Join us for Memorial Sunday!  A special day of giving thanks for our loved ones and celebrating those in our presence.  This is the last day of the Sunday School program for the season.  Come along and help us recognise our teachers and students.

These are Rev. Marlene’s thoughts on the scripture for Sunday.

Marlene’s Rev. Notes:

 “The city does not need the sun or the moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and the Lamb is the lamp.” Revelation 21:23

The Bible ends up very much where it began.  The broken relationship between God and human beings is healed and once again made whole. The curse of Genesis 3 is lifted.  For the first time since Eden, the world as it is finally matches the world as God wants it to be.

John sees Jerusalem restored with walls of jasper and streets of gleaming gold.  For someone today – a refugee in a poor country, perhaps – heaven may represent a family reunited or a home stocked with food and fresh drinking water.

Heaven represents the fulfilment of every true longing.  As C. S. Lewis said in his sermon The Weight of Glory, all the beauty and joy on planet Earth represent “only the scent of a flower we have found, the echo of a tune we have heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

The Bible never belittles human tragedy and disappointment. No book is more painfully honest – but it does add one key word: temporary.  For people who feel trapped in pain – whether in a broken home, in economic misery or in fear – for all of us, heaven promises a future time, one far longer and more substantial than the time we spend on this earth.  It will be a time of health and wholeness and pleasure and peace.  The Bible began with that promise in the book of Genesis.  It ends with that same promise in Revelation, giving a guarantee of our future reality.  The end will be but a beginning.

Rev. Marlene