This is a time of change, whether it is to do with the weather, family circumstances or the cycle of the church's year and, to be honest, most of us don't like change. Unpredictable change can be particularly hard but even those changes we know are coming can be unsettling. With Autumn comes shortened days and increased darkness along with falling temperatures and few of us welcome those. Change is difficult for most of us, especially if we don't think we have any control over the change.

A few weeks ago the Gospel reading for Sunday was Peter declaring that Jesus was the Messiah - God's chosen one. (Matthew 16:13-20) Peter's declaration came as they were travelling on the road near to Caesarea Philippi. By the time this event was written down as part of the Good News of God's kingdom about 40 years had passed and the world had changed dramatically from the way it had been when the conversation first took place.

The city of Jerusalem as the centre of Jewish life - the Jewish court a symbolic counterbalance to the power of Rome, and the people's way of staying connected to their God, the Temple in Jerusalem - was gone. Rome had enough of the persistent, troublesome rebelliousness of the Jewish people and the ineffectiveness of the local authorities to keep the peace, and they sent the army in, in full force.
The city of Jerusalem was over-run.
The Jewish king was deposed.
The Temple was attacked and destroyed.
And on the hill of Masada, where the last remaining rebels were held trapped for weeks and cruelly murdered, Rome brought the old normal for the Jewish people to an end.

From that moment on, the people had no living centre. Their new situation was a long, vulnerable dispersion as a people scattered like ashes and broken remnants across the face of the earth. It's in this situation that the Christian community remembers and starts to retell and write down the stories about Jesus the Messiah.

And in Matthew's account the story takes place not in the Temple, not in a synagogue in some surviving Jewish village, not even in the safety of a Jewish home, but out on the road - in the open, in the very shadow of Caesarea Philippi, an administrative centre of the alien power that has invaded and, in hindsight, is about the destroy all that they have counted on to preserve their identity as God's people in the world.

And what Peter's declaration says is that it doesn't matter!

It doesn't matter what normal you find yourself in - old, new, or in between. It doesn't matter if your city, your temple, your king or your kingdom are intact and still giving structure to your lives, or if they're gone and taken from you. It doesn't matter if you have a safe place in the world you can call your own and of which you are in charge, or if you're out on the road, in the open, on a long, hard way from what was to whatever will be.

It doesn't matter, because Jesus is the Messiah, the son of the living God, and he is really quite portable and thoroughly adaptable.

We believe in a God who comes to us not lodged in a particular building or in a particular set of rules. Rather he comes to us as one who journeys with us as life changes around us. As Summer moves into Autumn, as we give thanks for the wonder of God's creation and its bounty, as we recall the sacrifice that others have made for us and our world and then, as our thoughts turn to the coming of the Christ child into the world, let us hold on to the fact that our God is a God who stays with us through change; a God who is so much more dependable than the transient and fickle things of this world!

Copyright ©Wallington United Reformed Church 2026
Contact our Webmaster with any questions or comments