Magazine letter for September 2022
This Sunday (as I write) I have the enormous privilege of baptising my eighth grandchild, Norah. We inevitably ask ourselves what world she has she been born into, and what faith will she be taught to help her to cope with such a world.
It’s very physical this Christianity thing. Sometimes I like to pretend it’s all rather esoteric, and spiritual. But then I realise that Christianity is all about incarnation, about God alongside us… in this world and with this world – a part of this world. Christianity is not about ethics, it’s not about being good boys and girls, keeping to the rules, avoid doing bad things and you’ll be a good person, and God will think you’re just great. Jesus did not die on a cross to tell us that.
Morning Service for Trinity 12 2022
It has been said many times over the last 10 years or so that we’re in a post-Christian era, that the Christian age is over. Christianity no longer defines people’s moral values just as it no longer defines how most people spend their Sunday mornings. A majority of the population do not now come to Church in order to get married or when their children are born. We are left to take some of the funerals – perhaps as some great symbolism of ushering out an age that has passed.
And yet when we read that passage from St Luke’s Gospel, and others which have the same message, I wonder whether we were ever a Christian nation. It seems to me that the sort of demands that Christ is making have never been contemplated seriously by more than a few individuals in any generation, let alone the whole of a nation’s population.
Morning Service for Trinity 11 2022
Charlemagne was the greatest Christian ruler of the early Middle Ages. After his death a mighty funeral procession left his castle for the cathedral at Aix. When the royal casket arrived, so the story goes, with all pomp and circumstance, it was met by the local bishop, who barred the cathedral door.
Morning Service for Trinity 10 2022
I guess it’s all about what we think God wants from us – or perhaps what we want to give God. That was the problem that Jesus had with this leader of the synagogue. He was well versed in the way of the commandments and the practice of their interpretation, after all, hadn’t he grown up with them ringing in his ears. The commandments were, for him, the voice of God, the very will of God. Had he not been taught that when they were flouted disaster always followed – for the individual, the village, the nation? To heal was defined as work, it was not permitted on the Sabbath – it was not what God wanted, it would be against his commandments. It was in black and white what you could do on the Sabbath, if not in the Torah then in the Mishnah, the practical application of the Torah.