This page has the latest thought from our Vicar Marcus, followed by the latest Diocesan letter.
Vicar’s Thought for the month of April 2025
Ponder these things
After the shepherds had visited the newborn Jesus, telling of everything the angels had said to them; we are told ‘Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.’ (Luke 2:19)
It’s a great temptation at this time of year, when the days are bright but cold, to get out in the garden and start making lists of all the things that need doing. I have already heard the buzz of lawnmowers! Maybe start that new exercise regime (again) or the DIY that is waiting for that sunny day. We live in a world full of business, demands and instantaneous communication that is so hard to leave alone. We hardly have time to catch breath before the next thing is coming along. So may I invite you to do the same as Mary, this Holy Week and Easter – ponder; take a breath.
Pondering is a quiet activity, a word meaning – to think or consider especially quietly, soberly, and deeply. We remember Jesus comes to bring us ‘life and life in its fullness’ (John 10:10), to enable each one of us to live fully as God intended, in the busyness and the quiet.
In the evenings of Holy Week, we will be taking a verse or two and spending time just mulling it over, thinking what it means to us, having time to breathe and be still. This will be followed by Compline, the ancient office that derives its name from a Latin word meaning ‘completion’ (completorium). It is a service of quietness and reflection before rest at the end of the day.
Come and join us for all or just one as we look forwards to pondering on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus this Easter.
Have a very blessed and happy Easter.
Katie and Marcus
Letter for April 2025 from the Dean of Hereford
We talk a lot about failure. It is something we are super sensitive about. We have all had our failures. I am no exception and struggle most days with a fear of failing family, colleagues, church and God. Fear of failure is the reverse of what the gospel teaches but we are all extremely susceptible. It causes leaders to become risk averse and instinctively protect the institution, sometimes shamefully at the expense of the vulnerable. Farmers have told me that they don’t want to be the one that lets the farm go under and church people vow to battle on because ‘this mustn’t fail on our watch’. The pressure of the ancestors, of tradition, of the sheer hard work of those who have gone before is colossal. Believe me, I do not want to be the Dean of Hereford under whose leadership a millennia of cathedral life goes horribly wrong. When Christ’s Church fails, it is particularly heartbreaking, for it implies to others the failure of God.
The shame that accompanies personal and institutional failure scars us and trains us to count the cost, play it safe, and fear the unknown. Yet we know from experience that often failure leads to change and growth. Fear of failure among those called to live by the Spirit in the discomfort of risk leads to a lack of trust in God that literally asphyxiates His ability to create fresh possibilities, the most powerful of which is resurrection.
In the garden of Gethsemane, Jesus sweated over His anticipated cup of suffering, begging the Father to take it from Him. In the end, he chose to enter into the tragedy of his crucifixion. The long-awaited Messiah ended his mission in what looked like abject failure. Yet His willingness to trust God and submit to that failure led to the unimaginable expansion of God’s kingdom. Even if our model of mission today also seems doomed to failure, we are called to step into it and trust in a fruitful future because that is what God promises and what Jesus did.
The physical resurrection of Jesus on Easter morning is both concrete testimony that God accompanies His people into the very depths and a blueprint for his plan to show that His love is stronger than all our faults, fears and failures. The Resurrection shows His capacity to redeem and make new life even out of death itself.
In these difficult times let us live and die as people who believe in Resurrection not out of naïve optimism but because we have seen the Risen Christ. If God can do that then all bets on personal and institutional failure are off and as Peter Pan observed, ‘to die may be an awfully big adventure”
The Very Revd Sarah Brown