More than 100 members of the medical profession met recently at Holy Trinity Church in Leeds, for an inaugural carol service of a local Christian Medical Fellowship network.The networks are now being established across the country and offer those working in the medical profession to support each other in the workplace, and carry their faith into their work.Organiser, Dr Karen Flood (see photo) a vascular radiologist at Leeds Teaching Hospital Trust, said: "The carol service was fantastic. There was such a sense of community. There was such a mix of people pulling together."The network in Leeds has burgeoned from just 10 members to 113 during the pandemic. New groups are being established in the north of England, with the aim to see networks started across the whole of the UK in time. "The need for the network has been all the more clear during the pandemic," said Dr Flood. "It’s been a really, really hard time."Within the medical profession, we are all fairly exhausted and have been for a few months."There is a greater vulnerability of all of us through the last year. We are suddenly aware that we are mere mortals. It hits home. Eighteen months ago, none of us knew what would happen. We were all worried and scared, if we are honest."There was an increased awareness of our need for God and each other and to look out for each other."She added that prayer had been a particular focus of the fledgling networks. "At the end of a prayer meeting you feel filled-up and ready to work again," she said. Churches are helping encourage members of their congregations to join the networks, raising awareness of their existence and the benefits to those who work in health care.
It was as I was preparing to preach on the Baptism of Christ a few Epiphanies ago that it first struck me that the words spoken over Jesus – ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased’– take the form of a song, a canticle - in fact, the last and greatest in the wonderful series of canticles recorded for us in the early chapters of Luke. Up to this point, of course, we have already been treated to the Magnificat, the Benedictus and the Nunc Dimittis, along with the first few lines of the Ave Maria and the Gloria: men and women, young and old, clergy and laity all contributing to this wonderful outburst of praise, with a great company of the heavenly host thrown in for good measure! But at this remarkable epiphany moment, as Jesus is raised from the waters of baptism, it is God Himself who joins in that outburst in a brief but heartfelt love song to ‘my Son, the Beloved’. It reminds us of the moving words of the prophet Zephaniah:‘The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing’.‘The Beloved’: it’s a phrase to which St. Paul returns in his letter to the Ephesians, where he writes of God’s ‘glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved’. And as we inch our way out of a pandemic that has so changed and challenged us all, it’s my Epiphany prayer for 2022 that we might be drawn afresh into the love of the Father for his Son and marvel afresh at the glorious grace through which that love song is extended to us all.
