It's Friday of my first week back from my two week trip to New Zealand to visit with my father, who is not well, other members of my family, and old friends. I can report that the jet lag is finally abating. The lengthily Green Card application process meant that for five years I was not able to leave the US and so my visit to NZ was long overdue.

In my hometown of Christchurch, I found still much evidence of the devastation of several years of continual earthquake activity, some 10,000 tremors including two major quakes since 2010. Although there are signs of new life springing up in the form of new and innovative construction, including Christchurch Transitional Cathedral known affectionately as the cardboard cathedral because of the use of cardboard in its construction, nearly all the Churches in the city fell town and those that didn't are, for the most part not safe. Christchurch was a city renowned for it's profusion of Anglican stone churches and other gems of Victorian civic architecture, now sadly all gone.

I return to parish life in a New Year and we move quickly towards the Annual Parochial Meeting on Sunday 25th January. I am among those who really hate attending meetings and I will avoid doing so if I can. However, I urge you all to attend this important occasion in our Church year. The annual meeting is a snapshot of where we start from as we begin a new year. As such it provides a useful baseline for measuring our progress over the coming year. This year we have much good news to communicate to the parish. I can assure you that 2015 will bring rich opportunities as well as requiring of us adaptive and flexible responses to the challenges the year will bring.

As I write, we are on the eve of Martin Luther King Weekend.  As a nation the United States finds itself at one of those uneasy junctions when the quality of race relations, particularly between black communities and civil authority represents for the kind of thoughtful reexamination that paves the way for courageous responses. Our desire must be for a future that is not simply a repetition of the past. The anniversary commemorating Dr King's birth offers us renewed opportunity to be encouraged once more by his prophetic vision. As with all prophets, we also find ourselves unnerved by his message, which forces us to uncomfortably survey the chasm that still lies between the visionary dream and current reality.

In last Sunday's sermon on the gospel of Mark's depiction of the Baptism of Christ I spoke about the tension between a sense of ourselves as primarily shaped by the identity of birth and the influences on our identity of adoption through the choices we have made for ourselves. These choices take us beyond identities shaped primarily by the accidents of the time (epoch) and the place (social and cultural location) of birth. You can visit this in more detail at www.relationalrealities.com or at http://www.stmartinsprov.org/sermons

It's good to be back. See you in church, this Sunday.

Mark+ 

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We can build this living tapestry here at St. Martin's. 
God is the weaver and we are all the threads.