[This reflection was published in the weekly news bulletin of Horley Baptist Church, 04/Nov/2018]
It is perhaps to be expected, on the eve of Bonfire Night, that our thoughts would turn to those events that took place on 5th November. There have been some notable English births on this date: Pete Noone, the Herman in Herman’s Hermits; Tilda Swinton who played the White Witch in the Narnia Chronicles and Jonny Greenwood from the rock band Radiohead – he has the middle name Guy, I wonder why!
The 5th November 1688 saw what was possibly the last occasion in which England was invaded by force of arms (to date, at least). William III of Orange landed at Brixham with a large army, intent on preventing the majority Protestant population from being forcibly converted to Catholicism. He was successful.
Of course, the most prominent ‘memory’ of 5th November is that of Guy Fawkes and his role in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. In another example of a dispute when both sides claim to be Christians, Guy Fawkes was one of a group of conspirators who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament and replace the reigning monarch with one more sympathetic to the Catholic minority. He was not successful.
Actually, the obsession with Guys goes back a lot further than that. Consider the scene on 5th November in the year 0000: the Lord God was walking in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the evening but it was unusually quiet so He called out “Where is that guy?” (Genesis 3 v9) Adam’s answer “with a bird in the bush” was far from satisfactory and human history went downhill from there. Not a great success.
A long time later a glimmer of hope appeared when Jesus Christ was walking beside the Sea of Galilee. He called out to some fishermen “Be my guys” and that was the beginning of a global movement which is still proclaiming a message of hope for all who will believe in Him. Successful or not, sooner or later we must all face the choice that Joshua put before the Israelites – “choose you this day whom you will serve” or, in the parlance of these thoughts, “Whose guy are you?”.
Does that trigger your thoughts? A penny for them then.
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Contributed by Steve Humphreys; © the Author
