Sunday sun shrine

A Sunday on the French Riviera and what to do? Our friendly neighbours told us that there was a morning market in Port Grimaud – just a 10-minute walk from the campsite – so we headed off to take a look.

Certainly no sign of anyone heading off to church although there had been some Twitter chat about appropriate hymns for the England team’s failure to beat America in the World Cup. How about “Draw me close to you” especially after goalkeeper Robert Green’s unfortunate Hand of Clod episode – the next line is “never let me go”.

Anyway, soccer musings aside, we walked into the millionaire’s playground to see how people spent a sunny morning here. Port Grimaud is like Venice – once you get past the security barriers. In fairness they only keep out unsavoury drivers; almost anyone can walk in, including us!!

Crossing the first bridge takes you into a square which is transformed into a market, slightly upmarket as you would expect. It was the first French market I’ve ever been to, for example, without a single Morrocan selling Bob Marley towels.

The next bridge, deeper into Port Grimaud, reveals the first glimpse of the boats and yachts to come and then another square of stalls. If you look closely you can see something of the Med’s past. One or two of the stallholders have that permanently-glazed look from the flower power days, one still had her hair held in place by a bootlace-thin strand of leather; another wrapped what looked suspiciously like a kaftan round her.

On to the harbour where some of the super yachts waited at the sort of shrine that’s reserved for the very few – the very, very rich. The kind who can afford to click a couple of fingers and send someone out to buy whatever they want whenever they feel like it. As we gawped, four Dutch girls persuaded someone else to take their photo posing alongside a yacht called Chocolat registered in London. As they studied the digital image they looked at each other, shrieked something in Dutch which had one recognisable phrase: “something from Sex and the City”.

The irony was that these extraordinary displays of super-wealth, six yachts backed up against the harbour like some defensive wall of overpaid footballers anticipating a thunderous free kick from out in the bay, were no more than 10 feet from the doors of the community’s ecumenical church.

The building that represents a man who had nothing but the clothes he stood up in opens its doors in defiant welcome to the obscenely rich and the desperately poor. In that place Jesus says to them ‘however you arrived here, and however much you carried with you, makes no difference.’

At this Sunday sun shrine, where we couldn’t even have bought the inflatable boat that sat on the top of the super yacht – see Joy’s optimistic posing next to it! – there was that wonderfully disruptive invasion of the Gospel that said: ‘I’m still here and I’m not going away.’

Sandcastles on the beach

My wife and I were on the beach with our grandchildren a couple of weeks ago and five-year-old Rhys wanted me to help him make a sandcastle.

He’d filled up the bucket with wet sand so we patted it down and tipped it out for him to begin decorating with pebbles. As he pushed on into the side of the little castle it began to break down and I warned him not to be too rough with it.

Without even looking up he said: “I know. It’ll fall down because it’s built on sand. The Bible says that.”

I asked him where he’d heard that and he told me about his club at church in Plymouth. Then, within seconds he had forgotten all about his mini-sermon and he was off down the beach on another adventure: to get more sand or to try to dam up the river.

For Rhys the Bible, the sandcastle, the pebble and the conversation about God were all one big picture – they were all a part of the big excitement that was his life at that moment.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could see everything we are doing as part of one great inseparable God-inspired picture?

Those of us who are Christians try in different ways to make contact with our communities and show them the love of Jesus. The difference is that often when we’re asked why, we never quite make the leap to slip in the Jesus part of the conversation. We never quite get to tell people that we are providing them with a meeting place, giving them a meal, getting their prescription, running their children’s holiday club because we believe that God is crazy about them and sent Jesus to earth to die for them.

I now it’s easy to be over-sentimental about our children and as a grandparent I can fall into that trap all too quickly, but Jesus used the idea of childlike acceptance of God’s love for us as the measure of faith. The reason we are in communities is to be the Body of Christ, visible through loving service. As you read through the stories in this edition of TCN, just reflect on where in his great big exciting picture God has put you. And who can you tell about it?