 19th of February 2001. Tragedies, one personal, one borne by the whole community. We will remember the smoke from funeral pyres for slaughtered cattle, most of which didn’t have the disease. Livelihoods were shaken; generations of work destroyed. Despite compensation the scars remain for many.
Where is God in the middle of these things, these wilderness experiences? Is there a purpose in them that can be seen not just in retrospect but during. Our Christian hope is yes He can.
Elie Wiesel wrote a harrowing autobiographical account of his experience in Auschwitz called night. Forced to witness a punishment hanging a fellow prisoner asks, “Where is God? Where is he now?” And from within me I heard a voice answer: “Where is He? Here He is – he is hanging here on this gallows..”
+Richard