Reference Points

A small coffee table sat just inside the door. There is a flower arrangement on the table, yellow, red, blue flowers. Around the flowers sat 4 police helmets and a white police hat; on the floor, 3 more helmets. This is the picture that sticks in my mind from Kevin's funeral yesterday, a 45-year old policeman who died in a car accident last week. The helmets belonged to the policemen who carried his coffin.

These are the hardest events of all in which to be a minister. There are no words to say that can change the circumstances for his family, or his friends. Their sadness was tangible. The Superintendent who paid tribute to Kevin was in tears as he spoke.

The notion that seemed to me helpful and useful for the occasion was that of 'reference points'. We need to have some fixed points on our horizon that enable us to deal with situations like these; points of faith or understanding that don't change, but that help us put our situations into a bigger perspective. There were two reference points for me yesterday: the first is that Jesus died and rose again, a young man who died before His time in some people's eyes, but in His own eyes the time was just right. His death and resurrection throws a different light onto our notion of death. The second reference point was the endless love of God for us, a love that never ends and from which nothing can separate us; just in case that sounds trite and easy, we also remembered that this love was tested in the white heat of the cross!

There are other reference points:

• when thinking about Church, the key reference point for me is that Church has to be for everyone, accessible for everyone, of all ages and stages in our community.
• the credit crunch and all this talk about money that we've lost as share prices have crashed has to be seen in the light of the strong things that Jesus said about money and its hold over us.
• some of us work long hours and inevitably other parts of life are affected by that; family, church, leisure - it is important to have some kind of reference point that makes us consider, over and over again, where our priorities lie and what is ultimately important.

Every map has a North point on it somewhere. You may not be heading north; you may be heading in a totally different direction, but North is (almost) always at the top. You may, of course, be one of these people who needs to turn the map around so that the map is facing in the same direction as you are heading. Nonetheless, the North point is always there and everything else takes its direction from it. A reference point is like the North point on a map. You don't always refer to it, but everything else is measured by it.

We may not talk about our reference points very much, but our whole life is measured from them. Our whole life is shaped by our own personal reference points: our faith, our family, our job, our attitudes - they are all in there somewhere; these are the points by which we have to measure all that we are and do.

By the way, the two reference points from yesterday - that Jesus died and rose again and the endless love of God - are for every life at every stage on the journey.