Have you ever
wondered where your great-great-great-great-great grandparents were
born? My girls were very interested to find out, so they began a
big search. The first things they discovered were some old
tombstones. One was dated 1812 and another 1799; they were in an old
churchyard
at Lenten, near where 
Nottingham Medical School now stands. The 1812
tombstone was definitely my great-great grandfather’s. We hoped
to go way back into history by looking at the register of births and
marriages in the parish church. But the very kind minister of the
Lenten church told us that all of the really old books and registers
had been taken to the County Archives, in the centre of
Nottingham. So, we spent several days there, going ever further
backwards through some very old books. Some of the pages were even
written in Latin, and they were on thick parchment rather than writing
paper. Eventually we got right back to 1540. We couldn’t go
any further, because a King called Henry VIII had destroyed many of the
big churches and most of their books. It looked as though our
family had been shepherds for several hundred years, always living in
small villages along the banks of the River Trent, near to
Nottingham. And we were relieved to find that most of them
had been decent, god-fearing folk. One had even
been the Warden of the parish church, around the year 1700.
But if we could
have gone back even further into history, to about 1000 years ago, I am
afraid we might have found that my great-great-great-great-great
grandparents were rather wicked pirates! I think they were
originally Vikings, people who had sailed across the North Sea in their
warship, come up the River Trent, and seized some farm land near to
Nottingham.
What has all
this got to do with Wednesday? Well, the name Wednesday comes
from one of the God of the pirates, called Woden, or Odin. The
Vikings thought they knew a great deal about Woden, and they wrote many
stories and poems about him. He was supposed to have created the
world from the corpse of a giant called Ymir. And he had made the
first man and woman by breathing 
life into two dead tree trunks that he found lying along
the sea-shore. One was an ash tree, and the other an elm. Woden
was the Chief of many Viking Gods, and just as we set aside Sunday
as a special day to remember Jesus, so the Vikings remembered Woden on
Wednesdays. If my great-great-great-great-great grandparents were
pirates, they would have believed in Woden, and thought about him
on Wednesdays. Some people called him the masked one, or the
Grimmer, because he appeared in many disguises. Sometimes he came
as a fierce warlord; then, he stirred up the bear-shirted pirates,
driving them into a bezerk battle frenzy. Later, he led those who
were killed in battle to some mysterious after-life in the
clouds. At other times, Woden came as a ragged old man in need of
help, or as a wise person, offering advice.
This is just
one example of the many ideas people have had about God and how the
world was created. If
you have some
friends among the first nations people, they may be able to tell you
their ideas about how the world came into being, Even the ideas
of our church about God and creation have changed very much over the
years. When we lived in Toronto, we used to watch a procession that was
organized by the history students at the university. You know how
people build carts for processions! Well, they built a cart like
you would have seen in an English procession a thousand years
ago. It was a three-storey cart. Most of the students were
sitting on the middle deck, dressed as normal village folk.
On the top deck, there was an old, bearded man. sitting on blue and
white cushions that were supposed to be the sky and the clouds, This
was God. And sitting all around him were a choir of angels in
white robes. But the bottom deck of the cart was Hell.
There, a very fierce devil, was growling and thrusting his face out of
thick black smoke. And some of the students were sitting on this deck,
pretending to be bad people, screaming in terror.
This idea about
God and the world made sense when people thought that the earth was
flat, rather than round. There are still a few people who think of God
like that- that- if we do something really bad, we will be sent to see
a fierce old man living above the clouds- like being sent to see the
School Principal, but a hundred times worse. And if we have been
really bad, not only we will we get suspended, we will also be pushed
down beneath the earth, at the mercy of the devil and the fires of
hell.
But most people
today realize God is not like that. The God who created this
earth is a mysterious source of power, something too wonderful and
difficult to understand. But we do know we have a part of God’s
power within us. If we follow the teachings of Jesus, we can use
that power to love our parents and friends, to care for the earth, and
to make all our dreams of world peace a reality. And it is
important for us to follow this dream if we are to be happy people and
keep our planet a beautiful and friendly place. That is why we
take time learning about Jesus, as we come to Church and Sunday School
week by week.
Help us to show
the power of God
As we care for all living things,
And make the best of our dreams come true.
AMEN.