A Service for Pentecost 2023
Words, Words, Words.
Words are confusing but they are the best we have perhaps. Philosophers get very excited about them. The well known twentieth century philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell was said to have problems with numbers larger than two of anything – with two you could say this one is … and that one is the same in these ways but different in those other ways. But with more than two it becomes very complicated. I am told of philosophy university lecture courses which start with chairs. What is a chair? Something you sit on? Then there are lots of people sitting here. Are they sitting on chairs? No! How do you define what a chair is then?
Morning Service for the Seventh Sunday of Easter 2023
Jesus said, “and now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you.”
This morning’s Gospel reading was the beginning of the end of Jesus’s farewell discourse to his disciples, his long soliloquy preparing them for his death and for his glorification, and their future. In the speech Jesus deals with his relationship to God and his relationship to the disciples and their relationship to the world. Jesus speaks of him and the father being one, he then, a little later, talks of the disciples being one and then he says that he is one with the disciples, “I in them and you (that’s God) in me, that they may be perfected into one, that the world may know that you sent me, and have loved them just as you have loved me.”