31/05/2026
The Bible passage was 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, and Graeme Bell led the service and preached. Sandra Bell read the Bible passage, and led in one of the prayers.
John writes: 1 Corinthians 13 is St Paul’s great prose-poem about the centrality of love. Graeme reminded us of the prime importance of showing love to others in our daily lives. His talked to the children about the invisible bucket each of us carries. When it’s full, we feel joyful and positive; when it’s empty we feel negative and sad.
We fill the buckets of those around us when we show love, and say loving and affirming words. When, on the other hand we are negative, harshly critical, or dismissive, we contribute to emptying the bucket of inner positivity.
Graeme presented us in his sermon with a simple challenge to love others, and to act and speak out of that love. There was a lot of talk of buckets during the coffee time afterwards, so I think his message made an impression.
But someone said to me ‘What do I do if there’s a hole in my bucket, so that the positive things drain out?’ It’s a reminder that whether we accept and believe the truth of kind words said to us depends on our own state of mind and of heart. For some of us, deep wounds in the past have made it difficult to credit the truth of loving words in the present.
If we fill our minds with negative thoughts about ourselves, there will be no space in the bucket for kind and appreciative words.
Graeme quoted a child’s comment ‘We make love with the broken pieces of people’s lives.’ It is certainly true that it is love which draws together, and heals, and re-integrates the broken pieces of our lives.
And all our weak and wavering loving reflects the Love behind all loving, the love of God seen in Jesus. The broken pieces in our lives are healed as we are grow to realise that each one of us, despite our wounds and failures and shame and guilt -each one of us is loved beyond reason, beyond our wildest dreams by a love of unwavering immensity.
I am loved! You are loved! It is a love which will not let us go, it is a love which speaks of its unfailing nature through God’s Spirit. God says to us, to the world, to the universe: ‘Know how much I love you!’
In the Church Calendar, today is ‘Trinity Sunday’ when we reflect on the mystery of God, and the Christian understanding of God as Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Paul Cudby, an Anglican priest whom I follow was preaching on this subject today. He mentioned Genesis 1:1-3:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.
Paul pointed out that in these first verses of the Bible there’s already a hint of God as ‘Trinity’ . God was there among what seems like chaos. God’s Word was there, spoken creatively into the chaos - ‘Let there be light!’. The Holy Spirit was there, ‘hovering over the water.’
And Paul related this to our experiences of chaos. God is there, in the chaos, not far away. God’s Word, whom we know as Jesus, comes to us, and says ‘let there be light’, and into the trauma of chaos, light begins to glow. The Holy Spirit is present, sustaining us as God’s creative Word carries us forward.
In his sermon last Sunday at St Michael and All Angels in Inverness, Father Iain Macritchie quoted the wonderful poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur which speaks of the Spirit’s restoring presence in a broken world: ‘the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.’
That is ‘Love divine, all loves excelling’. That is the love which heals and transforms brokenness. The Bible may not talk about buckets, but it does say this about the days when we begin to grasp the immensity of God’s love: ‘my cup overflows’ . (Psalm 23:5)
