Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Official Report 835KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. Our time for reflection leader today is the Rev David Walton, minister of Greenock East and Port Glasgow United Reformed church.

In this Advent season, as we prepare in the Christian church for the festival that celebrates the birth of a child, Jesus the Christ, which begins on 25 December, the church turns to the prophet Isaiah in proclaiming God’s word.

One of my favourite verses in the Bible is found in chapter 43 of Isaiah, when God tells the people that they are redeemed

“Because you are precious in my sight, and honoured, and I love you”.

I believe that that is central to the teaching of Jesus in his ministry: that all are precious in God’s sight. Thus Jesus embraced and loved those whom the society of his time said that he should avoid, ignore and even hate. Jesus lived out the message that all are precious in God’s sight and all are made in God’s image, and that no matter who they are, what they have done or what the world has done to them, God loves and redeems them.

Jesus knew the power of love, acceptance and inclusion—that it transforms lives, brings new hope and self-esteem, and builds true community, caring and support for one another. Our society and culture today is very different from that of Jesus 2,000 years ago, but we still have our poor and our outcasts; there are those whom we love, and those whom it is all too easy to ignore and even despise.

While tackling those big issues is often at the forefront of your work and debates, in a time of financial austerity that affects all—and the poor proportionally more—it is all too easy for the most unloved and unwanted in society to be passed by. After all, it is not only the tabloid press that likes to judge and condemn; we all do that in some way.

Yet God calls us not to judge, nor to divide the world into sheep and goats; that is for him. Instead, he calls us, as Isaiah again says,

“to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners”.

Such a transformation can be achieved only when we all see God’s image in each other, realise that all are precious, accept God’s call to be his hands, his feet, his eyes and his mouth here on earth, and act in practical, loving service to one another.

Amen.