A Farewell - but not! Sermon on the Vicar's last Sunday

4^th Sunday after Trinity – Eucharist – 28.vi.2026

(Proper 8)

Genesis 22.1-14;
Romans 6.12-23;
Matthew 10.40-42

Not surprisingly, at the moment quite a number of people are asking me, “How do you feel?” I think they’re referring mainly to my impending retirement. And I’m not sure how to reply. I’m not sure really what I feel! I’ve lived so long in this one place – and it’s been so good. It’s 32 years since we moved into St. Cuthbert’s Vicarage. I remember waking up one morning and thinking, I’ve lived here longer than anywhere else in my life. Now I’ve lived here nearly twice as long as anywhere else.

It was a strange thing recently to have to clear the house which had been my family home for 55 years. I took long enough over that – with my mother in a residential care home for the last years of her life, and then keeping the house on for my own use. But eventually I realised it wasn’t the place for me to go back to. When the sale went through, things moved very fast because  the house had to be cleared out over Palm Sunday weekend and Easter. This is not the fortnight when a priest has the most time on his hands. Still I have boxes and boxes from that house in Hartlepool – and I haven’t had the chance to look properly into them, or to decide what to do with them. Except that I know that most of them will have to go! The fact that my parents themselves had put so much into boxes in cupboards is the clue. Why do we keep things? How will we use them? I’ve got that question to face with everything of my own possessions that are stored up in the Vicarage – only more so!

A theme that’s run through a lot of what people are saying to me at the moment is summed up in a card I was given the other day. “Wishing you best wishes on your retirement. Enjoy and make it a great time doing all the things that you want to do…”

That’s something that I’m looking forward to: “to do all the things that I want to do.” Except that this is more than a retirement! This weekend is also the anniversary of my ordination: yesterday, 44 years since I was ordained priest in Durham Cathedral; today, 45 years since I was ordained deacon. So for me this is always a time for thanksgiving and reflection. And these are not things that I will be giving up. There is a requirement that after retirement I should take off at least six months from exercising my ministry as a priest. I realise that will mean something of an abrupt stop. I’d like to retire with a sense of completion – with everything set in order and the job done; but it’s not. I’m all too conscious of the things we’ve worked on so long that are still not sorted out. How do you stop a roof from leaking after spending so much time and money on it? How is it that you can fix the boiler and find that then the radiators don’t work? Do we simply fix the electrics as they are at St. John’s? – or grit our teeth and take the pain of finding more money and filling in faculty application forms so that we can improve and future-proof them? These are the questions that I have raised – and now I have to leave them behind! I realise how wearing and wearying they are, but now I have to hand them over to churchwardens and those who will work with them. So please be supportive of those wardens! – it’s not an enviable task.

But no one’s task is ever over! I’m going to find that out for myself in taking on home ownership at the age of 70, having to make decisions for myself, having to sort out all those practical things without phoning up the Diocesan Surveyor. A friend of mine who has retired into a new-build (as I will) wrote to me that it was great to be able to decide just how she really wanted to have things for the first time. I’m not so sure! For the moment, I look ahead to see looming issues of snagging and then probably quite a long-haul as I work out just how I can make myself comfortable – to change a freshly-built house into a home.

But this is all rather a long digression. This time of leaving and moving is also the time when I look back on those things that have made me what and who I am as a priest. That doesn’t get given up, whatever the future may hold. The six months’ pause in ministry isn’t an imposition by those who make the rules up. It’s a time to stop and reflect on the person I am, formed for better or worse by God’s grace. To see what I value. To understand something of what I can be and do when freed from the requirements of what I have to do whether I want to do them or not. One of the practical parish questions we’ve considered is, who is going to put the bins out? Actually I haven’t minded putting out the rubbish and recycling, but what will make a difference is knowing that I don’t have to do or organise it each week! All the administration which has increasingly tied me to a desk is necessary stuff – and there’s something satisfying when you manage to keep things in relatively good order. Perhaps that’s why we talk about “the office and work of a priest in the Church of God.” But now all those files from my computer have been handed over on two USB drives – one for each parish. I face the question: so what am I? - cut loose from parish, PCC, meetings and admin?

Partly that’s answered by what I might plan to take with me as I prepare to move. What are you going to do with all those books? – has been one of the questions I’ve been asked. The answer has been, I’m not planning to use all those bedrooms in the new house for beds! Hopefully quite a lot of the books can go with me, for me to return to or even to get round to reading properly for the first time. I’ve wondered about taking all the files I stored up from eight years in university settings to see what sense I can make of them. But I suspect that they should go. I need to do fresh thinking. I hope there’ll be time to reflect – and that I’ll have the discipline to do so. And that needs to go along with making time to pray. For that I think I need a new Spiritual Director, someone who will accompany me on the way – probably someone who has had the experience I have had of a long parish ministry and then the adjustment to retirement.

With all this, alongside the necessary time to unwind and put aside so much that has sometimes tired me out, there’s the need to be ready for fresh questioning. I’m conscious that so far I haven’t referred to today’s set readings from Scripture. That first one is really troubling. Abraham believing that God is calling him to offer his son, Isaac, as a sacrifice. He gets as far as to tie him to an altar on a pyre of wood with his knife raised in his hand before he hears the call of the angel to stop. It raises the question, how much do we convince ourselves of what is right before we can discover there really is another way? Someone writing the other day in a publication called “The Jewish Journal” dared to question the conventional interpretation that this is about Abraham’s willingness to give everything up in obedience to God’s will. Don’t we need, instead, he asked, to remind ourselves of the meaning of the name “Israel,” given first to Jacob and then to the nation who would be his descendants, “Israel” which means literally “he struggles with God.”

God calls to us – and he calls us to the struggle. There are things which we need continually to wrestle with – though I hope to do so under less pressure in the future. I’ve found myself going back to the words of T S Eliot in his poem, Little Gidding. Little Gidding is a place which has been important to me since I visited it as an undergraduate, over 50 years ago – a “thin place,” where you feel that God is very near, but also a place where people have built religious community and understood that ours is a journey to make alongside one another. Eliot concludes his poem, the final part of a long poem in four sections:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

This is the Vicar's final Sermon - but there's a week to go before he retires! His final service is a Eucharist at 3pm on Saturday 4th July in St. Cuthbert's Church, Shotley Bridge DH8 0NW - at which he is not preaching. Do join us if you can!

View from the Vicarage: Life in Ordinary…

 It’s always something of a relief for me when we reach the point in the Church’s Year which we call “Ordinary Time.” It’s those very many Sundays which follow after Easter and Pentecost. As I write we’ve already begun it, though a number of saints’ days this week are getting in the way.

Ordinary Time is when you get simply to live life with a rhythm that it’s up to you to establish. Christmas is the time of excitement, Easter the season of joy in the Risen Lord. Ordinary Time – the words may seem to indicate that it’s nothing much special. But that’s not true! Sunday by Sunday we’ll be working our way through the Gospel of Matthew (in other years it would be Mark or Luke) – what do we discover once more through his account of Jesus’ life and ministry? We open up other books of the Bible along the way. We need to be able to allow them to speak to us – where we are, in whatever we are doing.

Personally, I have found recent months to be full of activity – and very demanding. First selling a family home, and all the clearing out that required. Then buying another – an ongoing project but I need somewhere to live very soon! All this alongside lots of continuing demands from ministry and the daily stuff of parish life. Things are not slackening off, but there’s that change of gear into “Ordinary Time” – the need to work out a new rhythm and to take responsibility for setting the agenda.

I wrote last month that with all the recurrent events of parish life deleted from my diary from the beginning of July, my calendar was looking quite empty.  But that means that it’s also full of opportunity. Life is full of opportunity for us all! 

Sometimes we refer to Ordinary Time as “Green Time.” That’s the liturgical colour which we use when nothing else “special” is happening in church. But it’s not ordinary and boring. It’s the colour of life and growth.  I’m aware of the demands I face when the diary empties and I move from the Vicarage into a place which will for the first time be my own. All our lives need to be fashioned – and that’s a responsibility we all bear. But it’s also one in which we can find God is our Companion on the way.      

Martin Jackson -  Parish Magazine, June 2026

View from the Vicarage: Leaving – and getting ready…

The word has certainly got around that I am in my last months before retirement – just over two months / 9 weeks to go. “How do you feel about it?” lots of people are asking. Quite apprehensive, is my answer. I’ve lived here far longer than anywhere else in my life – nearly 32 years in Shotley Bridge; eight years before that just down the valley in High Spen (down but also up the hill, so at approximately the same altitude). So wherever I go, it will be different – starting a new life at 70.

One thing I have never experienced is what it is like to live in a house with double-glazing! Now it looks as though I will be moving to a new-build house. So perhaps I will learn to live with fewer than four layers of clothing. Even more than the change in the sort of house I will have will be the difference in the community. There’s so much that’s special about the villages where we live and the whole of the larger town of Consett – itself really a huge village where even if you don’t really know people, you can nevertheless talk with them. And hopefully get on with them!

There won’t be a community as such on a new housing estate. But there will be the opportunity to build a community. I gather the plan is to move all the residents of my new road into their new homes at the same time. So we will all be on an equal footing – except I wonder how much older I will be than all the rest! 

Already I am having to think of what I can take with me – and even more, what I need to get rid of. Difficult, when I still haven’t sorted through many of the things from the family home which I have just sold! And not just possessions. Planning my diary for the coming month, I have been deleting all the “recurring” events which makeup the bulk of my diary – now from the beginning of July it is almost empty. That’s scary – but also an opportunity; how can I use that time?

That’s a challenge to all of us – at whatever stage of life. When Jesus leaves the Disciples at the time of his Ascension, he leaves nothing by way of material possessions – but he does promise them his Holy Spirit. It’s in his power and presence that we are called to live.

Martin Jackson

This is an item from the May issue of our Parish Magazine - click here for the online edition

Holy Week at St. Cuthbert's Church

 

Holy Week at St. John's Church

 

Mothering Sunday - 15 March

 

Learning from Nazareth

We’ve only just started the year, and already I’m having to think about Lent! I always welcome this time of year as one when I can set my rhythm anew, establish a fresh discipline and make the time to listen to what God is saying to me.

On another page I’ve made some suggestions as to the elements of a Lenten discipline that might be helpful to people. It’s often just a matter of tackling those things we know we ought to do – and the period of just over six weeks which Lent takes up gives us that time-frame to do it. Like the 40 days which Jesus spends in the wilderness – you can make a start with a target date already prescribed.

A “Lent Course” can be helpful in this respect. Something where someone has already done the groundwork in helping us think / learn / pray – and where we can join in with other people, so that we know we’re not on our own. But our usual provider of such courses, USPG, doesn’t seem to have come up with one yet – and other offerings as yet seem thin.

So I’m proposing a course which we can’t complete in the five weeks available during Lent – something you might want to carry on for the two further weeks of the course – and beyond. It’s a course based on the book, The City is my Monastery by Richard Carter. It came out of his consideration of what he should be doing at a particular point in his life. Should he leave his work as a parish priest in a busy city parish? Should he join a monastery or move into some other form of the “religious life.” His conclusion was that he needed to continue in the city – but with a fresh rhythm. And it was a way of life he would pursue with others – not alone. From this there has grown the Nazareth Community and a wider dispersed group known as the Companions of Nazareth. They follow a Rule of Life based on 7 S’s – to live with Silence; with Service; with Scripture; with Sacrament; with Sharing; with Sabbath; and “Staying with…” (steadfastness, truth, suffering, love). The book is available for anyone who would like to buy it. But there’s also a course which I can share. I hope you’ll join me in exploring how it might speak to us.  

Martin Jackson

This is the "View from the Vicarage," taken from the February issue of our Parish Magazine - follow the link to read more!

And here's a link to the book on which the course is based.