GUILSBOROUGH EVENSONG:  4TH February 2007
“Change & decay all around I see”
Well, we’ve started off the New Year with a bang haven’t we?   Four weeks gone and the predictions of gloom and doom are coming thick and fast.  Global warning; carnage in Iraq, Home Office in turmoil, Prime Minister tottering, private debt ballooning.  And now bird flu’.
Choose your aphorism: Harold Wilson  “ A week’s a long time in politics “
Lord Acton:  “Power tends to corrupt…”  or  Enoch Powell “ All political lives end in failure”
“The mood and temper of the public in regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is one of the most unfailing tests of the civilisation of any country”  - W. Churchill. 
It seems we aren’t passing too many tests at the moment.   
Isaiah in to-day’s Old Testament “Woe, is me for I am undone” certain resonance, though the context was very different. 
Down here at the micro level in the pulpit, a worried layman does not even really know what Sunday it is. 
My book of Common Prayer:  5th Sunday after Epiphany.  But the C of E Lectionary says its 3rd Sunday before Lent.  
There seems to be an awful lot of uncertainty around.  
I find it hard to make decisions: so many types of bacon in the supermarket.
Then there’s patient choice,  -school choice – should I change my gas supplier? What about my bank?  Reform is the cry, public services, House of Lords, the Football Association, England & Wales Cricket Board etc  reform? Why make things worse. 
Sometimes I wish we had the religious certainties of the past, the certainty that God has prepared for them that love him such good things as pass men’s understand…as Thomas Cranmer put it in his collect.  Life was not something we planned it was divinely ordained. All we had to do was follow the rules and we’d end up in Heaven, or not as the case may be.  
Well, actually it seems that we have more or less always been in a state of change.  Stability is hardly ever part of human life. 
In Cranmer’s day there may not have been much choice.   But the monarch made it.  
Midsummer’s Day 1571: Guild Chapel on Church Street in Stratford:  Knock out the stained glass.  
23 shillings and 8pence for his labour was furthering the cause of the English reformation “ Popery may creep in at a glass window as well as at a door” 
Midsummer celebrations  -  “ Midsummer madness” - now suppressed. 
Protestant reforms of Edward VI reversed by Mary.  Reform again under Elizabeth. But who knew what next. The Armada was on the horizon and a catholic Mary Queen of Scots was living in England, the heir.  Whitewash can be easily removed. 
St. George’s Day pageant suppressed after Henry VIII’s death.   Under Mary revived 
Norwich they let the dragon stay.
St. George misses the cut in 1536 when Catholic holidays abolished; but not a holiday in 1552; restored in 1559 then dropped again as the holidays were those Red Letter days of 1552.  So what’s new? So my confusion about the 3ed Sunday before Lent or the 5th Sunday after Epiphany is not new. 
Calendar: 1582 Julian to Gregorian. Day after 4 October to be 15th Bishops baulk – popish 
1599 Easter 5 weeks apart in Protestant & Catholic countries. 
2006:  Megan’s Law about paedophiles, Home Inspection packs, Faith Schools and now adoption agencies. 
We need beliefs and Guidelines:
The Creed, better still the catechism; 
The Gospel message of God’s love for mankind; To-day’s Gospel about the catch of fish. 
Fishers of men?  Most of us are not cut out to be evangelical.  But each in our different ways we can show by example that we are Christians in our daily lives in small ways. 
Good works: contributions to the church, work for charities, a kindness shown to someone.
Prepare for what’s to come.
But at my back I always hear time’s winged chariot hurting near
“ Thus, though we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we will make him run” 
 We can echo the words of Isaiah “   
Also I heard the voice of the Lord saying “Whom shall I send and who will go for us?  Then said I “here am I.  Send me” 
We each can have a mission and go out to be fishers of men & women by our example. 
And as we set about it we can also bear in mind “change and decay in all around I see, O thou who changes not abide with me” 
