Plenary, 02 Dec 2009
Meeting date: Wednesday, December 2, 2009
Official Report
374KB pdf
Time for Reflection
Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader is the Rev John Forbes, retired Church of Scotland minister from Banchory.
Rev John Forbes (Retired Church of Scotland Minister, Banchory):
Presiding Officer and members of the Scottish Parliament, it is a great privilege to share these thoughts with you as we move forward in the Advent season.
This is a season when something in human nature seems to change. We become more welcoming and more generous. One Advent, I was telling primary school children in Angus, up Glen Esk, the story of Moses crossing the Red Sea with the Israelites, including the story of the Israelites being chased by Pharaoh's 600 chariots. After the story ended, I asked whether anybody could remember what it was exactly that was chasing the Israelites. One child put up his hand and answered, "Six hundred charities". That is almost a Christmas message in itself; as we approach Christmas, our in-trays tend to pile up even more with numerous appeals for great causes. Charities know that we are more generous at Christmas-time and rightly focus on that generosity.
But this is also a time to dream and perhaps to dream the impossible:
"The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them."—Isaiah.
Is that a vision of the impossible or a vision of the possible?
I have regularly visited Bosnia with a Scottish charity, Dumfries and Galloway Action, and one of the most stirring memories that I have is from that ghost-ridden, war-torn, horror town of Srebrenica, where I listened to the mayor, a Muslim, echoing Martin Luther King's words: "I have a dream". He said, "I have a dream that my children will attend school where Muslim children and Serbian children can mix, learn and play together." Surrounded as the mayor was by Serbian councillors, those were brave words from a brave man. Excitingly, that afternoon, while dropping off stores at a Muslim primary school close to Srebrenica, one noted that the headmaster was Serbian. Things do move and dreams can start to become true.
Dream the impossible? The day when we can talk to the Taliban, perhaps with respect on both sides? Impossible, undesirable—or is it? With an army son in Afghanistan, and in the name of the prince of peace, one dares to dream the seeming impossible.
"I have a dream!" said Martin Luther King—and who sits in the White house now?
God bless each and every one of you as you seek the fulfilment of your own vision of tomorrow, even if today it may look like the seeming impossible!