Reflection: Sunday 11th September and for the week ahead:Scripture:‘Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners’ (1Timothy 1.15)Reflection:The religious leaders of Jesus’s time despised him for consorting with ‘sinners’ - a blanket term covering not only the immoral and the actual wrongdoers, but all those they dismissed as ‘unclean’: misfits and outcasts of every sort, including the diseased and disabled, not to mention women! To associate with such people would be to be made unclean oneself.But the love and care of Jesus for the despised of society gave such people a new self respect, new hope, new confidence, a new way of living. In our churches, in our community, in our places of work and in our chance encounters, we are not called to disapprove of and avoid those whose are not ‘like us’, but to actively seek ‘the likeness of Christ’ in all God’s children. Not always easy. But who ever said that to follow Jesus would be easy? Certainly not Jesus himself.Revd Rosemary Kobus van Wengen
