Magazine letter September 2024
A Nebraska banker whose bank went into failure during the depression came home and told his wife that they were going to lose everything. She said, “what shall we do?” He replied, “maybe we should pray.” She said, “Has it come to that?”
Morning Service for Trinity 14 2024 YrB p17
Freedom – it’s all about freedom. Release from imprisonment, from behind the prison wall; freedom to love. The narrator of the section of the Song of Songs we heard this morning is inside her parent’s property, kept for safety’s sake, kept for the demands of propriety. Her parents will find her a match, they will decide who the appropriate suitors are to be. But she has other ideas – as does her beloved.
Morning Service for Trinity 13 2024 YrB p16
Our Old Testament reading today recalls the consecration of the Jerusalem Temple by King Solomon. The purpose of the Temple, at its best, was as a sacred place of God for all people. However, locating God in one place is problematic; God is both transcendent and imminent, beyond all things and close by.
Morning Service for Trinity 12 2024 YrB p15
It’s very physical this Christianity thing. Sometimes I like to pretend it’s all rather esoteric, and spiritual. But then we read something like that and we realise that Christianity is all about incarnation, about God alongside us… in this world and with this world – a part of this world.
Morning Service for Trinity 11 YrB p14
So we continue the story of David and it is not for the faint-hearted. Still, at least the rape of Tamar has been missed out, as has the successful beginning of the coup d’état staged by David’s third son Absalom. David is forced to run and his cause seems lost. Only through the loyalty of his “old guard” and with much slaughter is the kingdom won back.
Magazine letter for August 2024
The inadequacy of the disciples is a constant theme in Mark’s Gospel, their weakness of faith, their propensity to get the wrong end of the stick, their hope for power and eventually glory, their depressing similarity to the rest of us. And yet Jesus’ never gives up on them, even at the end when they have run away and left him to his fate, his resurrection message sent through the young man in white is addressed to them. “I am going ahead of you into Galilee, you will see me there” – business as usual, back to work, the daily work of living and proclaiming the gospel.
Morning Service for Trinity 10 2024
John’s crowd ask the wrong questions, they are looking for grapes on a gooseberry bush. They think they have seen a miracle, or heard of one, and they want more. Jesus must put them right. He doesn’t talk in physical terms, the physical is only there to reveal the spiritual. He talks in metaphor because there is no other language to use. The food of which he speaks stands for an experience which his hearers have not had and cannot understand.
Morning Service for Trinity 9 2024 YrB p12
There is an awful realism in the Hebrew Bible, it has very few heroes that do not have feet of clay. Or, put another way, its characters are portrayed as real people, not cardboard cut-out supermen. This is true even when it recounts the life of one of the most significant figures in Israel’s history.
Morning Service for Trinity 8 p11 YrB 2024
Today’s reading from St Mark’s Gospel is, at first sight, rather unspectacular. The most dramatic parts of this section of St Mark’s Gospel have been taken out, the feeding of the 5000, Jesus walking on water and the second stilling of a storm. All three of them are covered in next week’s Gospel reading in John’s version of events. But what we have left does have some interest, it’s full of movement if not action, there’s lots going on and it’s all rather evocative.
Morning Service for Trinity 7 2024
Politics – so much is about politics, the exercise of power – how those who have it legitimate their hold on it, and how those who don’t have it seek to win it. Nothing is outside the province of politics, especially anything that can affect the opinions and inclinations of the people.
Morning Service for Trinity 6 2024
It’s a different language, a different way of speaking, a different way of looking at the world. I don’t know if it can be taught, do I don’t know if it can be inspired, or whether it just has to be discovered, fallen upon. Maybe it’s just a gift from God.
Morning Service for Trinity 5 2024
We have heard the stories of Jairus’ daughter and the haemorrhaging woman very often – another Mark “sandwich” where one story starts, then leaves us hanging as it goes off at a tangent and finally coming back to the original story, so that we can decipher the connecting messages that we are supposed to understand and respond to.
Morning Service for Trinity 4 2024
We begin today the story of David. At least we come into it slightly after the beginning, Samuel has already anointed David as Yahweh’s choice for the new king to succeed Saul. Remember that David was the 8th son of his father Jesse. If seven is the number that stands for completeness then the 8th one of anything was one more than was necessary.
Morning Service for Trinity 3 2024
The gospel reading today is part of Jesus first of two extended sermons in Mark’s gospel, chapters 4 and 13. Written in AD 66-70 Mark’s account of Jesus life and death is set against a turbulent backdrop of violence and revolution as the Roman Empire continues to assert its power.
Morning Service for Trinity 2 2024
How to put the country right. Politicians are giving us their recipes. Let’s change things – that will do it, people cry out. Perhaps it is a wholesale change, a new political structure that is needed, such as having a king when we did not have one before, as in our reading from 1 Samuel. Or is it more simple – just a change of personnel in the existing structure?
Morning Service for Trinity 1 2024
Our gospel reading today consists of stories of Jesus’ disputes with the Pharisees. The stories are not as haphazard as they might at first appear. The Pharisees and the Sadducees were themselves struggling for their place in the socio-economic life of the nation. The Sadducees interpreted the Torah strictly but expected only priests to keep it entirely.
Morning Service for Trinity Sunday for 2024
A can of soup – what is it food or drink – I say it is drink but my wife says it is food. It goes to show the difficulty we face in defining even physical things. If I say I love my family, what do I mean? If you say, I love my family do you mean the same as me? It is even more difficult to define non-physical things, things like love, which we can neither measure nor can we prove they exist in the same way that the can of soup exists.
A Service for Pentecost 2024
Theology like any other ‘ology’ attempts to describe what is there, it doesn’t seek to invent, or to create, it only tries to use language to explore experience and share understanding. And like any other ‘ology’ it is always woefully inadequate. For what it tries to describe, what it seeks to communicate, are experiences that transcend language, that take it past breaking point. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
Morning Service for the Seventh Sunday of Easter 2024 – The Sunday after the Ascension
This morning’s Gospel reading was the beginning of the end of John’s farewell discourse by Jesus to his disciples, the 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.
Morning Service for the Sixth Sunday of Easter 2024
We celebrate the Ascension on Thursday, so it is logical that we hear some more of Jesus’s parting words to his disciples as written by John in the context of the last Supper. These words are very personal, they are words from a teacher to his pupils, from a master to his disciples, from a Lord to his people. At least that is how they begin.