The Gospel According to George

It has been said that ‘The Church is the Fifth Gospel’ and in our services we sometimes feature an additional Gospel reading, from the Gospel of this Church.

On Easter Sunday 2025, we heard a reading from the Gospel of St Luke’s West Holloway, according to George Nelson.

__

‘Wouldn’t it be a waste of all this life we live, if it ended when we die?’

‘Life and things in general.’

 That is a quotation from Larry Hayworth, a radio broadcaster whose programme we used to listen to when I was growing up in Trinidad. ‘Life and things in general.’

I will be 88 on my next birthday and I have fewer years ahead than are past. I like company - and my son Terrence calls every day - but I am on my own a lot and so I tend to think about life and things in general.

I’ll give you an example: when I was young another child in the neighborhood died but I don’t remember thinking too much about it. Or being that sad. Did we think it was normal? Did we just carry on? 

But in 2012 my dear wife Idalia died unexpectedly and that hit me very hard. Then in 2020 my daughter Janelle also died. She was a school teacher, working in Brent Cross and only in her forties. This loss was devastating. 

I look around my home and see the many things she bought me and that makes me think about life and death more often. I begin to dwell on what life is all about. But in the morning I see a photo of my wife or my daughter and I say, ‘Well, a pleasant morning to you ladies.’

Life and things in general. 

I tell myself: your mother died, your father died, your wife and your daughter, they also died, so what is happening now is that you are facing life as it really is. People who mean so much to us and then they are gone. Here today, gone tomorrow. I conclude that we should live this life so that we leave others with pleasant memories of our time here.

All through the ages, all of us people have been thinking that there is someone, somewhere greater than we are. My conclusion is that this is Nature. I say God is Nature. Look at the trees as I do and you have to conclude they are part of something greater than I am and that this is Nature itself.

We arrive in this flesh, in these bodies, and then we return to the ground and we become dust after a while. In time - after one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years -  in time you can’t distinguish us because we have all been assimilated back into the soil from which we came.

In some mysterious way we are related to the plants and trees we see around us and we will in time go back into the earth and replenish it and come back again in ways we can’t explain. Who knows? 

What I do know is that we are a lot more than we appear to be.

It was in 1971 that I landed at Heathrow from Trinidad. If it had been possible I would have run off that plane and got straight onto the next one going back home. 

What a dismal looking place I thought. What am I doing here?

I was 34 at the time and I had come on a scholarship to study accountancy. Fortunately for me, no sooner had I visited the Trinidadian High Commission in London than I was off to study in Glasgow, where I would spend the next four years of my life. 

Glasgow was so much prettier than London. I was single at the time and lived in the YMCA, going to college in the daytime and spending my evenings watching the news. On the news here I felt I could learn so much more about what was happening in the rest of the world. 

But not just the news, also the Eurovision Song Contest. 

I remember watching it one year with a room full of people at the YMCA, the year that Sweden won with a group called ABBA and a song called Waterloo.

I made good friendships in Glasgow but it was a condition of my scholarship that I had to return after graduating to work for the government at home. 

While I was living in the UK I had been corresponding with Idalia, who I had known from home since my twenties. Idalia had come to the UK ahead of me, to study nursing, and at Glasgow airport, before returning, I proposed to her and she accepted.

We travelled to the United States to get married as my mother had moved, with my sister Pearl, to New York and in time we set up home in London. Not long after along came Terence, our son, and then Janelle, our daughter.

Our children went to a local catholic state school in north London because my wife had been raised Catholic. 

Sometimes I would go with them to services at the Catholic Church but more often I would go to the Church of England as my home church was Holy Trinity Cathedral, the Anglican Cathedral in Port of Spain, capital of Trinidad and Tobago. That’s where I made my first communion. 

I first came to St Luke’s in 1984 and in recent years I have been coming every Sunday.

The company I worked for in England was in social care, supporting families of children with special needs or with disabilities but it was not always easy as a black person arriving to live in England. 

You observe behavioral patterns which are not necessarily in keeping with what you would expect or hope. 

You school yourself that you're living in a world comprised of people of different characters, behaviour and passions. 

Even when people's behavior towards you is less than ideal, you have to remind yourself that this is the world and your task is to navigate a way through. 

When life is difficult I find saying the Lords Prayer very powerful - asking that our sins are forgiven as we forgive those who sin against us. We cannot withhold our forgiveness of others if we expect forgiveness for ourselves. This is a prayer that asks us to be generous and loving and kind in our forgiveness.

It is important to me to make the effort of getting to church on a Sunday. On the mornings when I wake up tired and may not want to do it, I think of going to church as a kind of penance - you are letting the Lord know that you are trying your best.

In recent times I have been asked to help distribute the communion, to hold a chalice as people receive the wine. This is a privilege as I never imagined I would be able to do this. It is also very helpful that a younger, stronger person, like David or Joe, stands with me to support me, just in case I wobble.

Life and things in general. 

I love to spend time with my son Terrence, his wife Jeanette and my grandson Ethan and I think…  wouldn’t it be a waste of all this life we live, if it ended when we die? 

I have no idea in what form we will continue to live but I have faith and, as we say in church during the communion service, Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.

A Red Herring

 
 

We recently unveiled the painting ‘Red Herring’ at St Luke’s, a work commissioned to remember the Rev Tim Pigrem, vicar of St Luke’s until the early 1990’s. Malcolm Doney, the painter of Red Herring, spoke in our morning service. Read it here.

Paul's Talk, Sunday 8 September

Psalm 133 – St Luke’s.

If I asked you to pick a bible verse, or a saying or a phrase, that holds a place in your life; one that settles, anchors or guides you – what would it be?

If our roles were reversed today, I might call out: “measure twice, cut once” or “tools and stairs don’t mix”, but I may well have picked Psalm 133 too. And indeed, I have chosen it for our scripture reading today because, as well as it being one of my life-centring verses, it just so happened that it was read out last Sunday during my first service in post, and again at morning prayer in the week.

This gave me a welcome sense of connection.

We all need points of connection to help us feel like we belong or fit in. Especially on our first visit to church. It might be a conversation. It might be the kind of tea, coffee, biscuits or home-made cake that were served. It might be a piece of art or two on the wall or ceiling. It might be the woollen prayers or a pile of ladders by the organ, or the wires that cross the church that carry endless creative possibility. It might be a phrase that people used to welcome you or part of the liturgy, or the music, or the sermon, or the prayers, or the inclusive invite to communion. Or maybe it’s the clothes or the shoes that people arewearing, or their hairstyles, or the gender, colour or age of the service leaders. Maybe it is the anybody-guess-what’s-coming-next-notices? Maybe it is the physical orientation of the service?

Maybe it is ‘all of the above’.

Maybe it’s ‘none of the above’.

Is this your first Sunday? Will it most definitely be your last? Or will you now be here until the day you die? Stranger things have happened!

As I arrive at St Luke’s I see a well-loved church with a strong identity, that is successful and yet fragile in places. Especially after an unsettled season. And I am very aware that you are now being asked to allow an unknown figure, such as myself, to land out-of-nowhere into a key role.

It’d be odd if we weren’t all a bit nervous of each other. New and old! But I hope that we can be hopeful, and excited, as we all reorientate for a new season. As we shift in our seats. And as we breathe today, breathing the words from psalm 133 and RS Thomas’ poem.

Reflecting on Psalm 133, it is, I think, a psalm of reorientation, where the psalmist gently reminds us of what God really wants, and what the all-round benefits of this are.

What does God really want?

God wants us to live together in unity.

When I cast my mind around the bible I see several key times when God commands unity: “A new command I give you (says Jesus) Love one another” (John 13:34); “the law and the prophets” (Matt 22:38) can be summed up by loving God and loving others. And the apostle Paul agrees in Gal 5:14: “The entire law is summed up by keeping this one command – love one another.”

It’s a running theme!

But here, in Psalm 133, it reads as less of a command and more of an invite. Where we are encouraged to live in unity because if we do: 1) – Life will be ‘Good and pleasant’: like beard oil and mountain dew. And 2) - That God will bestow blessing on us, giving life forevermore.

I know that this isn’t exactly profound power language today, but, pushing the boat out, I think it may well have been back then. And I’d like to offer an explanation of why I think this.

The word ‘good’, for example.

My youngest son has just done his GCSE’s, and of course people are asking how well he did.‘Good’ in this instance is likely ‘just above average’, or ‘good, considering what kind of a boy he is’. But it’s certainly not excellent. In Psalm 133 however, the word ‘good’ is the same word that God used when God looked at creation and saw that it was ‘good’. And it is also the same word that God used to describe the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Good in this psalm then is not ‘just-above-average-good’. Unless you think God could have done better with creation. Both physically and morally! But I’m not going there with you. Yes, corruption came in after creation, so you might argue it was not so good. But there’s some philosophy to do here and we can’t get into that now.

Suffice to say, in my mind, the psalmist is convinced that our living together in unity will result in things being as good as it is possible to get. In every sense of the word. I’m not sure what else they could be saying. Or why they would be saying something else.

And then there is pleasant. Our unity is not only ‘good’ but it’s also ‘pleasant’. ‘Pleasant’ raises the bar by adding another dimension. Pleasant is the same word as sweet sounding. Especially in a musical sense. This is where all the notes hit the sweet spot. Where there is no sweeter spot. Of all possible examples I am randomly reminded of a moment during the live west-end musical ‘hairspray’ when one soloist sang. It was ‘good’. And I felt for a moment that I was in heaven. But then there were more voices. Joining in, filling the space that I had thought was already full. I actually experienced a moment of euphoria. How can I find words to express that divine almost out of body experience? How can I put it in Old Testament language? Would ‘absolutely pleasant’ suffice?

How ‘good’ and how ‘pleasant’ it is when God’s people live together in unity?

It doesn’t get better than that!

To hammer the point home the psalmist then uses the two great failsafe examples that are beard oil and mountain dew!

Let me explain:

In Ex 30 God told Moses to make a very special perfumed oil, which included cinnamon, and sprinkle it on things to make them sacred. This included Aaron’s head (and subsequently his son’s heads), but nobody else’s heads.

For the oil to get over Aaron’s head and onto his beard and robes a lot of oil would have been needed. I suspect that it was hard to imagine that much oil, especially not that much special oil. For what was usually used for sprinkling would now be pouring. This image can only mean one thing: there is no place more anointed – no place more sacred - than when the oil runs down onto Aaron’s beard, collar and robe. It would have been the most sacred place, thing or person anywhere – ever!

I don’t know what you imagine when you think of sacred. But whatever, and wherever that is, I think that the psalmist is trying to say that it isn’t more sacred than us dwelling together in unity.

The other failsafe example that the Psalmist uses is the dew of Hermon on mount Zion. Hermon was apparently a very dewy place, and Zion a very fertile one. People would have known that. Maybe land values reflected it. How fruitful, then, would a place with the conditions of both those places be? Would it have been the most fruitful place known to humankind?

So, according to the psalmist: living together in unity is good and pleasant, and sacred and fruitful, to the extreme. To the point even that the psalm ends with the assertion that under these conditions things are so good that there is actually no end at all. For they are the conditions of eternity. They are where God bestows blessing forever. Peak blessing. ‘Good’ blessing.

At this point, if we haven’t already, we should probably acknowledge now that what we are describing here is the very essence of the Holy Trinity. The eternally-voluntarily-united-more-than-one-as-one-God

Who we are invited to join in with.

Which is wonderful! And it would be great to end this sermon there.

But, of course, easy said – not so easily done.

Even Jesus, in his act of trying to bring unity to the cosmos, said: “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me”(Matt 26:39). He was personally deeply troubled by the cost of unity.

The week before last Emily and I celebrated our wedding anniversary by walking up a small mountain in Wales with our dog. It was a joyous celebration of our love and unity. Until we got to the top and our dog decided to stop, lie down and not move. This has never happened before, but she is now 12 and maybe the walk was too much for her. So, faced with the choice of leaving her on the mountain to die or carrying her down I picked her up and began carrying, while Emily kindly decided to lead us by a different, more direct route down.

Soon I was standing on steep unstable rocky ground surrounded by gorse and snakes, with no hands, a distressed dog, a bad back, and nowhere to go.

Do you ever have those moments when you love somebody (in theory) but you really don’t like them?

Unity, by the way, doesn’t always require that you like or agree with people. I wonder if the Holy Trinity are like that sometimes?

After perseverance, prayer, contortion, swearing and no small amount of scratches, we eventually found a stream where I put the dog down for a drink. Here she drank for about 5 minutes and then lay down in the stream, and didn’t move.

Now I was faced with the choice of leaving her to die in the stream or carrying a wet dog!

One of the books that I have been given to read as part of my entry to St Luke’s is ‘Fully Alive’ by Elizabeth Oldfield. And in her chapter entitled “Wrath: from Polarization to Peace-making” she talks about how wrath (which she describes as vengeful or vindictive anger) is a ‘delicious pleasure, akin to a sugar high’. Unity is not only difficult, but it is also not always immediately desirable. Not when the addictive sugar-high-delicious-pleasure of wrath is an option too.

Happy anniversary darling!

And here we are today at church, reading Psalm 133 as though we mean it. As though we believe it. Choosing, I’d like to think, to allow it to become a point of connection for us, and to trust it as a centring psalm of reorientation after our own walk through the landscape of church in West Holloway, however scratchy and uncomfortable it might have been.

I’d like to finish with one more life-centring phrase as a prayer. It is probably what first kickstarted my feeling drawn to St Luke’s, and it’s found at point 28 of 30 things about St Luke’s on the ‘about us’ page of the website.

“At St Luke’s, we always try to be open even when we are closed”

Amen

PS - The dog survived, as has our marriage!

Psalm 133

1  How good and pleasant it is
  when God’s people live together in unity!
2  It is like precious oil poured on the head,
  running down on the beard,
running down on Aaron’s beard,
down on the collar of his robe.
3  It is as if the dew of Hermon
were falling on Mount Zion.
For there the Lord bestows his blessing,
even life forevermore.

The Bright Field By R S Thomas

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

 

Pippi (Spotty Stockings)

 

Solar Panels Are Up!

Fit for the future, David and Enitan tell the story…

We're excited to announce that our 32 solar panels are now resting upon the beautiful Welsh slate roof tiles and generating power! Good for the planet and also helpful in reducing our energy bills, as is the sheep’s wool which has been used to insulate the roof space. Martin blessed the solar panels last Friday with a poem written by Amelia.

We did anticipate that there would be a few surprises along the way and there were! In addition, the PCC also agreed as scaffolding costs are so high, that it made sense to commit to doing some repairs, which we had not budgeted for, whilst we had the scaffold in place.

We know that many of you have already given to the ‘Go Green’ campaign, but we also know that there are people who have offered to contribute to the ‘Fit for the Future’ campaign.  If you would like to and are able to you, you can make your donation directly on Sundays using the card machine or the hat, or here via Stewardship.  No gift is too little because together our gifts add up. 

As ever, thank you for your support.  The heat pump and the solar panels together help St Luke’s to reduce our carbon footprint and hopefully will inspire other churches and organisations to do likewise.  

With best wishes, 
Jacqui & Joy

 

A Version of Psalm 23 by Amelia Turncliffe

God is my Solar Panel,
I shall not be in the dark.
God energises me, leading me into hope.
I am full, my battery is powered up.
Even in the days of cloud,
I know the divine presence is there.
As each day the sun rises
- hidden sometimes but ever present - I grow not weary or afraid.
I know the power will return and the light will shine through.

And some background about the project…

Our 5 yearly building inspection identified that our south aisle roof was in need of replacement.  We had experienced several leaks, damaging the inside of the church.

We are fortunate to receive grant funding from our local charity Cloudesley. They funded a full replacement of the roof including an upgrade of sheep’s wool insulation and a full roof of solar panels. While the scaffold was in place we repaired areas of crumbling stonework, rusted gutters and old lead flashings

Maintaining the legacy. We now have a new Welsh slate roof, new lead flashings and repaired and new gutters that will keep the building dry and maybe last another 164 years (the age of the church).  We have repaired some stonework, but there is more to do! The quality of the work carried out by the contractor, Universal Stone, was excellent. We feel that we have done our old church justice, repairing and maintaining it to the high standard of workmanship that the Victorian builders applied in 1860.

Comfort and economy. The new sheep’s wool insulation and airtight roof construction will keep the church and its occupants warmer in the winter and reduce our heating bills and carbon footprint going forward.

Green energy. We have 32 solar panels with a peak output of 15kW which will meet about half of our historic electricity use, and reduce our bills by around £2-3,000 a year.

Epiphany, a short poem by Rev Martin Wroe

Epiphany

The answer you weren’t looking for
The way you went by mistake
The known unknown you never knew
Til it was staring you in the face


Arrives just after you give up
No formula or calculation
The star, the sky, the vaguest hunch
No map marks this destination


Emerges slowly as morning
Dawns on you like a new day
As if all your previous light was dark
And all of the dark made this way.

Martin
Associate Vicar 


A letter from Rev John as he moves to a new parish in Wyke Regis

Dear St. Luke’s 

Thank you for your wonderful gifts to Sophie and me - not only the presents you presented us with on Sunday (which were amazing!) but also for your love support and encouragement over these 4 years - I am only sorry to be leaving you at such an exciting stage in our community’s life. 

The heat pump is operational - the works have well and truly begun on the south roof and after that has been insulated and tiled an array of solar panels will be installed. Joy said on Sunday that an Eco-Church gold award is within our grasp - a very rare thing indeed - so keep up this fantastic work as St. Luke’s leads the way and helps others take the right steps in doing our bit in the climate emergency. 

Thank you too for that great community lunch after church - it was very pleasing to see people from the church community and the wider community there, joined by Claire - our local councillor and friend of St. Luke’s. Special thanks to all who prepared our food- I don’t know who you all were but I know that Rosie and Rachel where in the kitchen when I arrived before church in the morning and still there as Sophie and I left!!

Sophie and I were very moved seeing lots of old friends at the service and we received many messages from those unable to attend. As I said on Sunday - you are an amazing community and it has been an honour to be your Vicar, my prayers are with you all especially Jacqui and Joy, Martin and the PCC as they guide you through the next few months - you couldn’t be in better hands - please do use your voice as the community discerns who you are looking for next - and I know that you will choose a great new Vicar. 

Much love as always,

John

Hot Air and Heat Pumps

The air-source heating system which we've been fundraising for in the last couple of years is now being installed. It works like an inside-out fridge. It captures heat from outside – even in below-zero temperatures - and moves it inside. It’s powered by electricity and we’ll help generate that by installing solar panels on our south facing roofs. 

The heat pump is forecast to reduce our annual heating carbon footprint by approx. 28 tonnes, 86% of our heating footprint and as the heat pump is powered by the electricity grid which is getting greener year by year, our residual carbon footprint will continue to decrease going forward.

The solar panels are forecast to reduce our electricity carbon emissions by approx 2 tonnes which is 56% of our electricity footprint.

This will take us a small step forward into the future… and a small step backward to a world where people understood how everything was connected. This talk one Sunday morning has more hot air about all this (click here).

Illustrated Talk on the History of St Luke’s Church, Penn Road & Holloway

Wednesday 19 April 2023 at 7pm

 
 

  • How, When and Why was St. Luke’s Church built where it currently stands today?

  • Why was its first ever vicar unceremoniously and controversially dismissed before he had even conducted a service in this building?  (And why did he then set up the break-away church of St. George’s in the neighbouring Parish?)

  • How has our local landscape changed in the years before and in the years since those days?


To find out the answers to those questions (and to many more besides) come along to an illustrated talk on the history of St. Luke’s Church and the wider area of Holloway given by Stefano Cagnoni and Caroline Jackson

St. Luke’s Church
Wednesday April 19th 2023
Doors Open at 7pm, talk will start by 7.15pm
Tickets: £10
Please email admin@saintlukeschurch.org.uk to reserve your place

 

All proceeds go towards funding our eco-projects – this year we are installing solar panels and a ground source heat pump to reduce our carbon footprint.

Your support is warmly welcomed.