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.
Magazine letter for July 2024
The historically literal reading, or misreading, of this creation story has overwhelmed the subtleties of the original and its careful placing after the account of the first seven days. It is only within the context of God’s good creation of all things that this story of mankind’s place can be understood.
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.
Magazine letter for June 2024
We make up our minds about something and often we only change them with great reluctance. Our present opinions are shaped by our past opinions, what we think now, we so often thought then.
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.
Morning Service for the Fifth Sunday of Easter 2024
The story of the Ethiopian eunuch meeting with Philip on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza is an extraordinary one. The story reveals a surprising amount of detail concerning the eunuch. It tells us that he is a man held in esteem, he has charge of his nation’s Treasury, but although he has servants, at least a driver for his carriage, he is himself still under authority.
Morning Service for the Fourth Sunday of Easter 2024
The image of the Shepherd is an old one, and perhaps one that’s not terribly relevant to our modern age when the nearest most of us gets to a sheep is leg of lamb with mint source. But the image is a powerful one still – and it was one Jesus made full use of – and it’s hard to beat on a day like today when we have a baptism.
Morning Service for the Third Sunday of Easter 2024
“If a dead man is raised to life, all men spring up in astonishment. Yet every day one that had no being is born, and no man wonders, though it is plain to all, without doubt, that it is a greater thing for that to be created which was without being than for that which had being to be restored. Because the dry rod of Aaron budded, all men were in astonishment; every day a tree is produced from the dry earth, … and no man wonders … Five thousand men were filled with five loaves; every day the grains of seed that are sown are multiplied in a fullness of ears, and no man wonders.
Magazine letter May 2024
May 26th is Trinity Sunday, not a festival many will be marking I fear. It lacks the fairy lights of Christmas or the chocolate of Easter. But in its way it is a significant day, marking the contribution of Christianity to mankind’s understanding of the nature of God; not a topic now of general conversation, but it was not always so.
Summer break
The benefice baby and toddler group has now stopped for the summer holidays. Our first meet up after the holidays will be on Wednesdy 10th September between 10 – 11.30am. Coffee Morning. There is no coffee morning during August. The next Coffee morning will be held on Monday 16th September between 10-11.30am. Knit and Natter. […]
Rectory Bring and Share lunch
The lunch will take place at The Rectory in Otterbourne on Sunday 14th July from 12.30pm. Everyone in the benefice is invited to join us. If you come along please bring something that can be shared.
5th Sunday service
The Benefice service this Sunday, 30th June, will take place at Hursley. The service will begin at 11 am.