Plenary, 26 Mar 2008

Meeting date: Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Official Report 391KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is the Rev Scott Guy from Northfield parish church, Aberdeen.

It is a great privilege to be here today.

I am sure that everyone here is familiar with campaigns—perhaps too familiar. Just a couple of weeks ago, I took part in a campaign of a different sort in our local secondary school, Northfield academy, in Aberdeen. The theme of the week was "There is hope". As school chaplains, we were joined by a Christian rock group called the One Band, which went down a storm with the young people.

The aim of the week was to share with the young people and with everyone in the school that there is hope for each one of us, no matter how hopeless our individual or family situations might be. On our visits to the school over the years, we had come to see for ourselves just how little hope the young people in the academy had. They seemed to have no sense of value or self-worth and no confidence in themselves. As chaplains, we wanted to make each one of them feel that they were valued members of our society and that they had an important part to play in it. We wanted them to see that God loves them and values them as individuals and that he wants the best for every single one of them.

We each took different characters from the Easter story and tried to show that, when Jesus died, all their hopes died with him and they felt lost and alone, with no meaning or purpose in their lives, but that when Jesus rose from the dead and appeared to them and spoke with them, everything changed and their hopes and purposes were wonderfully restored. For example, Peter, who deserted Jesus and denied three times that he even knew him, was singled out by the risen Jesus and reassured by him. Peter went on to be a great ambassador for Christ and later wrote these words in his letter:

"Because Jesus is alive, everyone can now have hope. Everyone can have a real, living hope because Jesus is alive."

Where there is life, there is hope. That was the message of the first Easter and it is still the message for each one of us today. God values each one of us and sees us as important in his own eyes. He tells us that in the Bible when he says:

"You are precious and honoured to me and I love you."

Our hope as school chaplains is that all the young people in Northfield will come to realise that they are loved by God and that they will discover for themselves that there really is hope for each one of them, no matter what their different situations might be. Where there is life, there is hope. The Easter story shouts out that there is life, and so there is hope—a real, living hope for each one of us.